Interlude

Jason Duke’s second installment of PHOENIX NIGHTLIFE is yours for the listening at Crimewav.com.

A Twist Of Noir 521 - Terry White

A WOMAN WITH TEA-COLORED EYES - TERRY WHITE

“I don’t remember it. Sorry,” I said.

“Three years ago,” she said. “I was the blonde.”

Her hair was shoulder-length, chestnut. She was early forties, attractive, dressed in business attire, a little too chic for Youngstown. I had been to her restaurant on East Federal three or four times because it’s close to my office and the food is very good. It’s called Alessandro’s but there’s no Alessandro. She thought the name had good drawing power for a place that specialized in Sicilian cuisine.

She was explaining Hollywood residuals. I tried not to watch the late-spring dust motes floating behind her left ear like a tiny swarm of gnats. I’m thick when it comes to money, which explains why I have so little of it.

The show didn’t last more than a year; it was called Profiles of the Paranormal. Three men and one woman, all with psychic gifts investigating past unsolved crimes. She said she was added by the producer at the last minute because a show featuring all males was a Nielson no-no. I nodded my head as if I understood the dynamics of that, too. It was her break because she was working the fringes of TV and hadn’t landed a good role in years. It was harder for a woman climbing the age ladder in Hollywood, she said, and it was just a matter of time before her agent dropped her. She auditioned within an hour of her agent’s call and got the part.

“So you have no psychic abilities?”

“Good God, no,” she laughed. “I don’t know which end of the Ouija board is up.” She had a good voice, maybe some elocution lessons back there. Her eyes were light, almost tawny.

So far, all I had learned about the reason she was talking to me was that someone at her restaurant must have recommended me. They say the first things we say to each other are important clues to our personalities, but I must have slept through that seminar. My mother taught me it’s rude to interrupt. I let people who come into my place take their time.

“It wasn’t all fake,” she said. “The two guys, Ben and Lanny, are genuine paranormalists. I think they were, but who knows? They worked in Vegas in the smaller lounges off Fremont. The producer got his big concept when he caught their act.”

At Cardinal Mooney where I went to high school, we had different words for spiritual entities. “A team like Roy,” I said, “and what’s-his-name, the one that got chewed on by the tiger.”

“I think that was Roy,” she said.

“You said the program had three men.”

Her perfume was citrusy and my nose itched.

“Laurence van Vuuren, the producer, decided the show required scientific appeal, so they made one of their camera crew part of the show. They gave him all these fancy instruments for detecting ectoplasm and emo-peaks.”

She said Laurence liked to jazz things up with words for the gee-whiz stuff. An ‘emo-peak’ was a place where someone was murdered and had left an emotional turbulence behind to measure. It was like wading in warm water when it suddenly turns ice-cold. To me, it sounded like karma for dummies.

“Can you just do that?” I asked her. “Be a technician one day, an actor the next?”

“Sure,” she said and smiled. She flashed those baby dimples where the muscles were weak. “As long as you pay your SAG dues.” My keen powers of deduction inferred SAG was their union.

“Barry was younger and better-looking than the other two guys,” she said, “so Laurence figured he was giving the ratings a bump with the seventeen to thirty-four females.”

“With all that going for it,” I said, “I’m shocked it only lasted a year.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? The trouble was Ben and Lanny wanted to renegotiate their contract. They were constantly arguing about who had more lines and time on the meter.”

I let that pass. “But you didn’t mind it?”

“Heavens no, I was grateful to be working full-time again. People have no idea how exhausting it is to go from one cattle call to another just to get into that three-second crowd scene.”

“I’ll bet,” I said. We were getting to the end of the small talk. The corners of her mouth turned down a fraction and her light eyes went from tea to amber.

“It started in Miami,” she began. “The first one, I mean.”

They were down in Little Havana filming. The granddaughter of a deceased woman inherited a house and discovered strange phenomena like dishes moving from one side of the cupboard to the other. The grandmother had been born in Haiti. This was the kind of “thermal aura” the show reveled in, Moira Brenneman said. The old woman’s father was an importer from Port-à-Prince, apparently a member of the educated liberal aristocracy at the time of the notorious Papa Doc Duvalier and his secret police. Shibley Jean Talamas might have been working for the CIA, according to the granddaughter, when he was arrested by the Tonton Macoute, those killers in dark shades. The grandmother always believed her father was tortured to death in one of Papa Doc’s jail cells. The grandmother was born in Little Havana two weeks later when her mother fled the island. The rest of her life was normal, Moira said. She grew up, married and had a daughter of her own.

“How did your part figure into it?” I asked her.

“Oh, I was strictly there to emote. I was told to look, quite literally, as if I’d seen a ghost.”

“That would be the dead woman, right?”

“Oh no, Laurence said we should go for the big one.” She made a tinny banshee noise for sound effect, and crooned in a low voice: “The murdered grandfather whose spirit can never rest.” Laurence built the show around a triad of hoodoo, bayou, and Santeria as often as he could get away with it, she said.

The grandfather’s spirit apparently had its own built-in GPS. He had followed his baby to Miami and lay dormant until his child died of pancreatic cancer at the age of sixty-two.

Moira said, “When the needle on Barry’s machine went into the red, we were all supposed to react as if we’d all shared this one big cathartic moment together. Every episode, the same thing. We had the timing down so well we could anticipate everyone’s moment of shocked surprise at the reveal.”

“The reveal,” I said.

Her pretty eyes grew round and her lips fluttered; she did a little nervous tango in her seat. “The revelation where we all finally know.”

I was impressed. “That’s very good,” I said. “You said it began in Miami.”

“The first letter. I have it here,” she said. She took out a folded sheet of paper and handed it to me.

“Do you have the envelope?”

“No, the mail clerk at the studio threw it away,” she said.

Ordinary paper, a single word-processed sentence: You bitch stop looking at me.

“There were others?”

“Three more. Each one arrived after the next three episodes. Then the show was pulled.” She held out three more folded sheets.

“No envelopes with these either?”

“They were stuck under my windshield wiper.”

“He followed you around the country?”

“No, we did final cuts and voiceovers at the studio in Culver City,” she said.

Similar paper and motif in all three: I told you to stop looking at me. I warned you bitch. The fourth sheet just two words: Last warning.

“Why didn’t the studio help?”

“They tried. The CCTV cameras didn’t cover the lot where we park. You have to be on the A-list for that. LAPD has a special investigator for stalkers. She’s very good, but there wasn’t anything she could do except tell me to be vigilant on location.”

I looked at her.

“Technically, I wasn’t stalked.” She made a frown. “In Los Angeles looking for a strange circumstance is like looking for a needle in a haystack of needles.”

“How about your co-workers or the camera crew?”

“Studio security put surveillance on my car after the first note. They had their chief interview the cast. That made me real popular, believe me.”

Out there, she used her mother’s surname—Ducent, on the hunch it sounded more “accessible,” whatever that meant.

“I’m not making light of your concern, Miss Brenneman, but I’m assuming those notes didn’t panic you at the time.”

“You’re right,” she said. “It comes with the territory of being female. Every girl attracts her share of weirdos. Get your face on TV and the lid on the nut jar comes off.”

I waited for her to tell me the rest.

She pulled a piece of paper from her blazer pocket. This one was hand-drawn in block letters with a black magic marker: Fucking bitch I told you to stop looking at me now youre going to die.

“This was put under my wiper blade two nights ago. I was going over the books and doing my next-day produce orders. Except for Emilio, my cleanup man, there was no one else in the place. There’s a small alleyway where I park behind the back door. It’s a metal door with an iron grate. I went out there around ten for my cigarettes. The note wasn’t there. When I left the restaurant, I saw it.”

“What time did Emilio arrive for work?”

“He comes at nine thirty every night. He was never out of my sight the whole time,” she said.

“Have you mentioned this—stalker since you’ve been back in town?”

“Of course not. Very few people outside my circle even know I used to act for a living.”

“You need a bodyguard, Miss Brenneman, not a private investigator. I know some retired police officers from YPD. I can recommend a few names.”

“I can get a bodyguard on my own, Mister Haftmann. I want to know who this lunatic is. Will you take my case?”

I had never had a client refer to herself as a “case” before. The Case of the Hollywood Psychic and the Voodoo Stalker. Erle Stanley Gardner meets reality television. I do skip-trace jobs mostly. I’d even gone after a missing dog once. I was out of my depth. So naturally I said yes.

I spent a week putting her under surveillance. I must have gained ten pounds dining at Alessandro’s in the unlikely event her mystery writer wasn’t the craftiest criminal on the block. I talked to Emilio and was satisfied. Moira’s life was routine and predictable from the moment she entered the restaurant at seven in the morning to closing it late at night. No one hung around to watch her leave. No irate customers sent food back. I use the same Army-issue night goggles as the troops in Baghdad and made sure she wasn’t followed right up to the time I saw her enter her condo at Lake Glacier.

After that, I spent two more weeks chasing my tail in Los Angeles. I first interviewed her agent who had a hard time remembering Moira as a client. The LA detective assigned to her left Crimes again Persons and was working child-abuse cases. She met me in the center of that donut-shaped area downtown on Palos Verdes Boulevard at a Starbuck’s. She couldn’t give me much. For one thing, it was an open case and any suspects’ names were off limits to civilians. I tried the old cop-to-cop shtick and it got me zilch. She thought Moira’s note writer was an insider, not a deranged fan of the paranormal show.

“Why?”

“People who stalk the stars go in for these long, convoluted messages,” she said. “Their fantasies compel them. Man or woman, they see the victim as someone who’s already intimately involved with them.” The hostility, the low-class syntax and profanity—it struck her as JDLR: Just Doesn’t Look Right.

I tracked Laurence van Vuuren, the show’s producer, to a toney rehab in the Malibu Hills. He was by turns cooperative and bitter. I didn’t know he used to be a filmmaker. His slide into oblivion included the paranormal show and a sitcom after that about a dysfunctional family. I tried to turn him back to Moira’s threats, but he seemed oblivious to any treachery not directed at him. He also had the worst comb-over I had ever seen. The top of his head looked as if someone had pasted a huge furry black letter S to his pate.

We sat on a swing overlooking the surf. He dabbed his nose with a lilac-scented handkerchief. He said he inherited his mother’s hyperosmia, a condition that made everyday smells anathema to him. He reminded me of some pampered aristocrat in his coach sojourning through the befouled streets where garbage, dead dogs, and steaming chamber pots were hurled into the street. He preferred scented handkerchiefs. He ordered a dozen bottles specially made for him at a shop in Cannes.

I couldn’t budge him to remember much about the Haitian episode. I thought about the man Talamas murdered in a filthy Haitian cell only to be resurrected half a century later as a cheesy ghost by this self-indulgent narcissist for entertainment. Back in my motel I thought about Papa Doc’s young thugs in their opaque sunglasses.

I struck out with everyone else who had anything to do with the show. Barry was back behind the camera but working indie films in Europe now. The security guard detailed to watch over Moira showed me copies of his reports to his supervisor. I saw no entries beyond the times where “Miss Ducent” was escorted. She led a routine life even then. I talked with the nutritionist in the canteen where Moira ate a fruit salad and yogurt on Mondays and Wednesdays and a braised tuna fillet with a spinach salad on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

My next stop was Vegas where I tracked down Ben of the paranormal duo. He was back to performing before live audiences. He and Lanny had split up for good. After the program folded, Lanny left him for some young stud in Brentwood. “That hypocrite Laurence made us keep our relationship hush-hush. Gay street and ghost street don’t mix.”

I spent my last day avoiding panhandlers and hustlers on East Chavez where I was staying and put my notes together in my motel room. It was a wash, I had nothing. I could have stayed in my office in Youngstown, made phone calls and gotten the same results.

I shagged the redeye back to Cleveland-Hopkins and hitched home on a commercial prop job to the Youngstown-Warren County Airport.

I called Moira in the morning and arranged a meeting.

She came out from a back office when I arrived and shook my hand. Her gorgeous eyes buzzed me. She wore a carmine lipstick and looked elegant from her gold gladiator sandals all the way up to her loop abalone earrings. Her blouse was bone-white and made the skin at her throat glow. Under the palm trees and babyblue skies of California, hordes of stunning women crossed the street everywhere I looked. Under the battleship gray skies of Ohio, she stood out.

She led me into her office. I handed her my report and watched her riffle the pages.

“I couldn’t justify staying out there any longer,” I said. “Too much time’s gone by. I like to justify my fee with results. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll write you a check,” she said.

“No hurry.”

She insisted. I didn’t blame her for wanting me gone.

Sunday’s Vindicator on my doorstep made me giddy. Below the fold on the front page I saw a glamshot of Moira from about a decade ago. The headlines said local restaurateur Moira Brenneman, age 40, was found dead in her condo at Lake Glacier.

I read the rest between waves of nausea. The manager was called by Moira’s employees when she didn’t open up Alessandro’s. He found her hanging from a terrycloth belt tied to a clothes hook behind her bathroom door. Her knees inches from the tile, a granny knot fixed over the decorative hook where her white bathrobe was hanging; the other end cinched around her neck.

I found Det. Sgt. Jerry Pruel at his desk in Robbery/Homicide.

“I was just gonna call you,” Jerry said.

“You found my invoice,” I said.

“Check this out,” Jerry said.

He tossed photos across the desk to me.

She was nude, her face in profile was purple, the tongue protruded between swollen black lips; her right was glazed like a dead bird’s. One photo showed a partial bowel movement. No dignity or secrecy from homicide cops.

“What did Elizabeth say?”

Jerry’s smile grew wider. “A standard ‘neck compression event.’”

Pathologist Elizabeth Bhargrava’s been around longer than water, a grandmother with a sing-song voice whose hands have been inside more guts than Attila the Hun.

“What are you saying?”

“Sexual asphyxia,” Jerry said. “She just forgot one teensie-weensie item. You gotta make sure you can untie the fuckin’ knot before you pass out.”

“You’re crazy,” I said. I tapped the photos. “I knew this woman.”

“You think she wasn’t a freak?” Jerry leaned forward to look at me.

He wears a cowboy belt buckle the size of a canned ham. I said I was a long way from convinced that Moira Brenneman accidentally offed herself playing space monkey.

“Toxicology came back clean.” He smirked.

“No alcohol, no nothing, is that what you’re saying?”

“We found a stemmed glass on the floor by the tub.” Jerry took a working stiff’s mean pleasure whenever one of our more upstanding citizens wound up on Elizabeth’s slab.

“What about the threats?”

“We looked into them,” he said. “Your report didn’t dazzle us, by the way.”

“What about the hard drive in her computer? You take that apart yet?”

“Working on it,” he said. “The Samoan has it.”

The “Samoan” was actually a Solomon Islander—Danny Gumataotao, a brilliant hacker who did freelance work for the police whenever their tech people couldn’t untangle something. He was a chattering, wheat-haired, blue-eyed fragment of history, the seed of some English great-grandfather, a bo’s’n who climbed the mizzen mast for Her Majesty’s Royal Navy and then mounted as many island women as he could. How Danny had washed ashore in the rust-belt of the Mahoning Valley was a mystery in itself.

“Elizabeth’s slipping if she’s writing this off as accidental.”

A woman who had come to me for help was now a station-house joke.

“You got your fee out of her, right?”

That stung. Pruel snapped his notebook shut. “Stay out of this, Tom. It’s no red ball. It’s just an unattended death.”

Crossing the street to the car park, I knew I had blown the case of a liftetime, the one every private investigator dreams of.

I called Danny. His voicemail wasn’t taking more messages.

“You ever answer your phone?”

“Hey, uh, Detec—I mean, Mister Thomas Haftmann, what’s up?”

“What’s in her computer?”

“You mean the Brenneman thing, right? Pruel cleared this, right?”

“Don’t worry about Pruel. Tell me what you found.”

Danny whined until I reminded him why he was going to tell me. He had stolen one dollar from each of 28,000 MasterCard unencrypted accounts in Wilmington, Delaware. He lived in fear his fraud indictment would be unsealed and he’d be doing the backstroke in the state pen’s toilet.

He lived in married student housing on the YSU campus. Another one of his scams. I called from Mahoning Avenue, which was a few blocks from Danny. I didn’t want to give him time to think it over and bolt by the time I got there. In a few minutes, I was knocking on his door.

He opened it. What flickered across his face was supposed to be a smile but it didn’t reach his eyes.

He pointed at a bank of computers. “Over there. Help yourself.”

I walked a zig-zag line between stacks of technical magazines. Danny wrote a column for Wired.

“You ever clean this pig sty, Danny? I don’t speak geek,” I growled at the monitors.

He came up behind me, wringing his hands. “Play it, like, you know, I was out at the time,” Danny pleaded. “You just happened to come over to visit, like, and you saw the screen so—”

“Just tell me what this gobbledygook means.”

He hit a few keystrokes and brought up a website specializing in sado-masochism. The artwork showed a dungeon with manacles and ring bolts. Caricatures of women dangled from chains. A blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. One hirsute man, a polar bear with mange, revealed a crosshatch of livid welts on his back; the raven-haired beauty in skin-tight Lycra outlining her shaved pudenda stood next to a leather ottoman caressing a whip. Mild fare for the voyeur.

Danny hit a few more keys. Moira’s last chat-room conversations.

The language was the oddly prurient text-messaging of horny teenagers. Abbreviations like LOL. Her online name was “Giselle.”

Her male correspondents were proficient in the jargon of the lifestyle, the euphemism used by the website’s promo.

One of the men who used the pseudonym “Ed Friendly” talked about a slave contract, 24/7. The other called himself “Arcturus.” All three chatted about good times had in places called La Fuk, Lair de Sade, another place called Hellfire in Manhattan.

“What is COPAD?” It sounded like some urinary tract disease.

“Church of Perversion and Debauchery,” he replied.

“You sick bastard.”

“Hey, man, I had to look it up myself!”

“Where are their computers?”

“Hey, I bounced to their nodes from their ISPs, but that’s as close as I can go.”

“Dan-ny, oh, Danny boy...”

“Pruel will totally kill me, man!”

Ed Friendly turned out to be his actual name. Ed Friendly from South Beach.

He didn’t want to talk, but I twisted his balls hard over the phone. He begged me not to tell his wife. He was an elementary school principal in Coconut Grove. When I told him how Moira died, he sobbed into the phone.

Everybody lies. How much lying is sometimes hard to tell over the phone. Ed Friendly could stew in Florida while I checked out Arcturus.

I flew out to LAX that night. Danny tracked Arcturus’ computer to a server in West Hollywood. Lair de Sade was in Los Angeles. According to my Tom-Tom, van Vuuren’s house and Lair de Sade were three blocks from each other, door-to-door.

Van Vuuren’s rehab stint must have left him chipper because he sounded confident over the phone, although he wasn’t very keen on seeing me again once he remembered who I was. I pressed hard for a meeting that night.

He answered the door of his bungalow in a white toga that made him look chubbier. He led me through the dark wooden paneling of the interior to the pool, a corrupt Horace banished to his estate after his noble struggles with the Senate.

He made me an old-fashioned Horse’s Neck. Then he asked me who the most famous citizen in Youngstown was.

I said, “Emil Denzio. He was a thief.”

“Ah, yes,” Laurence said. He gave his nose a quick swipe with one of his scented handkerchiefs. “No one ever names a saint when asked that.”

“When you insisted on coming out here,” he said, “I did some research on you. My first film was a documentary about bears. ‘The Bears of Kodiak Island.’”

He said it as if it was in bright marquee lights over his head.

“That’s where you adopted your Arcturus handle,” I said.

He shrugged. It wasn’t worth denying.

“What you told me about Moira Ducent, how much was true?”

He studied his drink as if the answer was in there. Then he looked out over the aquamarine square of shimmering water. The underwater lights rotated different colors every few minutes. He sniffed and made another one of those I-smell-excrement faces. He mumbled something in French.

“What?”

“Laissez bon temps roulez,” he repeated.

“Huh?”

“Let the good times roll.” He said it as if he had ashes in his mouth.

Then he spilled. Laurence had established a relationship with Moira/Giselle years before the paranormal series. A small part in one of his Dracula films led to an invitation to attend one of his exclusive parties. When her career was collapsing, she begged him to use his influence to hire her over the director’s protests. Laurence had a stick to make him behave.

Moira used to work in the Lair de Sade and knew people, some very prominent in the film industry but a number were big in the other end, the money people who backed the moguls. Laurence provided the establishment with some homemade fetish films of his wild parties in the Hollywood hills. She informed him which play rooms at Lair de Sade made interesting viewing. She meant hidden two-way mirrors and peepholes where people performed acts of bondage and domination that could have ruined lives, marriages, and careers had they become known outside the fetish community. BDSM, to her, was a higher calling, flogging a way to enlightenment. She was a proud member of COPAD. Laurence knew how to keep a straight face. After all, he worked with actors every day.

Laurence introduced her to people, to men with power. With her California tan and her amber eyes, dressed in a Brazilian lace cami with boy shorts, she could humiliate millionaire tort lawyers and filthy-rich hedge-fund managers. Adorned in black spandex and wielding a leather thong, she transformed herself into the female Mengele of the selection ramp. Laurence described Giselle leading a political powerhouse from Sacramento in leather head mask without eyeholes, his testicles cinched so tight he yipped with every step. The memory made him laugh so hard he almost choked and spilled his drink.

“Moira played with fire,” he said. “She took her clients to places where the mind is not used to going. Some men became obsessed. One committed suicide.”

The pergola by the pool was garnished with vines bearing flowers with cerise petals. Their centers were crimson, like blood drops. I thought of ghost drops—what homicide cops call when blood and sere separated. The red ball of sun tipped the bottoms of clouds like a fresco with gold flaking and brushed salmon and mauve strokes across the sky. Coyotes lived in the hills beyond. They had yellow eyes, too.

He leaned over and whispered a name.

“You know it,” he smirked, “a fellow citizen of your town, I believe.”

I remembered a tiny hesitation in Moira’s voice when I asked her how she had saved the money to open her restaurant.

If you lived in Youngstown, it would be hard not to know the name. His family dated back almost to John Young, the man who founded the city. They were in timber and coal mining; then they designed and patented the machines to dig it from the earth. Back when the Mahoning Valley looked like hell without a lid on during the Carnegie years, they prospered and diversified. This scion was a legendary entrepreneur who started on Wall Street after Princeton and worked his way up as a senior trader for Goldman Sachs. He was a billionaire, a friend of the beautiful people in the entertainment industry and a man linked to powerbrokers in DC. He might not have made Forbes’ top ten every year, but he had the private cell numbers of Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and Mexico’s Carlos Slim, the world’s richest man, and if he wanted to get you, he could get five people above you and you’d never know what hit you. In Youngstown, it once took the entire Lenny Strollo crime mob, a dishonest city government, and a corrupt court house to do that.

I felt like vomiting into van Vuuren’s beautiful pool.

“Everything connects, eh, gumshoe?” Laurence said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Now that you know you aren’t dealing with something banal like, say, some actor with a declawed gerbil stuck up his ass, what are you going to do?”

I flew home that night. My apartment was expertly tossed. It took me an hour to realize it. I drove down to my office about three in the morning. Same thing. Not a paper out of place, file drawers locked—except that the Brenneman file was missing.

I called Pruel in the morning.

“I’m off the case,” he said.

“Listen to me...”

“It’s over,” Pruel cut me off. “Accidental death, ligature strangulation.”

“Jerry, wait—”

“You talked to Danny, goddamn it. You stepped over the line, Thomas.”

“Forget Danny,” I said.

“Finished, I told you. All the bears have exited the stage.”

Jerry had read exactly one Shakespeare play in high school and this was the only line he remembered.

“She wrote the threats to herself.”

“What the—what are you saying?”

“She wanted to make herself radioactive so he’d leave her alone,” I said.

“He—who?”

I said his name.

“You’re batshit, Haftmann, if you think that.”

“He has a golden reputation to protect. He must have tried to get in touch with her again after she came back to Youngstown. She didn’t dare confront him in the open,” I said. I was aware my voice was cracking.

“Whoah—forget it,” he said. “It’s over.”

“What—what am I supposed to do, Jerry?”

“Go take a long walk around the park, go fishing... You can’t bring her back.”

“Who got to you?”

He thumbed the connection dead. Nothing but Ohio air.

I waited for the sun to rise in California. I called van Vuuren’s number all day.

The studio security boss sent me a couple articles two weeks later.

The Los Angeles Times clipping of an elderly man’s body found in the hills off Mulholland Drive. The man was identified by a forensic odontologist as Laurence van Vuuren, resident of Los Angeles. His body was ravaged by coyotes. Cause of death unknown.

The second one was from Variety. It was more detailed but no less unkind:

‘Aside from a forgettable documentary on Alaskan bears, Laurence van Vuuren mixed horror, banality, and trite philosophy in films like The Gypsy Vampire and the putrid The Vampire’s Caravanseray. He was a pretentious Roger Corman without the master’s campy touch. Beneath his schlock was more schlock. His cinema verité is always a hair’s breadth away from risible—except in a single film, The Devil’s Deception, wherein a jaded young screenwriter trying to make it in Hollywood falls in love with an equally jaded young nymphomaniac. Van Vuuren disappeared in 1983 after an unfunny and pretentious sitcom. Hollywood hasn’t noticed his departure until now.’

Days pass, months, seasons. My license got yanked. Naturally. The process to get that ruling rescinded has taken all my time and most of my money. Three lawyers have dropped me like a dead Easter chick; none said why. The bureaucratic delays grind on and on...

I see his name in the paper all the time. Ohio’s a big swing state. A vice-presidential nod isn’t out of line; his family influence had put The Vindicator’s editorial staff in the bag long ago, but it’s even been mentioned in the Plain Dealer and yesterday’s Columbus Dispatch as well. I’ve had hang-up phone calls every few days. Same thing—a breather at the other end. I told Pruel someone’s following me around town. He just squints and looks at me with pity. I can read it in his mind: paranoid delusions. He said I was turning into Gene Hackman at the end of The Conversation.

Before I leave my house, I set my traps. I tell myself to remember the woman with yellow eyes. One day, I was sitting in my office and a woman named Moira Brenneman came to see me. She used to be in movies. She once played a psychic in a series about violent events that left an ectoplasmic turbulence in the air...

BIO: Terry White has been writing crime or hardboiled fiction for several years. His most recent publications include Thrillers, Killers ’n Chillers, Flash Fiction Offensive, Sex and Murder Magazine, and Powder Burn Flash.

A Twist Of Noir 520 - Robert Aquino Dollesin

GEISHA - ROBERT AQUINO DOLLESIN


A slightly different version of this story appeared at Yellow Mama

Courtland stood behind the counter with his arms folded and glanced at the clock on the wall above the buzzing beer coolers. Already his chronic headache was beginning. The shop should have been closed half an hour earlier, and he should have been at home right now, on his sofa in front of the television, digging into a microwave dinner. But with two customers still in the store, he couldn’t leave.

He looked from the clock to Lyric, the stripper who came in nights before closing. She was leaned forward over the lottery counter near the entrance, rubbing the film off a ticket with her fingernail. Courtland fixed his gaze on the lower curves of her ass, which was visible beneath the hems of her Daisy Dukes. He watched her ass jiggle as she scratched, scratched, scratched.

Past the potato chip display, Courtland’s other late-night regular customer, ‘The Veteran’ stood at the magazine rack. If it had been anyone else flipping through the porn magazines, Courtland would have enforced the ‘No Reading’ sign plastered to the magazine rack. But the Veteran had turned out to be a good paying customer, someone who never left the shop without first buying a six pack of Cobra and at least one smutty magazine; sometimes two.

*

Lyric blew ashy powder off the ticket she was scratching. Her stomach twisted. Another loser. Why did she even bother? It wasn’t like she could afford to gamble, anyway. Not with her roommate stiffing her on the rent, and Big Charlie at the strip club where she worked threatening to show her the door if she didn’t trim a few pounds.

The bell above the door jangled. Lyric whipped her head in that direction and watched the woman enter the store. It must be some kind of joke, she thought, trying not to laugh out loud. The newly-arrived customer was wrapped in a red silk kimono that was patterned with winding streams and bending willows. The new customer stood a moment just inside the shop, then shuffled past Lyric toward the checkout. The straw sandals she wore hished against the tiles, her white-powdered face flowed beneath the flickering overhead lights.

Remembering her lottery tickets, Lyric turned back to them and resumed her scratching.

*

A wave of alarm bolted through Courtland the moment he saw the woman in the kimono.

“Uh, uh,” he said, shaking his head. “You can’t be in here.” He was well aware of the horrific stories involving costumed criminals who robbed liquor stores, and sometimes even murdered the proprietor. He considered himself a cautious man who wasn’t willing to take chances. Reaching a hand beneath the counter, Courtland placed a finger above the button which would bring the police.

The woman in the kimono stopped before reaching the counter. Her lips moved as though she was seeking the right word. Finally, the woman said, “Me need call Japan. Like buy phone card, please.”

*

When she heard the woman speak, Lyric shot a look over her shoulder. She smiled. The clipped English sounded cute—sincere. She looked past the geisha and was shocked to see a nervous expression on Court’s face.

“Come on, Court,” she said. “Woman just wants a phone card.” She noticed Court’s gray eyes fixed on her breasts. She blushed, raised a hand, and brushed a nipple with her fingers.

*

At the back of the store, the man whose friends called him ‘Apache’ brought his head up from the magazine he’d been skimming. He stared into the security mirror in the rear corner of the store. Something was going on near the counter. The stupid store owner was babbling. Apache simultaneously replaced his magazine on the rack and slipped his free hand inside his green army jacket. He felt the coarse handle of his pistol. For over two weeks, he’d been scoping this place out. Finally, the perfect moment he’d been waiting for seemed at hand. With his hand still buried inside his coat, Apache started toward the counter.

*

Courtland sighed. His instincts pinged, and told him he should simply announce to everyone that it was closing time. “Come on, Court,” Lyric said. “Woman just wants a phone card.”

Goddamn Lyric. He watched her graze one of her breasts with her fingers. The nipple beneath her thin blouse hardened. Courtland removed his finger from where it hovered above the emergency button beneath the counter. He whirled around and scanned the phone cards hanging on the wall.

“What do you need? Will a twenty-five dollar card do?” When he heard the little woman’s high-pitched answer, “Hai,“ Courtland unclipped one of the phone cards. He turned back around just in time to catch sight of the Veteran hurrying toward him, one hand jammed inside his coat.

His heart hammered against his ribs and he dropped the phone card.

*

It was so nice Court decided to help the little Japanese woman. Lyric scratched her ticket. A third one-hundred-dollar symbol came into view. She screamed, raising the winning ticket into the air and spinning around to show Court. A deafening sound made her drop her arm. The creepy guy who always came in near closing time was standing at the counter with a pistol in his hand. Across the counter, Court was sliding down the wall. The Japanese woman crouched low on the floor, both hands covering her mouth.

*

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Apache had not intended to squeeze the trigger, but when the bitch stripper from the Slippery Kitty screamed, his finger just reacted. Now the damn guy was blasted back against the wall, slipping to the floor with his eyes wide open, and fucking blood everywhere.

“Fuck,” Apache said. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” He turned to the bitch and pointed his pistol at her.

*

Lyric opened her mouth to scream again, but stopped suddenly when the gunman whipped his head around to face her. His pocked face twitched and he held his pistol out.

“You shout again,” he said, “and I’ll make you dead.”

Lyric raised her arms above her head and said nothing.

*

Think, fucking Apache, think. But things were happening too fast to think. He glanced from the lottery-playing bitch to the stupid-looking woman dressed in a kimono. The woman crouching on the floor nodded her head again and again.

“Quit fucking moving!” Apache told her.

The Japanese woman nodded again, and said, “Hai.”

Apache rolled back his upper lip and thumbed the gun‘s hammer back. “Move or open your chink mouth one more time and I’ll kill you.”

*

“Listen, please,” Lyric begged the poor woman cowering on the floor. Then she turned to the gunman and pleaded. “Don’t hurt her. She doesn’t understand you.”

“Hai,” the Japanese woman said.

Another resounding explosion brought Lyric’s hands to her ears. Near the Japanese woman, cans of food flew from a shelf and clanked onto the floor. The Japanese woman squeezed herself into a fetal position and laid with her head on the tile.

“Didn't I fucking tell you not to move!” the gunman said.

And this time the Japanese woman did not say “Hai.”

*

Apache turned to Lyric and said, “I don’t want to hurt anyone else. I’m just going to go around the counter and empty the register. Understand? If anyone—” His grim stare went from Lyric to the woman in the kimono and back to Lyric. “—if one of you bitches move, I’ll put bullets in both of you. And I don‘t want to do that.”

Neither of the women said anything. Apache went around the counter. He stepped over the shop owner’s body and punched the keys on the register until it opened.

*

While the gunman took the cash from the register, the Japanese woman, whose name was Mariko, gazed at Lyric and smiled. She raised a finger to her lips, indicating to Lyric that she should remain silent. Lyric watched the tiny woman slip one of her tiny hands under the wide Obi belt that secured her kimono. Still smiling at Lyric, the geisha withdrew a pistol and slipped off her sandals. She very slowly got to her feet and crept to the counter. The gunman glanced up from his bag of money. His eyes grew wide.

“Die, motherfucker,” Mariko said.

*

Apache stared into the powdered face. From the corner of his eye, he caught the glint of something. The bullet that struck his forehead, however, he never felt.

*

When Lyric screamed, the tiny Japanese woman turned to her and shouted, “Quiet!” Lyric did as she was instructed. The little woman raised high the hem of her kimono and hopped over the counter. She snatched the bag of money that the robber had already filled, and climbed back over the counter and headed for the door.

“What are you doing?” Lyric asked. “What are you doing?“

The geisha stopped short of the front door. She removed a wooden clip from her bunned hair and shook the hair out.

“What are you doing?” Lyric said again.

“Did you win anything?” the geisha asked.

Lyric shook her head. “I...I can't remember.”

The geisha pocketed the hair clip. She smiled and raised her pistol. “You seem like a nice woman,” she said. She pressed the pistol against Lyric‘s throat. “I’m going out that door,” she said. “I should probably kill you. You know, that thing about no witnesses. But I won’t hurt you because you seem like a such a nice woman. A nice woman with a terrible, terrible memory.”

BIO: Robert Aquino Dollesin was still a kid when he left the Philippines. He now resides in Sacramento, where he tries to get something on paper every day. He sometimes blogs at Robert Aquino Dollesin.

A Twist Of Noir 519 - Robert Caporale

THE PROTOCOL OF DEATH IN A POOL HALL - ROBERT CAPORALE

“Bronco’s Billiard Academy” blinks in blue neon from a second floor window of the Worthy Hotel Building. The sign has been there since neon was invented and never stops blinking. Bronco’s is open 24/7, even on Christmas.

Bronco’s is a microcosm...a collection of every kind of proton and neutron known to man...it’s all there for the taking.

There is street poetry in Bronco’s.

The manager is a woman. Her name is Missy. Missy started out as Bronco’s cocktail waitress, serving up drinks in the “Bank Shot Lounge.” She became Bronco’s mistress and was quickly promoted to ball girl and placed behind the counter where she pretty much ran all the day-to-day activities for decades. When Bronco retired to Florida last year, he put Missy in charge.

In Missy’s day, she was something to look at…for real. There are black and white photographs of her hanging on the wall of the “Bank Shot Lounge.” She is staring into the camera with these Greta Garbo spitfire eyes in the company of gangsters.

Eddie has the shoeshine concession in Bronco’s; had it since day one. Two oak chairs with curved backs and thick leather seats up on a pedestal. He’s shined some famous shoes in his day, including the rum runner Joe Kennedy, who told him one day his son would be president of the United States, and Minnesota Fats, who gave him a twenty dollar tip.

Eddie still talks about that generous tip.

Bronco surf-fishes the day away down in Largo now, but he misses the action of the city and the pool hall and the guttersnipes.

Word on the street has Chickenman in town peddling his poultry, and that means it won’t be long before he’s in Bronco’s, shooting nine ball.

Chickenman rolls into town once every three or four months driving a flatbed truck stacked high with wooden cages full of chickens...hundreds upon hundreds of the filthy clucking birds on their way to be deep-fried at KFC or Kenny Rogers’.

An old gentleman named Forbes is part of a foursome that plays billiards in Bronco’s every day at noon like clockwork orange; a tradition that goes back some thirty years. Forbes is a master tailor and owns a highly-regarded Haberdashery down on Bayside Boulevard. The four old-timers are all professional men...one is a stogie-smoking doctor they call “MD.”

Chickenman swings the flatbed around on Avocado Street and backs his feather-flying rig up to the loading docks of the Poultry Exchange. Teamsters unload his chickens. As Chickenman waits for his check to be cut, he watches the young receptionist fold and unfold her legs a half-dozen times, hoping to catch a glimpse of panties. From Avocado, he goes to the bank and cashes his check. From the bank, he stops by the Farmers Council Building on South Main to bitch about government subsidies; then to the White Castle for a double cheeseburger to go.

With the white White Castle bag in hand and a shit-eating grin on his lined, weathered face, he walks the two blocks to Bronco’s Billiard Academy.

Forbes carries a Thermos-brand thermos to the Haberdashery with him every morning. It’s an antique. The stainless steel thermos has rings around it and a real cork stopper. It is not the original cork; it’s a replacement he sent away for to Akron, Ohio. Forbes brings the thermos with him to the pool hall every noon. He unscrews the silver cup and pops the cork and pours out steaming black coffee. All of his gestures are performed in an elegant fashion without any false affectations. Forbes loves that thermos. To him, it represents an honest day’s work and a job well done. He relishes these quiet moments sipping on hot coffee from the thermos and inhaling smoke from a Camel cigarette.

Chickenman pushes open the street level door to Bronco’s and heels across the glistening black and white tile floor. He double-steps up the flight of scalloped-smooth marble stairs anticipating the interior of the pool hall. Even before he steps into Bronco’s, he pictures the stately rows of mahogany tables covered in green felt, each with a ruby stained-glass chandelier illuminating it. Between the manqué de queue of burger pool hall and nine ball, Chickenman can barely stand the rush. He literally dreams of playing nine ball in Bronco’s and making these incredible shots under the ruby light. He never dreams of shoveling chicken shit...ever.

The gentleman Forbes sips hot coffee all while leaning on his cue stick contemplating his next shot. After a moment, he swallows the last of the coffee, balances the silver cup on the arm of a chair and leans across the table and starts stroking his cue stick, calculating just where to hit the cue ball to get enough high left-hand english on it when something inside of him just gives out. The gentleman Forbes casually places his cue stick on the felt and slithers down the billiard table to the floor...pretty much the same way he lived his life: peacefully and without fanfare.

“MD” examines Forbes...he cannot find a pulse or a heartbeat. He checks again. He takes a big pull off his White Owl, blows out the smoke and says, our old friend Forbes is deader than a doornail.

Missy calmly phones the police. A man is dead, she tells the dispatcher, natural causes, no rush.

Not the first time Missy has made the dead man call.

A few moments later, Chickenman bursts through the heavy swinging doors and steps up onto one of Eddie’s oak leather chairs and places his cowboy boots in the footrest and opens the White Castle bag and sticks his face in and takes a deep breath. The aroma of flamed broiled beef and sweet onion pass through his sinuses and singe his brain like acid. The opiate scent will stick to his sinus membranes for days to come. Eddie starts rubbing polish into Chickenman’s cowboy boots. Chickenman never notices poor old Forbes half under the billiard table. Eddie never mentions Mister Forbes to Chickenman; he just minds his own business and starts slapping out a funky Motown beat on the boots with a buffing rag. Chickenman slides the burger out of the bag with pageantry and dirty fingernails. After three months of mostly chicken pot pie, chicken soup, chicken salad and chicken fricassee, Chickenman savors the unwrapping of the flame-broiled burger.

MD and the other gentlemen are patiently waiting for the ambulance to arrive and remove their dear old dead friend Forbes so they may resume their billiard match. Time is of the essence. They keep checking the big Seagram’s neon clock on the wall and start pacing as they all have things to do places to go and people to meet. Pretty soon, they huddle up. It looks like they are praying but, in fact, they are debating the protocol of death in a pool hall. After a moment of whispers and quiet introspection, MD says, it is what it is, and they continue their billiard match knowing that if roles were reversed and it was one of them stretched out...Forbes would do the exact same thing.

Chickenman delicately peels back the white wrapping paper, revealing a plump moist bun with ketchup, mustard and mayo squeezing out of the sides. He peeks under the bun at the charbroiled paddy, making sure the pickles and onions are where they’re supposed to be and the cheese is in the proper melting mode before drawing the burger to his mouth like communion. His eyes roll back in his head as the virgin juices of red meat and condiments blend and slide down his throat and drip off his chin.

The three gentlemen are stepping around and over their dear old dead friend Forbes, trying not to add insult to injury by tripping over him. Considering the circumstances of their twisted and contorted positions, they’re still making some splendid three and four bank billiard shots.

One of the gentleman points out that Forbes’ wingtips have just recently been re-soled and heeled.

What a waste of good Italian leather, MD says.

The whole scenario is turning dark and ominous.

Outside, there is a fine warm mist falling as an ambulance and police cruiser siren up to the curb by the entrance of Bronco’s. Their flashing lights glisten on the wet blacktop.

Hearing the siren, the three gentleman pick up the pace of their match.

The Redmond Brothers follow the gurney up the stairs and into Bronco’s. They are mildly curious about who got their head split with a pool cue when they spot Chickenman wiping burger juice off his chin with his sleeve.

The police have a few perfunctory questions to ask witnesses before they close their little pads and leave the medics to their work.

The medics cover The Gentleman Forbes with an antiseptic white sheet and roll him towards the door with his newly-soled wingtips poking out of the sheet.

The three gentlemen glance up at the Seagram clock and slip their sportcoats over their Brooks Brothers shirts and line up single file behind the gurney and follow it out the door. But not before MD surreptitiously snags poor old dead Forbes’ beloved Thermos brand thermos and quickly corks it and screws the silver cup on and awkwardly hides it under his blue blazer with the Forbes Haberdashery label French-stitched onto the gold silk lining.

MD has always had designs on Forbes’ Thermos brand thermos.

Chickenman catches a glimpse of the gurney just as it rolls out the door with MD and the boys parading behind with heads bowed New Orleans style.

What happened? Chickenman asks.

Man died, Eddie tells him. A billiard player.

How?

Just like that, Eddie snaps his fingers, like turning off a light switch. Eddie shakes his head in disbelief.

Chickenman checks out the new shine on his cowboy boots. Nice job, he tells Eddie, and drops an extra dollar into Eddie’s tip jar.

The Redmond Brothers swoop down on Chickenman like a couple of strung-out junkies on a get-well fix. The stakes are set at ten on the five and twenty on the nine.

Who’s hustling who is still up for grabs.

Chickenman wins the lag for the break. He places the cue ball and studies the line. He moves the cue ball a quarter inch to the left, studies it some more, then moves it back again. He chalks his stick, checks the tightness of the rack, powders his hands and firmly sets his feet on the floor. Chickenman leans over and starts stroking his cue stick until everything peripheral gets fuzzy, leaving him in a state of pure dead quiet and shrinking reality until he enters the zone and his universe consists of just three feet of green felt and an celestial Ivory ball.

A crowd gathers as Chickenman slams the cue ball like a battering ram into the diamond shaped configuration of pool balls turning them into a frenzy of pretty colors flying in all different directions. Everyone in Bronco’s holds their breath as they track the yellow and white nine ball rolling ever-so-slowly through harm’s way towards the corner pocket.

The nine ball drops.

The place goes wild.

Chickenman anticipates being bolted awake in a cold sweat and pounding heart from another nine ball dream.

BIO: Robert Caporale’s most recent publications can be seen in Wildcat, The Café Irreal, Zuzu’s Petals Quarterly, The Lummox Journal, Confrontation, and The Avatar Review. He is finishing up a short story collection and thinking about a novel. He takes MFA workshops at the University of Massachusetts.

Interlude

The first chapter of Jason Duke’s PHOENIX NIGHTLIFE is yours for the listening at Crimewav.com.

Edited to add: You can also read the first part of PHOENIX NIGHTLIFE at Darkest Before The Dawn right now.

Interlude

Jason Duke will be appearing at Crimewav at some point this week with the first episode of his novella, PHOENIX NIGHTLIFE.

From Jason himself:

Keep an eye out @CRIMEWAV.COM this week for the first of four episodes of my serialized novella PHOENIX NIGHTLIFE.

First and foremost, a big shout out to Seth Harwood and Aldo Calcagno for making this happen, who have my respect, gratitutde and appreciation. I can’t thank them enough for giving me this opportunity.

I think the four episodes will be released over the next month or so, about one per week. Not sure, but I think the text version will also be available at some point on Darkest Before the Dawn, if you can’t stand the sound of my voice and would rather read it instead. There’s some writing I left out of the podcasts that you can read in the text.

The novella originated from a short story that was published nine years ago in Plots With Guns. Yeah, it’s taken me nine years, off and on, to finish the thing, but fuck it, better late than never.

So love it or hate it, call it the greatest thing since Dashiell Hammett, call it a piece of shit, just read it and call it something, and spread the word. Thanks.

A Twist Of Noir 518 - Allen Kopp

UNTOUCHED BY MORNING - ALLEN KOPP

Tillman sat beside her bed all night long, hardly moving. In the minutes before the sun came up, as the birds were starting to sing in the trees outside the window, she took her final expiring breath and was dead. He stood up slowly and stretched his cramped body. He went to the window and pulled back the curtain that she had made with her own hands and looked out. It was a beautiful morning in early summer and for that he was glad; she didn’t like the cold—he would have hated to see her go into her grave when the ground was frozen and the trees bare.

He went downstairs and cooked his own breakfast and sat long over it with a cup of strong tea in front of the window. When he saw Windsor, the hired man, moving about in the space between the house and barn, he went out and told him that she had died in the night. He asked him to go to the barn and get the coffin they had been keeping for her and bring it upstairs to her room.

Windsor grunted slightly to show that he understood but, not being the kind to express condolences, said nothing. He finished what he was doing and went straight to the barn and took the coffin off the blocks and, with much noise, carried it up the stairs and set it alongside the bed and took off the lid. He picked her up in his arms as if she were no heavier than a load of wood and put her gently into the box. He was going to nail the lid shut but Tillman stopped him. Word had been sent to her son and, more than likely, he would be coming home and would want to see her one last time.

After Windsor left to go to the little cemetery on the side of the hill to open the grave that had been set aside for her, Tillman went to his room and stripped himself naked and washed from head to toe and put on his good clothes. When he was finished dressing, he went out and sat on the front porch and waited with his feet up on the railing. He held his rifle across his knees but it wasn’t loaded.

In a little while, he saw Peck coming toward the house on the road. He knew it was Peck from a long way off because he walked with a little limp from when he had his leg broken as a child. When Peck came to the gate, he let himself in and came up the walk to the porch and sat down heavily on the top step and blew out his breath.

“It’s a sad day,” Tillman said.

“Is she for sure dead?” Peck asked.

“As dead as the dodo bird,” Tillman said.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, each thinking his own thoughts. Peck chewed on his thumbnail and looked off into the distance. A large gray striped tomcat, stepping delicately in the damp grass, came around the side of the house and up the steps and lay down in the sun on the end of the porch and went to sleep.

After a while, they stood up, the two of them, and went up to her room, their boots sounding very loud on the stairs. Tillman went quietly to her door, as though she might only be asleep, and paused and looked over his shoulder at Peck. He thought perhaps he should say something to prepare Peck for the way she looked, but he couldn’t think of anything to say, so he opened the door and both of them went into the room.

Windsor’s strange wife with the white eyes had been in and taken some pains with the body, so she looked better now. She had smoothed her hair out with a brush and put her hands over her stomach and washed her face and put some powder or something on her face to keep her from looking quite so pale.

Peck approached the coffin and knelt beside it and removed his hat while Tillman stood behind him.

“Do you want me to leave you alone with her?” Tillman asked.

Peck didn’t answer so Tillman stayed where he was. After a couple of minutes, Peck stood up and put his hat back on and said, “Do you have a drink in the house?”

They went downstairs to the kitchen. Peck sat down at the table and Tillman got the bottle of brandy he kept on hand for guests. He poured some of it into a glass for Peck and a cup of tea for himself.

“My condolences,” Tillman said, as though proposing a toast. “In spite of your differences, she was your mother and you her son.”

“We were never very friendly,” Peck said. “I believe there were many times she would have cheerfully killed me if she could have done so without consequences.”

“She would have killed me, too, I think, for a good enough reason,” Tillman said.

“Was there a will?” Peck asked.

“Yes, I believe there was,” Tillman said.

He went to the old roll-top desk in the otherwise empty downstairs bedroom and opened the drawer and took out a folded-up piece of paper and went back into the kitchen with it and placed it on the table in front of Peck.

Peck read the will and then refolded it and handed it across the table to Tillman.

“Don’t you think she might have remembered her only son?” he asked quietly.

“You would have had to ask her about that,” Tillman said.

“Why did you ever marry her?” Peck asked. “Was it so you could get her property after she died?”

Tillman laughed. “The place wasn’t worth much when I first came here,” he said. “She was drowning in debt, about to lose everything.”

“So you just happened to come along and, in spite of her being twenty years older than you, you married her out of the goodness of your heart.”

“She would have lost the place for sure if it hadn’t been for me. And she was seventeen years older than me. Not twenty.”

“What did you get out of it?”

“I don’t know. A home. Somebody to talk to. A place to lay my head at night.”

“I heard you married her because you would have gone to jail if you hadn’t.”

“People wag their tongues. You hear anything. Just because people say it doesn’t make it true.”

“I heard that the money you had rightfully belonged to your brother. When he tried to get it back, you had him murdered.”

“That’s not true.”

“That’s when my mother made her deal with the devil. Because she was a landowner, she pulled some strings with the sheriff to get the charges against you dropped. Your brother’s death was ruled an accident, even though any fool could see otherwise.”

“I think you’ve said enough.”

“After you were free, the two of you got married. I don’t know how my mother was able to stand such an arrangement. She had your brother’s blood on her hands as much as you did.”

“That’s not what happened.”

Windsor came into the kitchen just then, so they stopped talking. He went to the sink and got a drink of water and then he turned to Tillman.

“We’re all ready,” he said.

He had brought the wagon around to the door. His wife held the horses while he and Tillman and Peck went upstairs and brought the coffin down and loaded it into the wagon.

Tillman and Peck rode in the wagon carrying the coffin, while Windsor and his wife rode behind in another wagon. When they came to the cemetery, Tillman pulled the wagon as close to the open grave as he could get so they wouldn’t have to carry the coffin very far.

They lowered the coffin with ropes and then Windsor’s wife read a few verses from the Bible. Tillman asked Peck if he wanted to say anything and Peck shook his head. They all stood looking down into the grave for a silent minute and then it was over. Windsor started filling in the grave and Tillman and Peck got back in the wagon and headed back toward the house.

Peck lit a cigar and began humming a tune he liked that he had heard in a barroom.

“You don’t seem very grieved,” Tillman said.

“It doesn’t make much difference to me if she’s alive or dead,” Peck said. He leaned over the side of the wagon and spit and stoked his cigar. “When I was fourteen or fifteen,” he said, “she used to lock me in the shed to keep me from going into town to meet my friends. There was a cot in there and a little wood stove—very cozy. She would leave me in there all night and come and unlock the door in the morning and find me sleeping like an angel. What she didn’t know was that I had a way of getting out and then back in without her knowing about it. I stayed away all night and came back just in time before she was likely to unlock the door. She never caught on.”

“You don’t have much sentiment, do you?” Tillman asked.

“What’s that?”

They came to a place in the road where there was a little clearing for turning around. Tillman pulled the team into the clearing and stopped. The two of them dismounted and walked the thirty yards to the river, which was high and swift due to the spring rains. They sat on a little rise and watched the limbs and debris floating past.

“I need money,” Peck said after a little while.

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Tillman said.

“Now that she’s gone, I was hoping you would sell the place and give me half the money. I’d settle for one-third.”

“You’ll settle for nothing. I’m not selling. I plan on staying here for as long as I live.”

“Not everybody lives so long.”

“Meaning what?”

“Nothing. I’m just saying.”

“It sounded like a threat to me.”

“You’re just overly sensitive, with the strain of your wife’s death and all.”

“If I were to give you money, how do I know you wouldn’t just throw it away? How do I know you wouldn’t be back for more?”

“It’s not like that. I want it for a legitimate business investment.”

“Which is what?”

“My partner and I want to open a restaurant and a sort of hotel.”

“Who is this partner?”

“You don’t know him.”

“How much money do you figure on needing?”

“At least ten or twenty thousand.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“You could easily get that amount by mortgaging the property.”

“And spend the rest of my life paying it back to the bank.”

“I believe I could live with that.”

“I’m not going to do it.”

“I have in my possession a letter.”

“What are you talking about? What letter?”

“Not long after my mother married you, she wrote me a letter. She felt guilty about the part she played in freeing you in your brother’s death. She was afraid she would burn in hell for it. She said in the letter that you had admitted to killing your brother but that you claimed it was self-defense.”

“That’s not true! There is no such letter!”

“She said she wanted me to know the truth about you, but she made me promise I would keep this knowledge to myself until such time as I might need it.”

“If you have such a letter, let me see it!”

“Do you think I’m stupid?”

“I think you’re a liar! Your mother never wrote a letter in her life. She could barely read and write.”

“She was a lot more educated than you thought.”

Not knowing what else to say, Tillman went back to the wagon. He wanted to get back home, indoors and out of sight. He was just about to pull away in the wagon, not caring if he left Peck behind or not, when Peck jumped up on the seat next to him.

When they returned to the house, Tillman left the wagon in the open space in front of the barn for Windsor to put away later. He and Peck went through the back door into the kitchen. Peck sat down at the table and poured another shot of the brandy and drank it down. Tillman pulled out a chair and sat down across from him.

“If I were to raise ten thousand dollars,” he said, “would you give me the letter if such a letter exists?”

“You’re going to have to do better than that,” Peck said.

“I need some time to think. Come back in two or three days and we’ll talk about it.”

“No, we’ll talk about it now.”

“Your mother had some jewelry,” Tillman said. “I don’t know how much it’s worth, but I think it is of great value. You can take it with you when you go. I think you could get a good price for it if from a dealer who knows his gems.”

“That’s more like it!” Peck said, breaking into a broad smile. For him, the tension had gone out of the room. “She had a diamond necklace when I was a small boy,” he said. “She would take it out about once a year and look at it and show it to all of us. I wonder if that’s in with the other stuff you’re talking about.”

“I think it is,” Tillman said. “We can go upstairs to her room and take a look if you want.”

They went upstairs, Peck first, with Tillman following close behind. When they came to her room, Peck pushed the door open and went in as if he belonged there. He was smiling now, happy. When he turned around and opened his mouth to speak, Tillman hit him in the side of the head with the small hatchet he was carrying concealed against his leg.

Peck staggered, grabbing onto the bed. He looked levelly at Tillman, confused, holding his hand to his head, surprised that there was so much blood. “No letter,” he said. “I made it all up.”

Tillman approached him and hit him in the head again, knocking him to the floor. When he started to get up, Tillman pulled a pillow off the bed and, straddling Peck’s chest, held it over his face. Peck struggled and kicked out his legs and flailed his arms about—to no effect—and then he was dead.

Tillman lay on top of Peck for several minutes and then he stood up. He took some towels and wrapped them around Peck’s head to contain the blood. He took the coverlet off the bed and wrapped it around Peck’s body, tying it at the neck and ankles.

When he had Peck’s body wrapped up the best he could manage, he went to the window and looked out. Windsor and his wife hadn’t returned yet. He was sure they would take a good long time tending to the grave.

He picked Peck’s body up and slung it over his shoulder, thinking how fortunate it was that Peck was not a very big man and not difficult to carry. He carried him down the stairs and out the door and put him in the back of the wagon, covering him with a piece of canvas that was used when it rained.

He knew of a place a mile and a half back in the hills, an old homestead where nobody had lived for seventy-five years. There was an abandoned well there that was covered over with rotting timber. It was rumored to be hundreds of feet deep.

The old homestead was just as he remembered it—the foundation of an old house on a little rise back in the trees, with the well only a few feet away from what would have been the front door. He pulled the wagon as close to the well as he could get.

Before dismounting, he sat quietly for a few minutes and looked all around, as though contemplating the silence and solitude. Satisfied that he was not being observed, he dismounted and removed the body from the wagon and carried it to the well and pulled aside the rotting timbers.

“Goodbye, Peck,” he said. “Sorry it had to be this way. Say hello to your mother for me.”

He pushed the body into the well, imagining it plunging down, down into the darkness until it came to rest on the unimaginable bottom. After saying a silent prayer for the acceptance of Peck’s spirit into heaven, he replaced the timbers of the well, making them appear undisturbed.

Driving home, he began to feel a twinge of sadness. He had been hoping that Peck would come and live with him on the old place. He had been going to ask him when the time was right. They would have got along very well living under the same roof; they were really very much alike. Close together in age and temperament, the older stepfather and the slightly younger stepson. They could have made life easier for each other. They could have eased each other’s loneliness.

When he returned home, he was tired and went upstairs to his room and locked himself in. He took off his boots and lay on his back on the bed and watched the play of afternoon light on the ceiling. He went to sleep and awoke with a jolt, remembering what he had done.

In the early evening, Windsor came and tapped lightly on the door. His wife had fixed a special funeral supper, he said, and the food was ready to eat. Tillman mumbled in a strained voice through the door that he was sick and wasn’t taking any supper. When he heard Windsor’s footsteps going back down the stairs, he rolled over on his side and faced the wall, knowing that he had, somehow, to get through the long lonely night that stretched before him.

BIO: Allen Kopp is a technical writer and lives in St. Louis. His work has been published in Foliate Oak Literary Journal, Temenos, The Legendary, Danse Macabre, Bartleby-Snopes, Skive Magazine, Hoi-Polloi, Conceit Magazine, and Dark and Dreary Magazine. Future work will appear in Sunken Lines, The Storyteller, and The Bracelet Charm. Allen was a contest finalist in the Bartleby-Snopes dialogue-writing contest and a 2009 Pushcart Prize nominee for the story “Hermaphrodite Ward.”

A Twist Of Noir 517 - Phil Beloin Jr.

SOMETIMES THEY DON’T TELL YOU ENOUGH - PHIL BELOIN JR.

“My wife is a very sensual creature, Mr. Trimble,” Clark Gibbon said.

Sometimes clients tell you too much.

“I have a picture of her,” he added.

He slid a photograph across the desk. He was dead-on. His wife oozed sexuality with flowing blonde locks and a saturating sheen to her eyes.

“Well?” Gibbon said.

“Well, what?” I said. I wanted to smoke, but Gibbon looked uptight, needing a P.I. to get the dirt on his better half.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” he said.

“Heck, no,” I said. “I’ll light it for you.”

And we smoked for a while. After he left, I took out my digital camera.

I latched onto Mrs. Gibbon outside her estate of marble and glass. Her hubby was an attorney suing companies for copyright infringement and anti-trust violations. Apparently, it paid well enough for an eight hundred room villa and a roadster imported from Italy. Mrs. Gibbon drove that gazelle like she was late for a meeting in Europe, too.

I had a stitch of trouble following her in my crumbling sedan, running stop signs and red lights, missing a bevy of stray critters, and even an elderly fellow in a wheelchair, who’s middle finger worked just fine.

It seemed Mrs. Gibbon didn’t want to be tardy for lunch, rushing inside our local French eatery with seven floors of hotel rooms stacked above it. I followed her into the restaurant, strolling over to the barman, who was busy wiping the shine off the polished bar top.

I ordered a pricey American beer and swivelled towards Mrs. Gibbon. She was more than sexy, she was electric, she was fire, she was everything more than a photograph could portray.

She was also not alone for lunch. She was with a man.

A man who turned out to be Clark Gibbon. Clark had donned a jacket and tie since he had left my office and what good lawyer didn’t suit up before jurisprudence?

Clark didn’t look my way so I ignored the Gibbons by turning back to the barman. He continued his buff and polish.

“You missed a spot,” I said.

He wanted to know where.

After a multi-course meal of ritzy cholesterol and gobs of saturated fat, the Gibbons paraded into the hotel lobby, past the front desk clerk, and into an elevator, which shot them straight to the penthouse suite for a whopping two-hour matrimonial dessert.

Clark was right about his wife’s sensuality. But he had also underestimated his own.

The missus came down by herself and flew her hotrod back to the homestead. I didn’t expect her to go out again—not unless she was a nymphomaniac—and it turned out I hadn’t lost my deductive skills. She stayed put until Clark came home after dark.

With an extended lunch hour like his, no wonder the counselor had to work late.

Two more times that week, Wednesday and Friday, the Gibbons met for lunch and a post-meal romp. Other than that, his wife remained home. Clark would roll in a little after sunset and I would roll off.

That Friday, I went back to the office. There were ashtrays that needed cleaning and a wastebasket that was overflowing. Which to do first? How about a smoke, Matt?

The phone rang and if I hadn’t been poisoning my blood with all the goodies blended into a harmless looking slender tube, I might have reached it on the first ring.

“Matt Trimble,” I said.

“Who’s my wife sleeping with?” Clark Gibbon said.

Only you, I thought, but said, “No one.”

“And you followed her?”

“All week.”

“Impossible.”

“Look, Mr. Gibbon...”

“Stay on it,” he said and hung up.

I took the weekend off—Clark had mentioned in our initial interview that he and his wife spent those two days together. Before heading out to tail the luscious Mrs. Gibbon on Monday morning, I opened the paper and saw the headline: LOCAL LAWYER DIES IN HOUSEHOLD FALL

According to Mrs. Gibbon, her husband had slipped at the top of the staircase, careened down one flight, through a balustrade where the stairs turned at a right angle, and then dropped headfirst onto the marble floor another flight below.

The police were ruling it an accident.

I went to the wake. I wanted one more look at the man who had thought his wife was cuckolding him. I knelt before my former client, had my look-see, and then stepped to the left to pay my respects to Mrs. Gibbon.

She still looked gorgeous—even in black—even with tears smudging her makeup.

“Mrs. Gibbon,” I said, taking her offered hand, “you don’t know me, but I did some work for your husband, and I want to express how sorry I am for your loss.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Mister...?”

“Matt Trimble.”

“Mr. Trimble, I appreciate you coming, and let me introduce you to Clark’s brother, Roger.”

“Sir,” I said to the man sitting next to her.

But I could say no more.

Clark Gibbon sat beside his wife.

But Clark was in the casket.

Clark was dead.

“I see,” Mrs. Gibbon said, “my husband never mentioned he was an identical twin?”

“No...no,” I said. “He didn’t.”

Sometimes clients tell you too much.

But sometimes they don’t tell you enough.

BIO: Phil Beloin Jr. lives in New England with his wife and children. He hopes you check out his novel, The Big Bad, on Amazon.com.

A Twist Of Noir 516 - Jim Harrington

THE KILLER STORM - JIM HARRINGTON

Originally published in Clever Magazine

Zachary struggled against the hurricane’s wind and rain to get to the shelter door. He reached for the handle, but a sudden gust hurled him two steps back. He turned his head away from the gale to catch his breath, regained his balance, leaned into the wind as if pushing a great weight, inched forward, grabbed the handle and pushed down. The door, propelled by the wind, flew open and launched Zachary off his feet and into the street. Stunned, he crawled toward the opening and watched as meaty fingers gripped the door and began to pull it shut.

Zachary tripped as he lunged for the entrance, yet managed to grasp the metal panel at the same time his chest slammed the sidewalk. He closed his eyes against the rain and battled to maintain his hold. Without warning, a hand seized his wrist and dragged him inside. As he crossed the threshold, an iPod fell from Zachary’s jacket and landed at the feet in front of him. He looked up, ready to thank his rescuer, but stopped when he saw Sheriff Mumford looming over him.

“All citizens were told to evacuate,” the sheriff said. He spread his legs and placed his hands on his hips.

“Didn’t hear nothin’ about no evacuation,” Zachary said, getting to his knees.

“Right,” the sheriff mumbled. He bent down to pick up the shiny object. “Nice doodad you got here.”

Zachary reached for the iPod, but the sheriff jerked it behind his ear, out of Zachary’s reach.

“I found it,” Zachary said.

“Sure you did.” The sheriff’s eyes narrowed and he tilted his head to one side. “Where was it? In somebody’s home or still in the store?”

“A guy’s gotta make a living.” Zachary stood. “Besides, the owner’s got insurance. It’s not like he can’t afford to replace it.”

“It doesn’t matter if the owner can afford to get another one. You stole it.”

“Gotta get some money somehow. Daddy needs his medicine.”

“Your daddy needs his daily bottle of Johnny Walker,” the sheriff said, shaking his head.

“We don’t have enough money for real medicine.” Zachary locked his eyes on the sheriff’s. “Ain’t got health insurance like you rich folks.”

“Ever try getting a job?”

“Hell, Momma’s got two jobs and barely makes enough to buy food and pay the rent.” Zachary leaned back against the concrete wall. “Daddy’s workers’ comp ran out, and he’s been waitin’ nine months for the government to approve his disability and Medicare.” He picked mud from a fingernail while he waited for the sheriff to respond.

“You know I’m going to have to arrest you.” The sheriff held up the iPod.

“Won’t be the first time.” Zachary smiled. “I’ll be out in a day or so.”

“You’re probably right,” the sheriff said after a taking a moment to think. He grabbed Zachary’s arm and pulled him to the exit. Fighting the wind, the sheriff forced the door open and flung Zachary into the street.

“You can’t throw me out in this storm,” Zachary shouted.

“Sure I can,” the sheriff replied. “I’m breaking the law if I don’t. See that sign that says Maximum Occupancy 250? We’re at the limit. I can’t let anybody else in.”

Sheriff Mumford closed the door and locked the deadbolt before Zachary could re-enter the shelter. He ignored Zachary’s screams and the pounding on the door. Smiling, he hitched up his trousers, straightened his tie and headed toward the two men fighting over a bottle of water. He had work to do.

BIO: Jim discovered flash fiction in 2007, and he’s read, written, studied, and agonized over the form since. His Six Questions For... blog provides editors and publishers a place to “tell it like it is.” In his spare time, he serves as the flash fiction editor for Apollo’s Lyre.

Introduction to Cindy Rosmus's Original ALL GONE

Over the weekend, you’ve been able to have a look at Cindy Rosmus's ALL GONE.

At least the version that appeared in Out Of The Gutter.

After I posted the story, I sent Cindy the usual note that I send all writers when one of their stories appears at A Twist Of Noir and I said that I thought that the girl at the end was the assassin until I was proven otherwise and the husband popped up.

Cindy responded and let me in on a little secret, that there was another version to ALL GONE.

It seems that the original version, the one that follows this introduction, was mulled over by an editor at Out Of The Gutter and this editor told Cindy that it would be published if there was a revised ending (the one that you read over the weekend). Cindy told me that she worked on it with this editor, that she believes that she did more than one rewrite and still it was not good enough for him. She said that he changed so much of the story that it stopped feeling like it was her story.

I want to make it clear that Cindy never named names, doesn’t even remember who the editor was. I also want to make it clear that this kind of thing has been mentioned to me more than once, and not necessarily with Out Of The Gutter. I, myself, have experienced just such an incident, in which my story was only accepted after I changed a bit of it around and, even then, there were whole sentences and a paragraph or two removed.

This is something that absolutely drives me up the fucking wall where it concerns some editors.

A writer sits down, thinks up a story, transcribes it, hopefully looks it over and makes sure that everything is where it’s supposed to be and everything has been said that they wanted to say. And then they send it off to a publication of some sort, whether online or print, and they wait and they hope and they cross their fingers and they wait some more and sometimes they're kept waiting for a long, long time.

Eventually, an editor or a publisher or both will have something to say about this story that the writer waited and hoped over.

And this is where an editor can either help or hobble a story.

As an editor and a publisher, I am being asked to consider the story, read it, go over it with a fine-toothed comb and make sure everything is okay, everything makes sense and that the story will entertain if it does see print.

But there is a line. And it should be a stark line.

Just because I am in possession of a story does not make it my story. Even when I decide that, yes, it will be going up at A Twist Of Noir, it is still not my story.

I hope that I provide a safety net for writers, as well as a place for publication. If a story falls short of the mark, I hope that I acquit myself well in explaining why I think this is the case and what I think might help make it a story that I can publish.

What I do not do is tamper with someone’s story to the point where they feel that it isn’t theirs any longer.

That’s not an editor; that’s, at best, a collaborator and, at worst, a thief.

The following is Cindy Rosmus’s original vision of ALL GONE, which starts out and runs to the middle of the story pretty much how you’ve read. But the ending, it don’t end the same. Not by a longshot.

I’m of the opinion that it ends much better than the other ending.

You be the judge.

Feel free to make comments here and at the story itself and let us know which ending you prefer.