I share with my wife a love for the twist ending, and I suppose our short stories tend to be a little old-fashioned... though in a good way.

Recently I co-edited (with Jeff Gelb) a collection of short stories (Flesh and Blood) that included a cross-section of writers in the mystery/suspense genre, from old pros to young punks. I liked all of the stories — or I wouldn’t have bought them! — but several stood out. Writers like Ed Hoch and Don Westlake (to name just two longtime professionals who contributed to that anthology) crafted the kind of well-made story we don’t see much these days. Every nut, every bolt, in its proper place, every screw turn of the plot perfectly tightened... with a final pay-off that provided a smile, or a tingle at the back of the neck... or both.

These days, we see some very interesting stories — unusual ones, daring ones, rule- and ground-breakers. But we rarely see the kind of perfectly fashioned story that used to be, well, fairly commonplace in our popular culture. The great weekly “slick” magazines — Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s come to mind — and the wonderful pulps — Black Mask anyone? — are long gone; so are the half-hour radio and TV dramas. I grew up on Tales from the Crypt and other great comic books (mostly EC’s); and — while HBO mined those ancient ghoulish funnies for several seasons a while back — those are long gone, too.

This makes the short story a sort of lost art. A lot of the short stories written today — many of them good, even terrific — are the work of novelists... like me... taking an occasional dip into the short-fiction pool, at the invite of the editor of an anthology, or to take a crack at the few remaining markets, like Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Some top-notch novelists — like John Lutz, Ed Gorman and Lawrence Block — are also first-rate short story writers; and I like to think I’m not bad at it myself, if not in the league of those mentioned.

But I’m not a born short story writer. I think in complicated, complex ways that make for a good novel, and it’s difficult for me to work in miniature. My wife, Barb — who is swiftly becoming a skilled novelist, by the way — has a knack for precision work. You’ll see examples of that in the pages ahead.

Now and then we write a story together (we always help each other on individual projects) and we’ve never had a problem, none of the expected marital battles. Perhaps she’s just used to dealing with my bloated, fragile ego. Or maybe it’s just that we stay out of each other’s way, after we come up with a plot in a story conference over lunch or on a Sunday afternoon drive — she writes her draft, and I write mine.

Now and then we trade off sections. There’s more of me in the Sam Knight voice in “Eddie Haskell in a Short Skirt,” and more of Barb in Rebecca’s. She is notorious, in our collaborations, for leaving me dangling: in the middle of a beautifully crafted sequence, in which I’m all caught up as a reader, I will encounter FIGHT SCENE HERE.

Anyway, we work well together — and we do well on our own. We hope you’ll find the tales in this collection — whether hers, mine or ours — worthy examples of the almost lost art of the well-made tale with a twist of wry.

Back in the 1950s, when there were only a few TV channels to watch, three shows brought to a screeching halt the mayhem in the kid-infested house I grew up in: Perry Mason (my mother had a mad crush on Raymond Burr), Maverick (my mother had a mad crush on James Garner), and Alfred Hitchcock Presents (my mother did not have a mad crush on the great director, but loved the stories). These programs must have had a profound effect on me, because the key ingredients of each episode — mystery, humor, irony — seem to make up the recipe I follow for my own short stories.

Even though I have worked in the novel format, to me, the perfect way to tell a tale is the short story. It’s great for impatient people with short attention spans, one of which I am. And my husband, who encouraged me to write and has been a great teacher, has always touted, “Write what you’d like to read.”

Some of my favorite stories are ones that we’ve collaborated on; it’s a little bit me, a little bit him. Having a male/female perspective is always interesting. And our writing styles are so similar (no surprise) that, come the end result, even we sometimes can’t tell who wrote what.

Besides my husband — who is one of the smartest, best writers in the whole wide world — I owe a debt of gratitude to Ed Gorman and Marty Greenberg for publishing my stories in their wonderful anthologies.

Another debt is owed, of course. The stories in this book are sometimes by me, sometimes by my husband, sometimes by the two of us, working together. But the important collaborator, in any story, is the reader.

We’ve done our job — the rest is up to you!

The Polk County Prison was located just north of Des Moines on four well-manicured acres. The newly constructed twenty-million dollar complex had no unsightly barbed wire fence surrounding its premises, nor a guard station at the front entry, or anything else that made it look like a prison. To the passer-by, the two-story red brick octagonal building might have been a clinic of some kind, a place you might go to have a skin tag lopped off, or an impacted molar extracted. Only the back of the building gave its purpose away: rows of small barred windows ran its length, windows so tiny that a man — or woman — couldn’t possibly squeeze through.

I’d been to this prison just one other time, with my father, Sam Knight, to visit a client. He and I — my name is Rebecca — are partners in an investigations firm in the city. (You might have read about us in People magazine last year for cracking “The Cutthroat Cowgirl Case” — their title, not ours.)

Getting back to the prison, I was really impressed by this state-of-the-art facility, with its laser sensors, computer-operated doors, and prisoner tracking bracelets. Even the cells were fairly comfortable, clean and new.

Anyway, mine was.

I was in for murdering my best friend, Vickie.

Footsteps echoed down the concrete hallway coming toward me, sounding like pop-guns going off, but I remained motionless on the little bed, my hands clenched tightly in my lap. Then a deputy sheriff, tall and gangly, was punching in numbers on a security pad, opening the barred door, informing me my father was here.

In the visitation room, which was small but not claustrophobic, my father and I sat at a long table, the width of which was between us. He looked older than his sixty-four years, older than I’d ever seen him, his craggy face drawn, bronze tan faded from the long winter months. But his eyes were strong, determined. If he was at all frightened, those ol’ blue eyes did not betray him.

I, too, must have looked a sight: no make-up, shoulder length brown hair uncombed, and very unfashionable in the orange prison dress with orange slip-on tennies.

He cleared his throat. “Are they treating you okay, pumpkin?” He’d hardly called me that since grade school.

I nodded numbly.

“Got a call in to Walter Conlon,” he told me. “He’s a good criminal lawyer.”

I nodded again. I would need the best.

Now my father stood up and came around the side of the table to stand before me, running the fingers of one hand on the table top, looking down at that hand. His voice was soft, even gentle. “You understand bail won’t even be an issue until you’ve been arraigned.”

“I understand,” I said weakly.

I stood up and gave him the bravest smile I could muster, which wasn’t much of one. “I’ll be all right in here, really.”

Then I fell into his arms, like I promised myself I wouldn’t do, reduced from age thirty-four to four, and sobbed into his chest, leaving big, wet stains on his gray suit jacket, crying for me, crying for Vickie.

He smoothed my hair and said, “I could stay here longer if you want, but I’d like to get right to work on this.”

“What is there you can do?”

He gave me a funny smile. “I might think of something. You hang in there, pumpkin.”

Back in my cell, I returned to the bed, where I sat staring at the tan wall.

If only I hadn’t gone to The Brew that night, our paths wouldn’t have crossed... And I wouldn’t be sitting here now with my life and business in shambles.

But then, our meeting again after so many years hadn’t really been left to chance, had it? Because Vickie had come to town looking for me. I realized that now, too late.

We’d met in the seventh grade, Vickie and me, and soon became good friends. I had a cousin, Ann, a few years older, who’d had a number of best friends in school. One by one they betrayed her: Sue spread nasty, false rumors; Janice stole her boyfriend, and Liz got her kicked off the Pom-Pon squad when Ann gained a few pounds. I watched on the sidelines and made up my mind not ever to have a best friend.

But the more time I spent with Vickie, the more she seemed like the genuine thing: someone I could confide in and trust. She knew the value of keeping secrets. Hadn’t she given me my first diary, for my thirteenth birthday?

And she was so confident, out-going and fun. Qualities I felt I lacked. When I was around her, she made me feel like a different person, a person I liked much better.

I lost track of Vickie after high school, when we went on to different colleges, me to the University of Minnesota, her to Northwestern. She didn’t come back for our tenth high school reunion, but a photo of her (looking gorgeous behind a desk in a fancy high-rise office) was tacked on the bulletin board, along with those of other classmates who couldn’t make it back. An accompanying letter said she and a partner named Kyle owned a very successful insurance company in Chicago. A p.s. on the note said, “A special hello to Rebecca!”

So you can imagine my surprise and delight when I turned around from the bar at The Brew six months ago, a glass of Chablis in one hand, to see my old friend Vickie. We squealed like little pigs, and hugged, and laughed and hugged some more, then found a booth in the back.

“You look terrific,” I told Vickie. And she did: long blond hair, startlingly blue eyes, porcelain skin, perfect white teeth. “Don’t have a portrait of yourself, getting wrinkled in the attic, do you?” I asked.

She laughed and shook her head. “You look wonderful, too,” she said.

Maybe. Maybe not. But it was nice of her to say it.

“What brings you back to town?” I asked.

“I’m going to open my own insurance agency here,” she said happily.

“Really!” I was thrilled. I reached out and squeezed her hand, immediately visualizing us lunching at Noah’s, shopping at Valley Junction, and spending Friday evenings at Billy Joe’s Pitcher Show. Just like the good old days.

She ran one manicured fingernail around the rim of the glass of red wine she’d brought to the table, and looked down into the drink. “But before I can,” she said, “I have to pass the Iowa exam, since I’m only licensed in Illinois. But that shouldn’t be too hard.”

Not for her. “What happened to your other insurance business?” I asked.

Her face clouded, and she stared off into the smoky, noisy room behind us. “My partner — Kyle was his name — and I had a rather bad falling out.”

“I’m sorry.”

She took a sip of her drink. “It’s not what you think... We weren’t lovers or anything. Just business partners who couldn’t see eye to eye.”

“I understand.” I’d been there with my father, but never bad enough to call it quits.

“I couldn’t take his unethical practices anymore,” she explained sadly.

Curious, I asked, “What do you mean by ‘unethical practices’?”

She paused a moment, wineglass to her lips. “Kyle would give customers more coverage than they needed, with outrageously high premiums, just so he could collect a big commission.” She took a sip of wine, then added, “That’s just one example, and believe me, there were plenty of others.”

“Wow.” I’d read about such scurrilous practices that were rampant in the 1980s, when suddenly, reputable insurance corporations found themselves in legal hot water because of some unethical agents. It cost the corporations millions and millions to settle all the claims.

“I just had to get out,” Vickie said, pain showing on her pretty face, “so I left it all behind.”

I smiled supportively at her. That must have been hard. That must have taken guts.

“Anyway,” she went on, “the first thing I have to do is find a temporary job, until I can move forward with my plans. Got any ideas?”

And a bolt of lightning struck me. Three weeks ago I let our office manager go because of poor performance, and I hadn’t gotten around to finding a replacement, doing the work myself.

“Have I!” I said. “You can come and work for me, doing bookkeeping and such.”

“Really?” she asked, her face lighting up. Then she sat back in the booth, putting one hand to her forehead, like she felt faint. “Oh, Reb, I’m soooo embarrassed. Here I’ve been talking about myself and my problems, never once asking you about yourself.”

“That’s all right,” I said, warmed by how considerate she was. “I run an investigations firm here in the city. With my father.”

“No kidding?” she said. “How exciting. With your father, you say.”

“Uh-huh.”

“How is he? Did he ever remarry after your mom died?”

“Nope. Too set in his ways.”

She gave me a half-smile. “I always thought you were so lucky having him for a dad.”

I smiled back; such a nice thing of her to say.

We fell silent for a few seconds, then Vickie raised her glass. “Here’s to us,” she said.

Our glasses clinked together. And I downed my drink.

Vickie would be perfect for the job, I had thought. After all, she had a business degree. She couldn’t possibly do any worse than the previous manager had done.

You think you’re way out in front of me, don’t you?

Well, within a week Vickie had cleaned up the mess left by the other manager — straightening out the payroll, collecting delinquent accounts receivable, even cracking down on employee pilfering of company supplies. She ran one hell of a tight ship with, “Do we really need that?” and “Can’t we buy it cheaper?”

Within the next few months, the coffers at Knight and Knight and Associates had never looked fuller. Which, in hindsight, made a lot of sense. Because there was just that much more money for her to steal.

Which she did.

Yesterday, Friday, the first day of Spring, I stayed late at the office to finish some paperwork when I got a call from a west coast electronics firm we’d purchased some surveillance gear from, saying their bill was ninety days overdue. I assured them there must be some kind of mistake because we always pay on time, but I’d look into it and call them back Monday morning.

I went into Vickie’s office to scribble her a note about checking on the overdue bill, and I opened the right hand desk drawer looking for a note-pad. There was the company checkbook, so I flipped back through the register and found that the check to the LA firm had been written nearly a month ago. But there was no check mark by it, which meant that it hadn’t cleared — as hadn’t a great many of the checks written two, even three, months ago.

Some checks had cleared — ones written every week for thousands of dollars, payable to Vickie and marked “expenses.”

Only we’d given Vickie no expense account privilege.

Ten minutes later, I found a large manila envelope stuffed in the back of the bottom drawer of a file cabinet; it contained the bills and checks that she’d never mailed.

It’s hard to describe how I felt that moment, but anyone who’s ever been betrayed by someone they trust knows. The range of emotions was incredible: shock, disbelief, sadness.

Rage.

I don’t remember getting my gun out of the safe in my office, but I must have, because I had it in my hand as I stood outside Vickie’s apartment on Hickman Road, using the butt of it to bang on her door as I called her bad names.

I knew she was home because her car was in the lot. So when she didn’t answer I shot wildly at the wooden door, the third bullet taking the knob off, then shouldered it open.

She was sprawled on the floor by the front door, face down, wearing the same blue suit she’d had on at work; a puddle of blood spread out from her chest like a red fan, soaking the beige carpet. She must have been coming to answer the door, I realized, when she was struck by one of my bullets.

Behind me, in the hallway, I heard alarmed voices. Someone yelled to call 911. My legs felt rubbery and I stepped into the apartment and eased myself into a chair by the front door to wait for the police to come. I felt detached, strangely cold — an out of body experience.

The room was in disarray, with papers and magazines strewn about and cardboard boxes sitting half-filled. On a coffee table lay Vickie’s purse, open, its contents dumped out. And next to the table were two large black suitcases, ready to go.

I remember thinking that it wasn’t very nice of Vickie to leave the apartment in such a mess.

It just wasn’t very nice at all.

Laura sat in the front on the rider’s side of the white Transport mini-van in the Holiday Inn parking lot, waiting for her husband to come out of the lobby.

In the back seat, their son, Andy — a dark-haired, round-faced, eleven-year-old boy with glasses — was hunched over, peering into the small screen of his Turbo Express, moving the expensive video toy back and forth in his hands to catch the last fading rays of the sun.

Even with the volume turned down, Laura could hear the frantic tune of the game he was playing: Splatterhouse — a particularly violent one she didn’t approve of (and wouldn’t have allowed her husband to buy for the boy, if she’d been along on that shopping trip). She mentally blocked the sound out, gazing toward the horizon at the picture-postcard sunset descending on lush green trees.

Wisconsin was a beautiful state, and the weather had been perfect; but now dark, threatening clouds were moving quickly in, bringing to an end a memorable summer-vacation day.

She spotted her husband, Pete, coming out of the lobby. He’d only been in there a minute or so... not very long.

It wasn’t a good sign.

“We’re in trouble,” he said, after opening the van’s door and sliding in behind the wheel. The brow of his ruggedly handsome face was furrowed.

“No room?” she asked.

“No room.”

“Let’s try another.”

Pete turned toward her. “Honey,” he said, his expression grave, “according to the desk clerk, there’s not a vacancy between Milwaukee and Minneapolis.”

“But that’s impossible!” Laura said, astounded. “What’s going on?”

Pete started the van. “A country festival, for one thing,” he replied. “And this is the tourist season...”

“Aren’t we staying here?” Andy asked from the back seat.

“No, son,” his dad answered, as he wheeled the van out of the packed hotel parking lot and toward the Interstate ramp. “We have to go on.”

“But I’m tired,” the boy whined, “and there’s not enough light anymore to play my game!”

Annoyed — more with their current predicament than with her son — Laura picked up a small white sack on the seat next to her and threw it to Andy, hitting him on the arm. “Here... have some fudge,” she said flatly.

“I don’t like fudge!” the boy retorted, and threw the sack back at his mom, smacking her on the head.

“Andy!” Pete said sharply, looking at his son in the rearview mirror. “That’s five points! When you get to ten, you lose your Turbo-Express for a week, remember?”

“Well, she started it!” he protested.

“Six,” his father said.

The van fell silent, the air tense and heavy with more than the humidity of the on-coming storm. Big drops of rain splattered on the windshield. The sky was crying, and suddenly Laura felt like crying, too. She stared at the dark highway before her, upset that their wonderful day had turned sour.

“We shouldn’t have stopped at the Dells,” she sighed.

It had to be said, and it might as well be said by her, because she was the one who first suggested the detour to the expensive touristy playground...

A sign on the road advertising the Oak Street Antiques Mall had caught her attention, but Pete and Andy had just groaned.

Then Andy saw the gigantic 3-D billboard for Pirate’s Cove — a 72-hole miniature golf course set in tiers of sandstone and waterfalls that overlooked the Wisconsin River. Quickly he defected to his mother’s side.

Pete, reminding them both of their agreement to make it from Illinois to Minnesota, by nightfall — where a coveted condominium at Kavanaugh’s Resort in Brainerd awaited them — held firm... until he drove over the next hill on the highway.

There, among the trees, was a pretty blonde braided billboard fraulein wearing an alluring peasant dress; she beckoned to him with her wooden finger, teasingly, tempting him to taste the homemade fudge (sixteen flavors) at the German Candy Shoppe.

“Well,” Pete had said, slowly, “maybe we can stop for just a little while.”

But “just a little while” turned into all afternoon, because there was much more to the Wisconsin Dells than antiquing and golfing and rich gooey fudge — like river rides and go-carts, wax museums and haunted houses...

“Let’s try that one,” Laura suggested, as a road-side motel materialized in the mist. Three hours earlier, she wouldn’t have dreamed of ever stopping at such a scuzzy place; but now they were desperate, and any bed looked good, even this biker’s haven.

Pete pulled off the highway and into the motel — a long, one-story, run-down succession of tiny rooms. The lot was full of pick-up trucks and motorcycles, so he parked in front of the entrance, and got out of the van, leaving the engine running.

Laura locked the doors behind him, and waited. Rain pelted the windshield. The van’s huge wipers moved back and forth spastically, like gigantic grasshopper legs, grating on her nerves. She leaned over and shut the engine off.

Behind her, Andy sighed wearily.

Please, dear God, she thought, let there be a room so we don’t have to sleep in the car. She strained to see through the rain-streaked window, trying to spot Pete. He’d been gone a long time, this time... too long.

That wasn’t a good sign, either.

Suddenly Laura saw him dart in front of the van, and quickly she unlocked the doors. He jumped inside. His clothes were soaked, hair matted, but he wore a grin.

“You got us a room!” Laura cried, elated.

Pete nodded, wiping wetness from his face with the back of one hand. “But not here.”

“Then where?”

He looked at her. “When I went in,” he explained, “the desk clerk was telling another family they had no rooms... so, naturally, I turned around to leave. Then a maintenance man gave me a tip on a place... a bed and breakfast.”

“Oh, really?” They’d never stayed at one.

“I used the payphone and called,” Pete continued. “The woman sounded very nice. They had one room left and promised to save it for us. I got the directions right here.”

He fished around in his pocket and drew out a piece of paper.

“We gotta go back about forty miles, and it’s a little out of our way, but...”

“But it’s a bed,” she smiled, relieved, throwing her arms around Pete, hugging him.

“And breakfast,” he smiled back, and kissed her.

“What’s a bed and breakfast?” Andy asked.

Laura looked at her son. “A bed and breakfast is not really a hotel,” she answered. “It’s somebody’s home.” She paused. “It’ll be like staying at your Aunt Millie’s house.”

“Oh,” the boy said sullenly, “then I gotta be good.”

“You’ve got to be especially good,” Pete said, “because these people don’t usually take children, but they’re going to make an exception for us. Okay, son?”

“I’ll try,” he said, but not very convincingly.

An hour later, as the storm began to die down, the little family drove into the small quaint town of Tranquility, its old cobble-stone streets shiny from the rain.

At a big County Market grocery store, Pete turned left, down an avenue lined with sprawling oak trees and old homes set back from the street.

They pulled up in front of a many-gabled house. An outside light was on, illuminating the large porch, which wrapped around the front of the home. On either side of the steps sat twin lions, their mouths open in a fierce frozen roar as they guarded the front door.

Laura clasped her hands together, gazing at the house. “Oh, isn’t it charming? This will be such fun!”

Pete nodded, then read the wooden sign attached to the sharp spears of the wrought iron gate. “Die Gasthaus...?”

“That’s German for ‘the inn,’Ю” Laura said, utilizing her high-school foreign language class for the very first time.

“So let’s go in,” smiled Pete.

“What’s German for ‘Splatterhouse’?” said a small sarcastic voice from the back seat.

Anger ignited in Laura — why did the boy have to ruin things? And after all they had done for him today! She turned to reprimand Andy, but her husband beat her to it.

“Shape up,” Pete shouted at the boy. “You already have six points — wanna try for seven?”

“No.”

“It’s going to be a mighty long trip without your Turbo Express!” his father threatened.

“I’m sorry,” Andy said. “It’s not my fault this place looks like a spook house...”

Pete wagged a finger at his son. “Now we’re going to go in, and you’re going to behave, and, goddamnit, we’re all going to have a good time!”

There was a long silence.

Laura couldn’t stand it, so she reached back and patted Andy on the knee. “Now gather up your things, honey,” she said cheerfully. “Don’t you know how lucky we are to be here?”

Pierce Hartwell removed the pillow from his wife’s face, relieved to see her expression was not one of agony, but peace. She had not suffered. She had, as Pierce expected her death certificate would verify, passed away in her sleep.

The lanky, darkly handsome, pencil-mustached Pierce, wearing the wine-color silk robe he’d received from Esther on their tenth anniversary not long ago, took one step back, pillow still held delicately in two hands as if he had brought it to his wife’s bedside to present her with comfort, not oblivion. He stood poised there, as if waiting for Esther to wake up, knowing — hoping — she would not. The once beautiful, now withered features of the eighty-year-old woman had a calm cast, the simple white nightgown almost suggesting a hospital garment.

“Goodbye, darling,” he whispered to the dead woman, feeling something almost like sadness. He was breathing hard, as hard as when of late he’d made love to the woman, an act that had increasingly taken his full effort and intense concentration.

When he had married Esther Balmfry ten years ago, she had been an attractive matron, slender and elegant on the cruise-ship dance floor. Pierce, at that time forty-five and wearying of his gigolo existence, had considered Esther a prime candidate for settling down. Prior to this, he had flitted from one fading flower to another, providing love in return for financial favors; but he had never married. Never considered it.

But — on that cruise ship a decade ago — Pierce had noticed several others of his ilk plucking the faded flowers from his field, men younger, newer at the game, fresher. Pierce had begun dyeing his hair, and wearing a stomach-flattening brace (he could never, even mentally, bring himself to say “girdle”) and had sensed that perhaps it was time to settle down. Pick one rich old girl who he could put up with for a few years before that “tragic” day when his beloved went where all rich old widows eventually go.

And Esther was childless, had no close relatives — except for Pierce, of course. Her loving husband.

These ten years with Esther had been increasingly difficult. The remnants of her beauty waned, though her health remained steadfastly sound. Her last physical — a few weeks ago — had elicited a virtual rave review from her doctor, who said she had the body of a woman twenty years younger.

That was easy for the doctor to say: the doctor hadn’t had to sleep with her.

“My mother lived to see one hundred,” Esther had announced over muffins and tea last week in the breakfast nook, her creped neck waving good morning to him. “And father lived to be ninety-eight.”

“Really,” Pierce had said, spreading strawberry jam on his muffin.

“Looks like you’re going to be stuck with me for a while, darling,” she’d said, patting his hand.

He’d always been given a generous allowance, but Pierce knew that Esther’s fortune was a considerable one, and the life he could lead with access to that kind of cash would go a long way toward making up for the indignities of the last ten years. At fifty-five, he had living left to do. If he waited around for Esther to pass away of natural causes, he’d be a geezer, himself.

Or, if her health did finally go, but gradually, that fortune could be decimated by medical bills.

Pierce didn’t dislike Esther, though he certainly didn’t love her. He didn’t feel much of anything for her, really: she was just a means to an end. And now her end could be his means to a new, unencumbered life.

And then there was that goddamned cat: that had been another factor, another catalyst to spark this unpleasant but necessary deed.

Clarence, the mangy brown beast, named for her late husband, had turned up at the door last year and Esther had welcomed it in, grooming it, taking it to the vet to be “fixed,” lavishing attention upon the thing as if were a child. Pierce and the cat kept their distance — once the cat learned that Pierce would kick it or toss something its way, any time its mistress wasn’t about — but just the presence of the animal meant distress to Pierce, who was after all allergic to cats.

His first act, as the master of the house, the sole human inhabitant of the near mansion (they had no live-in household staff), would be to toss that animal back out into the winter night, into the cold world from which it had emerged.

Just thinking about the beast — as Pierce stood at the bedside, taking his wife’s pulse, making sure she was in fact deceased — made his eyes burn, his nose twitch.

No... that was no psychosomatic response: that wretched animal was somewhere nearby!

Pierce turned sharply and there it was: sitting like some Egyptian statue of a feline, the blue-eyed brown beast stared at him, eyes in unblinking accusation.

“Did you witness it, then?” Pierce said to the animal. “Did you see what I did to your mistress?”

It cocked its head at him.

Sniffling, Pierce said, “I liked her... Imagine what I’ll do to you.”

And he hurled the pillow at the creature.

But Clarence leapt nimbly from harm’s way, onto the plush carpet, padding silently but quickly out of the bedroom, a blur of brown.

Pierce ran after the animal, chasing it down the curving stairs, past paintings by American masters, into a vast dark living room where the cat’s tiny claws had damaged precious Duncan Phyfe antiques. The thing scampered behind a davenport and Pierce threw on the lights, pulled out the heavy piece of furniture... but the cat was gone.

For hours he stalked the house, with a rolled-up newspaper in hand, looking behind furniture, searching this nook and that cranny of the expansive, six-bedroom spread, checking in closets and in the basement and the most absurdly unlikely of places... even under the bed where his late wife slept her dreamless sleep.

No sign of Clarence.

By dawn Pierce had given up the chase, figuring the cat had found some way out of the house. Exhausted, he sat in the breakfast nook with a cup of coffee and drinking the bitter brew, wondering if it was too early to phone 911 about the unsettling discovery of his deceased wife next to him in bed. He raised the cup to his lips and the cat jumped up onto the table and stared at him with its deep blue unblinking accusatory eyes.

I saw what you did, the cat seemed to say.

Spilling his coffee, Pierce reached for its throat, but the beast deftly, mockingly, dove to the floor and scampered across the well-waxed tiles and into the living room.

Racing after it, Pierce spent another hour searching high and low, before he finally gave up — and realized the house was in a terrible disarray from his search. It took better than an hour to straighten the furniture, smooth various throw rugs and otherwise make the place look as normal as possible.

At eight o’clock Pierce called 911, working up considerable alarm as he said, “Come quickly! I can’t rouse my wife! She won’t wake up!”

The paramedics came, and Pierce — not even taking time to dress — accompanied them in the ambulance, but Esther was of course D.O.A. at the emergency room. Rigor mortis had begun to sink in. He put on his best distraught act, working up some tears, moaning to the attending physician about his inadequacy as a husband.

“If only I’d been awake!” Pierce said. “To think I was asleep beside her, even as she lay dying!”

This melodrama seemed to convince the doctor, who calmed Pierce, saying, “There’s no need to blame yourself for this, Mr. Hartwell. There’s every indication that your wife slipped away peacefully in her sleep.”

“I... I guess I’ll have to find solace in that, won’t I?”

By eleven a.m., Pierce was back home, driven there by one of the ambulance attendants. He was whistling as he went up the curving stairway, almost racing to the bedroom where he had murdered his wife. He went to the closet to select appropriately somber apparel for the day — there were arrangements to make, starting with the funeral home — and when he reached for his charcoal suit coat, the cat leapt from the shelf above, as if jumping right at him.

But it wasn’t: Clarence scampered up onto the bed and resumed its Egyptian-style posture and again affixed its blankly reproachful blue-eyed gaze at him. Pierce moved slowly toward the animal, which twitched its nose; as if at this bidding, Pierce’s own nose twitched, and began to run, his eyes starting to burn. He leapt at the cat with clawed hands, but the animal adroitly avoided its master’s grasp and again fled the bedroom.

This time Pierce did not follow. He sat on the edge of the bed, at its foot, and caught his breath. Slowly the symptoms of his allergy eased, and he rose and finished dressing.

The cat’s next appearance came when Pierce was seated in his study, at the desk, calling the Ferndale Funeral Home. He was halfway through the conversation with the undertaker when the cat nimbly jumped up onto the desk, just out of his reach, and stared at him as he completed his phone conversation. Gradually the allergy symptoms returned, his eyes watering, burning, puffing up.

The undertaker, hearing Pierce’s sniffling, said, “I know this must be a difficult time for you, Mr. Hartwell.”

“Thank you, Mr. Ballard. It has been difficult.”

And as Pierce hung up the phone, the cat sprang from the desk and scurried out of the room.

Pierce didn’t bother following it.

The police came that afternoon, two of them, plainclothes detectives, a craggy thickset lieutenant named March with eyebrows as wild as cat’s whiskers, and a younger detective named Anderson, ruggedly handsome but also quietly sullen.

Pierce knew Lt. March, a bit, as the onetime Chicago homicide cop had married a wealthy widow several years before, the couple a staple of country club dances, where the detective was viewed as a “character” among the city’s captains of industry and inheritors of wealth.

They sat in the study, with Pierce behind the desk, the two men across from him, as if this were a business appointment. Pierce hadn’t offered to take their topcoats and neither men took them off, as they sat and talked — a good sign. This wouldn’t take long.

“Pierce,” Lt. March said, with a familiarity that wasn’t quite earned, and with a thickness of speech that reflected a stroke the detective had suffered a year before, “I hope you know that you have our deepest sympathy.”

By “our,” Pierce wasn’t sure whether March was referring to Mrs. March or his fellow detective, the younger man whose unblinking gaze seemed to contain at least a hint of suspicion.

“I appreciate that... Bill.”

March smiled; one side of his face seemed mildly affected from that stroke, and his speech had a measured manner, as if every single word had to be cooked in his mind before he served it up. “There is the formality of a statement. We can do that here, if you’d like. Save you a trip to the Public Safety Building.”

“Certainly.”

Anderson withdrew a small tape recorder from his topcoat pocket, clicked it on and set it, upright, on the edge of the desk. The recorder emitted a faint whirring.

“When did you discover that Esther had passed away?” March asked.

“When I woke up,” Pierce said, and his nose began to twitch.

“What time was that, would you say?”

“Well, just minutes, probably moments, before I called 911. I didn’t look at the clock.” His eyes were running now; that cat — that cat was somewhere in this room! “Don’t you record those calls?”

“Yes.”

“So you can verify the time, that way.”

“Yes we can.”

Pierce felt a rustling at his feet; glancing down, he saw the damned thing, sitting under the desk, at his feet, staring up at him with those spooky unblinking blue eyes.

Sniffling, he reached for a tissue from a box on the desktop. Blew his nose, dried his eyes, and said, “Sorry, gentlemen.”

“We know this is difficult for you,” March said.

“Terribly difficult,” Pierce said, and withdrew another tissue.

The statement was brief — what was there to tell? — but once the tape recorder had been clicked off, Anderson said, “We’d like you to authorize an autopsy, Mr. Hartwell.”

“Why is that necessary?”

“I think you know.”

There was something nasty about Anderson’s tone, and Pierce said, huffily, “What are you implying, sir?”

March frowned at his partner, then, smiling at Pierce, sat forward. “Pierce, I’d like to be candid, if I might.”

“Certainly.”

“When a wealthy elderly woman — who has recently married a relatively younger man — dies under circumstances that are even remotely questionable, it’s incumbent upon the police to investigate.”

What did he mean, “relatively younger?”

“An autopsy,” March continued, “should establish your wife’s death by natural causes, and we can all go on with our lives.”

“Bill,” Pierce said, invoking the lieutenant’s first name, “considering the fact that many people in our fair community have accused you of marrying for money, you’re hardly anyone toБ”

“Mrs. March isn’t dead,” Anderson interrupted.

“Gentlemen,” March said, holding out two palms. “Please. This is an unfortunate situation... a tragic situation. Let’s not get into name-calling or personalities.”

Eyes burning, Pierce said, “Of course I’ll authorize an autopsy, distasteful though a debasement of my dear late wife’s remains are to me. Just tell me what you need me to do.”

When Pierce had seen the detectives out, he returned to his study, hoping the cat would still be in the well of the desk. Pierce’s intention was to trap the cat, perhaps cage it up in a wastebasket and hurl the creature into the cold late afternoon air, where it could either fend for itself or freeze itself to death — preferably the latter.

But there was no sign of the cat. He looked everywhere, irritated but relatively calm, not allowing himself the indignity of turning the house topsy-turvy again, which would only require him to set it aright. Clearly the cat had finally sensed the obvious: that Pierce meant Clarence harm.

Sooner or later it would come out, to its water and food dishes.

So Pierce set out fresh water and food for the animal — the cat food liberally laced with rat poison — and, whistling, dressed for dinner.

Since they had no cook (Esther had enjoyed preparing breakfasts and lunches herself), the couple’s habit was to dine out. In a town the size of Ferndale, only a handful of suitable restaurants presented themselves — the country club and the hotel, chiefly. Pierce chose the latter, not wanting to chance running into March and his wife at the former.

He was famished and hoped the staff at the hotel restaurant — who went out of their way to express their sympathy, to stop by and comment about how much they would miss the sweet, kind Esther — did not consider him callous, to eat so heavily and drink so heartily. He hoped they would consider him to be drowning his sorrows, as opposed to what he was really doing, which was celebrating.

At home, mildly tipsy and extremely drowsy, his stomach warm and full, Pierce lumbered up the curving stairs. When he found himself in the bedroom — the bedroom he and Esther had shared — a chill passed through the room, and him. Winter wind rattled frost-decorated windows. Telling himself he wanted to get away from the draft, he stumbled down the hall into one of the guest bedrooms.

Clothed in the Armani suit he’d worn to dinner, taking time only to step out of his Italian loafers, he flopped onto the bed, on his back. Had his conscience sent him into this bedroom? Did he feel guilty about what he’d done to Esther? These thoughts were worthy only of his laughter, with which he filled the room, laughing until his tiredness took over and sent him almost immediately into a deep sleep.

He awoke, not with a start, but gradually, groggily, with the growing sensation of pressure on his chest. He reached for the nightstand lamp, clicked it on, and stared into the blue unblinking eyes of the brown animal sitting on top of him.

Staring at him.

Staring into him.

The accusatory stare of the witness to the murder he’d committed...

Screaming, Pierce sat up, flinging the cat off him. The beast rolled and came up running, scurrying out, claws clicking on the varnished wood of the hallway.

And Pierce was after the animal, chasing it down the winding stairs, darkness relieved only by moonlight filtering in through frosted windows. This time there would be no frantic search of the house. This time he would prevail.

As the cat headed into the living room, Pierce dove, and in a careening tackle that took over an end table and sent a lamp clattering, crashing, to the floor, Pierce scooped the animal in his arms and held it tight. Clarence fought, but its claws were facing outward as Pierce hugged it around the belly.

The nearest door was the front one, and, lugging the squirming beast, Pierce made his way there, holding tight around the cat’s belly with one arm and with the other reaching to open the door, swinging it open, flinging the beast into the deadly cold night.

Slamming the door behind it.

No sounds came from beyond the closed door: that cat didn’t want back inside, no matter how cold it was. For the longest time, Pierce sat on the floor with his back to the door, folding his arms tight, laughing, laughing, laughing, until tears were rolling down his cheeks, never aware exactly when the glee gave way to weeping.

At some point he found his way back to the bedroom, where, exhausted, he quickly fell to sleep. He had nightmares but on waking didn’t remember them — they just clung to his mind the way the taste of sleep coated his mouth. But he was able to brush his teeth and deal with the latter; the taste of the unremembered dreams stuck with him.

Nonetheless, the morning passed uneventfully, without any particular stress. Noting that the poisoned cat food had not been touched, he emptied the bowl into the sink and down the garbage disposal. He washed his hands thoroughly before preparing himself an English muffin and coffee. He showered, shaved, and was feeling fairly refreshed, wearing the same silk robe he’d killed his wife in, when the phone rang.

“Could you come down here, to the Public Safety Building?” Lt. March asked.

“Am I needed?”

“We have the results of your wife’s autopsy, and we’d like to discuss them with you... if it’s not inconvenient.”

At one o’clock, wearing a Pierre Cardin sports jacket and no tie, Pierce Hartwell walked to March’s office on the first floor of the modern Ferndale Public Safety Building. The door to the modest office was open and March was seated behind his desk, with Anderson in a chair by a cement block wall.

And on top of the desk, seated off to the left like an oversize paperweight, was the cat.

Clarence.

Sitting and staring with its terrible blue eyes — right at Pierce.

“Have a seat,” March said.

Swallowing, Pierce pulled a chair up, opposite March and as far away as possible from the brown beast. The goddamn thing looked none the worse for wear: no sign that it had spent a terrible frostbitten night, perfectly groomed, even purring, as it stared accusingly at Pierce.

March said, “Mr. Hartwell, there is a disturbing aspect that’s turned up, in the autopsy.”

“What... what are you talking about?”

The cat seemed to stare right through him. The cat. The witness. Could they somehow know this cat had witnessed the murder? The goddamn thing couldn’t have told them. He was a cat!

March was saying, “Your wife’s eyes...”

The cat’s eyes...

“...had severe hemorrhaging.”

Pierce began sniffling. “Uh... uh, what do you mean?”

Anderson, sitting back, arms folded, said, “Clotting. The whites of your wife’s eyes were so clotted with burst vessels they were damn near completely red.”

From the nearby desktop, Clarence, the cat, stared at Pierce, whose eyes had begun to burn. I saw what you did, he seemed to say.

“A person suffering suffocation tries so hard to breathe,” March said, “the blood vessels burst, in the eyes.”

Eyes.

Cat’s eyes...

His own eyes, burning, burning...

“We’ve been doing a background search on you, Mr. Hartwell,” Anderson said. “You met your wife on a cruise ship, isn’t that correct?”

“How could you know?” Pierce blurted.

“Very simple,” Anderson said.

Pierce lurched forward in his chair. “You found it outside in the cold, didn’t you? What did you do, go into my house and find that poisoned food? Did you have a warrant? Perhaps I should call my attorney.”

The two detectives glanced at each other; but the cat was looking right at Pierce — and the animal seemed to shake its head, no...

“He couldn’t have told you anything,” Pierce said, and laughed as he nodded toward Clarence. “A goddamn cat can’t talk.”

Anderson started to say something, but March waved a hand and the younger detective fell mute.

“Go on, Mr. Hartwell,” March said.

“You’re very clever, lieutenant. How did you do it? How could you know that that cat witnessed what I did?”

“What did you do, Mr. Hartwell?”

“You know damn good and well.” Water was running from his eyes — not tears, just that burning goddamn allergy kicking in. “You just said so yourself. I smothered her — with a pillow. But she didn’t suffer. I would never have done that. Never.”

Nodding slowly, March got on the phone and called for a uniformed cop. Pierce just sat there, avoiding the gaze of the purring cat on the detective’s desk. The damn thing seemed to be smiling, a Cheshire cat, now.

“If you’ll go with this gentleman,” March said, standing, gesturing past the animal to the police officer who was now standing in the doorway, “he’ll escort you to a room where you can make your full statement. We’ll be with you momentarily.”

Pierce could only nod. He needed help to get to his feet and the police officer gave it to him.

“How did you know?” Pierce asked from the doorway, eyes watering, nose running. “How in God’s name could you know about the cat?”

The two detectives said nothing.

Then Pierce was gone, and Anderson said, “That’s one for the books. We could never have made our case on those clotted eyes alone. His gigolo background woulda helped, but...”

“Maybe he had a conscience.”

“That guy?” Anderson snorted and waved at the air. “No way in hell.”

Shrugging, March got on the phone and arranged for a technician to meet them at the interrogation room.

Then, hanging up, March shook his head and asked Anderson, “What do you suppose he was going on about?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know — that business about a cat?”

The two men widened their eyes, shrugged at each other and left the empty office, to take the confession.

Her mood darker than the night — and the night was very dark — the striking blonde tooled the candy-apple Jaguar into the Marriot lot. She climbed out, pausing by the car, standing there like a modern-day gunfighter, red-nailed fingers slowly opening and closing.

With a smile bordering on a smirk, she walked toward the hotel, ground fog swirling up around her legs, red stiletto heels clicking on the asphalt, punctuating the thunder growling in the distance.

At the entrance of the modern, sterile building, she stopped and looked up.

Above the double glass doors hung a homemade banner — WELCOME CLASS OF 1978 — their fifteenth reunion; it flapped crazily in the breeze, as if trying to escape the imminent storm.

Her smile vanished, blue eyes clouded, as she gazed at the sign; the wind whipped long blonde strands of hair around her face.

Lightning split the sky, and the world went white, then black. Big drops of rain began to pelt her, and the banner, its painted letters starting to bleed and run.

Her smile returned, and grew broader until she threw back her head, laughing, her throaty voice mingling with the thunder that followed.

She reached up and ripped the banner down, letting the wind take it.

Then she straightened her red lace dress, and adjusted each copious breast in the push-up bra, opened the glass doors and walked inside.

Heather sat at a table with Linda just outside the hotel ballroom on the second floor. They were collecting money for the banquet tickets and handing out I.D. badges, which displayed each classmate’s name above their old high school yearbook photo.

Heather leaned toward Linda, touching the other woman’s arm intimately as if the two of them were best of friends, and giggled as if she were having a great time... but inside Heather was seething.

How did I get stuck on the goddamn door? she fumed. I’m the fucking class President!

Heather smiled sweetly at Linda, who was reciting recent bowling scores, like it was somehow important. She studied her classmate’s face and concluded that no amount of plastic surgery could help. If she were Linda, she’d kill herself.

“Would you like to go bowling sometime?” Linda asked, under the deranged impression that spending the past hour with Heather made her a close friend — or a friend at all, for that matter.

“That sounds very entertaining,” Heather answered. As in slicing and dicing a finger in the Cuisinart.

At the end of the carpeted corridor, three men burst out of the men’s bathroom, laughing loudly, punching each other’s arms. What was it about class reunions that regressed even a thirty-something hunk like her husband into a nerdy teenager?

“Rick!” Heather called out disgustedly.

He ignored her.

So she hollered louder. “Rick! Come here!”

Her husband, tall, handsome, so perfect in his Armani suit, shrugged at his other two friends — a fat farmer and balding banker — and sauntered toward her.

Heather felt her face flush; how dare he be having a good time when she was so miserable!

“Where’s Jennifer?” she snapped at him. “She was supposed to take my place fifteen minutes ago!”

He looked at her stupidly. “Haven’t seen her, hon.”

“Well, find her, damnit! I’m sick of sitting here!”

Out of the corner of her eye, Heather could see Linda shifting uncomfortably in her chair; Heather didn’t want to alienate the woman — not just yet — she might need her vote.

Heather gave Linda a patronizing, little smile. “It’s just that, as president, I have other things to attend to,” she explained.

Linda nodded and looked away.

Heather turned back to Rick. “Go... find... Jennifer, dear.”

“Okay, okay,” he said, gesturing in a calm-down manner with both hands, “I’ll go find her.”

He winked at Linda.

Linda beamed.

“So go,” Heather said through clenched teeth. “And back off on the booze!”

“Yes, hon,” he said and turned away.

Heather watched him move slowly down the hall, in no great hurry to accommodate her, which infuriated her further. Finally, Rick opened the ballroom doors, letting escape the loud, pounding disco music from their high school days, where it bounced off the walls in perfect timing with the beating of Heather’s palpitating heart.

...staying’ alive...

The ballroom doors slammed shut; the corridor fell into a strained silence.

Linda cleared her throat and asked, “I wonder who’s going to be crowned Reunion Queen?”

Heather, pretending not to care, began to straighten the remaining badges on the table. “Whoever gets the most votes,” she said, but thought, It damn well better be me.

After all, wasn’t she, even after fifteen years, still the bestlooking woman in her class? And Heather had gone to great lengths and expense to make sure that she was: trips to the tanning salon, weight reduction classes, professional makeup and hair care (her shoulder-length brunette tresses completely untouched by gray — now) — not to mention a six-month-long search for the perfect little designer dress...

And for what? Heather thought sullenly, so she could rot out here, while everyone else was in the ballroom having fun?

Heather looked resentfully at Linda, whose mouth now hung open like a big bass being reeled in. What was the matter with her, anyway?

Heather followed Linda’s stare to a woman who was ascending the stairs in front of them.

And Heather gasped — not because of the woman’s hair, which was butter-blonde brushing bare shoulders, or her porcelain face, its features almost too perfect, or her voluptuous figure, which bordered on Amazonian — but because the bitch was wearing Heather’s designer dress!

Perfectly balanced on her high heels, the blonde undulated toward them.

“Hi!” She said.

Linda continued to stare at the woman, but Heather said pleasantly, “The Bimbo Convention must be at some other hotel.” After all, this was no one Heather knew from school.

“Pardon me?” The blonde looked confused, which Heather considered redundant.

“This is a class reunion,” Heather said, her voice dripping with insolence. “But then, I guess you couldn’t read the sign outside.”

The blonde flashed a dazzling white smile. “I’m afraid there is no sign... but I’m at the right place.”

And she extended one hand, moving it over the remaining I.D. badges spread out on the table, like a fortune teller picking a tarot card, and with a perfectly manicured fingernail, tapped one. “That’s me!” she said.

Linda leaned forward in her chair. “Hilda?” she asked, stunned. “Hilda Payne?”

“Hello, Linda,” the blonde said warmly.

With a squeal, Linda jumped up, ran around the table and gave the blonde a hug.

“I can’t believe it’s you!” Linda said.

The blonde smiled. “It’s been a long time. I’m sorry I couldn’t make it back for the tenth.”

“You... you look wonderful,” Linda gushed.

“So do you,” the blonde replied.

Gag me with a spoon, Heather thought. She studied the blonde, trying to mentally transform the homely girl on the badge into the gorgeous woman (all right, she admitted it) in front of her. But then, Heather really didn’t remember Hilda much at all — or any of the other plain non-entities that had roamed the school hallways like cows, getting in her way.

“Are any of the other girls here?” the blonde asked Linda. “Mary? Diane?”

Linda nodded, her head jerking back and forth on her shoulders like a jack-in-the-box on a spring. “I can’t wait until they see you!” she said excitedly.

And Linda began pulling the blonde by the arm down the hall toward the ballroom.

Heather stood up. “Hey, wait just a minute, Linda!” she said angrily. “Who’s gonna look after the table?”

“How about you?” Linda shot back.

And the two women disappeared through the ballroom doors.

...heart of glass...

Heather slammed her fists on the table, rattling the cash box and scattering the badges.

Then, dejectedly, she slumped in her chair.

“But she’s wearing my dress,” Heather whimpered to no one. “She wearing my dress...”

My pregnancy was pretty much uneventful, with the exception of the hostage situation.

I was in my seventh month and still going into my office in the Loop — Tree Investigations, Inc. — and had been working more like the CEO I was supposed to be, rather than field agent I preferred to be.

“You know, Michael,” Dan Green said, one hand leaning against my desk, “you don’t have to be here. You can go home and relax... put your feet up...”

“Not without help,” I said, smiling a little.

Dan, a slender handsome blonde in his late twenties, had a hook for his left hand and one of his eyes was glass — souvenirs of a dispute with the crime family responsible for the death of my husband, whose name was also Michael Tree. When Mike died and I took over the agency, I didn’t even have to change the lettering on the office door.

“I may be big as a horse,” I said, “but I feel great. It’s this desk work that’s getting me down... all this damn peace and quiet.”

His slightly scarred face broke into a grin and he shook his head, saying, “You’re incorrigible.”

“Did you scope out the Bandag account?”

He nodded. “It’s a plumb. We can sub-contract the day-to-day security and still get rich off the deal.”

“What does Roger think?”

Roger Freemont was the third partner in Tree Investigations. My late husband’s partner on the force, Roger — balding, brawny, bespectacled, pushing fifty — was the company conservative, our voice of reason.

“I think,” Roger said, sticking his shiny head in my door, “we should add staff. Hell with sub-contracting. Let’s make all the money.”

“Spoken like a true Republican,” Dan said.

“When we do have to give Bandag our bid?” I asked.

“Monday.”

It was Friday.

“You want to hit the computer over the weekend, Roger,” I asked, “and make some money comparisons?”

“Sure,” he said, sounding almost eager.

“You are a Republican,” Dan smirked.

“Do it, then,” I said. It was four-thirty. “Me, I’m going home... well, first I’m going to pee and then I’m going home.”

“Thanks for sharing,” Roger said.

I bid a pleasant weekend to my secretary Effie and to our receptionist Diane, walking through our modern glass-and-ferns office area on surprisingly springy steps. I may have looked like I was trying to smuggle a marijuana-stuffed beach ball across the border, but I felt lighter than air.

That evening, in the masculine-looking apartment that had been my husband’s, as I sat on the couch watching a rental video of “Basic Instinct,” wondering how anything could be so supremely stupid, chewing on the crust of a Tombstone pizza courtesy of my microwave, I felt an ache in the small of my back (and my back was the only part of me that was small, these days) that might have been a bullet.

“You need exercise, lady,” I said to myself (not to Sharon Stone, who was changing her clothes for the umpteenth time on the TV screen), and hauled my butt off the cushions, and stood and held my back with my hands. And groaned.

I glanced toward a window. It was a cool, fall evening out there; even with my baggy woolen blue sweater and stretch pants, I’d need a jacket. I ran a brush through the mop of my brunette hair, and had lipstick poised for application when I sneered at myself in the mirror, slung my purse on its strap over my shoulder, and said, “Fuck it.”

When my late husband moved into this side-street two-flat a dozen years ago, Lakeview was a blue-collar neighborhood; now it was Yuppies and gays — safe, as Chicago neighborhoods go. Last year there were only nine murders.

Nonetheless, I was, of course, packing. I’m always reading that “real-life private eyes” don’t really carry a weapon. Considering that the mob murdered my husband ten years ago, and that I’ve lived through perhaps half a dozen attempts on my own life, I’m content to be armed and imaginary.

If you’re wondering how I could be pregnant when my husband died a decade ago, I assure you the conception was not immaculate. Suffice to say an old flame flared up, some satisfying if unsafe sex followed, but the relationship didn’t last. At an age closer to forty than thirty, however, my biological clock ticking like a time bomb, I decided to keep the child. Ultrasound said a girl was on the way.

The cool breeze whispering through the trees lining the narrow parked-car choked street was soothing, and Friday night or not, the world seemed deserted. It was just after ten, and too late for people to be leaving, and too early for them to be getting home. I walked quickly, getting the spring back in my step, and the kink out of my low back.

Then I had to pee.

It was closer to walk to the Ashland Mini-Mart than back home. Besides, I could use some of Jon’s baklava and maybe a can of sardines. Yeah — that sounded great...

A corner storefront on Ashland and an east-west side street, the Mini-Mart was evenly divided between groceries (including fresh fruits and vegetables — typical for Greek proprietors) and liquor. Three of their four coolers were beer and wine.

The well-lighted mart didn’t have the modern look of a 7-11; the floor was waxy wooden slats, the ceiling high with rococo trim. You could still squint and imagine the mom-and-pop corner grocery this had been in the 1950s.

“Hey, Ms. Tree,” Jon’s son Peter said; the dark young skinny handsome kid, in his early twenties, white shirt, black pants, frequently took the all-night shift in this family business. “Pop’ll be sorry he missed you. You come for your baklava and sardines fix again?”

“You bet. But can I use your employees-only john? If not, the world’s gonna think my water broke.”

He grinned and shook his head. “You’re a riot, Ms. Tree. Go for it — you know where it is.”

I walked back around the counter, saying, “Busy night?”

“So-so. Friday, you always sell plenty of beer and wine coolers. And lots of lottery tickets. Payday, and everybody wants that ten-million jackpot.”

“Me too. I never buy lottery tickets, but I figure my odds of winning are about the same.”

Then I pushed through the swinging stockroom door and shut myself in the bathroom — the lock was broken, but niceties were not a priority — and enjoyed my twelfth or maybe twentieth urination of the day. Impending motherhood is such a spiritual, uplifting experience.

I was still sitting there when the door opened and I looked up, startled, to see my wide-eyed expression reflected in the shiny badge of a potbellied blue-uniformed policeman. His metallic nametag said HALLORAN.

“Sorry, lady,” he said, and flashed a pleasant if yellow grin, and shut the door.

A minute or so later, I eased the door open and he was standing right there, staring right in my face — a patrolman in his fifties with the yellow-white hair and red-splotchy complexion of an aging Irish beat cop.

He backed up a step, chuckled gruffly. “Hey, I’m awful sorry. Didn’t mean to embarrass you, mother.”

“You did give me a start, officer.”

He touched his generous belly. “Over anxious. Got me a bad case of the trots.”

As he was closing himself inside the john, trots or not, he paused to ask, “When’s the little one due?”

“Couple months.”

“God bless you both. Shit!” He clutched his belly, shut the door, and, presumably, was as good as his word.

I smiled, shook my head, and coming around the counter asked Peter why he hadn’t told the cop the john was in use.

“I was busy with a customer,” Peter said, and indeed a guy in a down-filled jacket and plaid hunter’s cap was hunkered over the counter, scratching his lottery tickets with the edge of a quarter. “Cops around here don’t bother asking — they just go around and help themselves.”

“No harm done,” I muttered, and headed down one of the four aisles to find my can of sardines.

I was plucking it off the shelf when a harried woman of thirty or so in a tan London Fog raincoat and heels rushed in with a young girl of perhaps seven at her side in a tutu, white leggings and Reebox, a light jacket over the girl’s shoulders. The mother’s heels clicked as she went over to a cooler for some milk. The child, blond, stood looking at my pregnancy with wide prairie-sky blue eyes in the midst of an angelic countenance.

“You’re going to be a mommy,” the little girl said.

“That’s right, honey. Recital?”

She nodded. “I’m a ballerina.”

The mother, with a jug of 2 % milk in hand, was at the counter, speaking to Peter, crossly, even though Peter was in the process of paying off an instant win to the guy in the plaid hat.

“No butter? No eggs?”

“We’re out of both, ma’am. Till Monday.”

“That’s ridiculous! How am I supposed to make breakfast in the morning? Do you have any breakfast rolls?”

The guy in the plaid cap was giving the five bucks he’d won back to Peter in exchange for five more tickets.

“No, and we’re out of bread, too. There’s some muffin mix in aisle two.”

“How do I make that without eggs? You oughta call this an inconvenience store!”

I was at the counter now, with my can of sardines; the woman was between me and the plastic-lidded tray of baklava.

“There’s a big mini-mart on Southport,” I said. “They have everything.”

She glanced over her shoulder at me and pursed her lips in contempt; she was blonde but not as pretty as her daughter — not frowning, anyway. “That’s out of my way, thank you very much.”

I shrugged. “You’re welcome.”

“Mommy!” the little girl called, from a nearby aisle. “They have Pop Tarts! Let’s have Pop Tarts for breakfast.”

Her mother sighed. “Amy, put those down.”

Amy, delighted with her Pop Tart discovery (Strawberry), twirled in the aisle, a ballerina in Reebox. “No, Mommy, I love Pop Tarts! Let’s have Pop Tarts!”

The mother joined the daughter and began scolding her, though the little girl didn’t seem to be paying much attention. Nor did she seem to be putting the Pop Tarts back.

Peter grinned, teeth white in his dark face; he was a handsome devil. “Two baklava tonight, Ms. Tree?”

The guy in the hunter’s cap sighed — none of his five lottery tickets had been worth ten million dollars, or five dollars, either. He trudged out wearily.

“Just one,” I said, lifting the lid, helping myself to one of the pastries in its paper shell. “Don’t want me to get fat, now, do you?”

Peter laughed and handed me a small brown paper sack, which I was placing the baklava in when two white boys in ski masks came in, one of them holding a garbage bag open, the other waving a big revolver.

“All your money in the bag, greaseball,” the one with the revolver said to Peter.

“Now!” added the other one.

They were skinny, wearing Cubs jackets over heavy metal T-shirts; they had on worn, torn jeans, and Nike pumps that looked like spaceman shoes. The one with the gun was taller — or maybe the gun just made him seem taller.

“Take it easy,” Peter said, as he opened his register.

“We’ll take it easy, all right!” the one holding the bag said, horse-laughing at his own remarkable wit. His voice was thin, whiny.

I thought about the gun inside the purse over my shoulder, but then I thought about the mother and her daughter a few feet away, and I thought about the child in my belly, and I just stood there while Peter piled cash on the counter and the shorter of the pair used his whole arm to push it into the garbage bag.

Then I heard the sound of a flushing toilet and thought, Oh shit, but Halloran was pushing the stockroom door open and coming out and the smile on his mottled Irish face had only barely dissolved into a scowl when the three bullets slammed into his blue shirt and sent him back through the swinging door, on his back.

“You fuckin’ killed him, man!” the one holding the bag said.

“Shit,” the one with the smoking gun said.

The other one dropped the garbage bag to the slatted-wood floor, where money spilled as easily as blood just had, and he pulled a small nickel-plated revolver out of his waistband; he held it in an unsteady fist.

“A cop,” he said, brandishing the gun at his taller partner. “You fuckin’ killed a fuckin’ cop!”

The swinging door waved at us half-heartedly; it was only a three-quarter affair, with space at top, and bottom, with Halloran’s dead feet sticking out below.

The two faced each other, guns in hand. For a moment I thought they were going to save society the trouble; then movement behind him caught the corner of the taller one’s eye.

“Jesus!” he said, turning, and he fired again, at a blue shape at the door of the mini-mart, and glass made brittle thunder as it shattered and rained to the pavement, and somebody out there yelled, “Judas Priest!” and Peter ducked down behind his counter, and I did the same on the other side, and the ski-masked pair took cover in an aisle.

Cool evening air and street sounds rushed in from where the glass of the door used to be. “Who the hell was that?” the smaller one said, as they cowered in the aisle next to where I stood.

“Must be the dead pig’s partner! Shit...”

My fingers unclasped my handbag. To my left, down the next aisle, the mother and her little ballerina cowered together, sitting half-sprawled on the wood floor, the mother looking nearer tears and hysteria than the oddly placid little girl.

From outside a gruff male voice yelled: “Throw out your guns! Walk out slow — hands high!”

“It is another cop — what do we do?” the smaller one asked desperately.

“Grab that pregnant bitch!” the taller one said.

The little guy came at me, fast, and I pushed my purse behind the ILLINOIS LOTTERY sign on Peter’s counter, back down behind which Peter was looking up with wide-eyed terror.

A gun was in my back and the smaller guy was behind me, as if hiding there; he had room. Still hunkered down in the aisle, his partner yelled out, “We got people in here!”

“We got police out here!” the gruff voice shouted.

I could see, through the window, between neon beer signs and homemade butcher-paper sale signs, the head of the cop bobbing up behind a car he was using as a barrier; a glint winked off his revolver, as it caught street lights. Sirens were faint cries that were turning into screams; Halloran’s partner would not be alone, long.

The little one pulled me by the arm into the aisle with his partner, and down, into a crouching position. I almost fell, but managed to keep my balance.

“Why the fuck did that other cop take so long to come in? If they’re partners... Jesus!” The taller one remained hunkered down, the gun in his hand steadier than that in his pal’s.

Peter’s voice, as if a ventriloquist’s, came from behind the counter: “They always park in the alley but usually come in together. I don’t know why he dropped Halloran off, first.”

“He had the trots,” I said.

“What?” the little guy behind me asked, as if surprised I could talk.

“The runs. Diarrhea.”

“Ain’t that the shits,” the hunkered-down leader said, with no irony. Then thought glimmered in his eyes. “Go check the back, Bud.”

“I thought you said no names, Frank,” Bud said contemptuously. “Duh!”

Frank pulled off his ski mask; he was hatchet-faced, pockmarked, with dead gray eyes and wheat-color hair that covered his ears.

“They got us pinned in here,” Frank said glumly. “We’re gonna have a hostage situation soon. They’ll know who we are, all right.”

“I told you we shoulda stole a car,” Bud said, shaking his head even as he pulled off his ski mask.

He was round-faced, an odd shape to top such a skinny frame. His head was almost shaved — black five o’clock shadow covering his skull, skinhead style. His acne hadn’t turned to pockmarks yet, and his brown eyes were alive, in a stupid sort of way, under heavy eyebrows.

They were kids — just kids, maybe seventeen, eighteen at most. But for street kids, into drugs, as I assumed they were, that was plenty old. Ancient, in some circles.

Frank pointed his gun at Bud, gesturing as if it were a finger. “Check out the back door. If it looks clear, maybe we can make a break for it, ’fore those other cops get dug in.”

The loudness of the sirens made that unlikely, but Bud scrambled off to the backroom, pushing open the door, stepping around Halloran; then the door swung shut, swaying as Halloran’s feet disappeared, Bud pulling him out of the way.

“You left your car running?” I asked Frank. “Out front?”

“Yeah,” Frank said, wincing with irritation. Hostages weren’t supposed to talk: they were supposed to be quiet and scared.

I said, “You thought it’d still be waiting for you? In Chicago?”

“We left it locked.”

“You left your car out front, locked, with the motor running? No wonder you gave up on keeping your identities from the cops.”

“Shut up, lady.”

“Can I sit?”

“Huh?”

“Can I sit? Pregnant women can’t crouch long, you know.”

“Sit. Sit! And shut the fuck up!”

I sat, my swollen, stretch-pants-covered legs angling out before me like I was inviting somebody to make a wish. I could hear whimpering in the adjacent aisle, but I couldn’t tell if it was the mother or the little ballerina. My purse, nestled behind the ILLINOIS LOTTERY display, beckoned me; but I couldn’t come.

Two explosions echoed from the backroom — gunshots — following by a clanging sound, and Bud saying, “Shit!” again and again, at varying volumes, with varying inflections.

Frank sat up, neck straining like a turtle having a look around; the sound of scraping, wood against concrete, sang from the back room.

Cueball Bud came running out, saying, “Cops back there already!”

And, eyes wild in his round face, he crawled on his hands and knees over to join his partner and me in the nearby aisle, the shiny little revolver in one hand, like a child’s toy.

“Cops everywhere,” he said breathlessly.

“Can they get in?”

“No. Windows are barred back there and the door’s steel; I bolted it up, and blocked it with some crates just to make sure. They ain’t gettin’ in.”

“Like you’re not getting out,” I said.

Round-faced Bud looked at me astounded. “Who the fuck asked you, fatso?”

I shrugged. “Just thought you better face facts.”

Hatchet-faced Frank said, “Such as?”

“Such as you’re in the midst of a full-blown hostage crisis.” I leaned out in the aisle, nodded toward the street, where the blue revolving lights of several cop cars cut surrealistic paths in the night, and a big Winnebago-style vehicle was rolling in. “Take a look.”

Frank and Bud glanced above a row of corn flakes boxes to have a peek. “What the hell’s that?” Frank asked.

“That,” I said, “is a Mobile Command Unit. Before long they’ll be calling you on the phone from there — to start negotiations.”

“Negotiations,” Bud said stupidly, eyes tight.

I nodded. “So you fellas better decide what you want.”

“I just want outa here, Frank!” Bud said.

“It’s not that simple,” I said.

“What do you know, you fat cow!” Bud shouted, waving his shiny gun at me.

“Play your cards right,” I said, “you can trade us for your freedom.”

“She’s right,” Frank said thoughtfully.

“Well, I’m sicka hearin’ her voice!” Bud said.

Frank thought about that, too, but his expression turned darker. “You know... me, too. Get up and go into the next aisle, mommy — keep that brat and her old lady company.”

“You mind if I take a bathroom break first?” I asked.

“You gotta be kidding,” Frank said.

“I’m pregnant. I pee a lot. Excuse me for living.”

“I can do somethin’ about that,” Bud said with a sneer.

I smirked, then gestured with two open hands. “What say, boys? To pee or not to pee? That is the question.”

They just looked at me stupidly. I’m so frequently too hip for the room.

“Go ahead,” Frank said.

“But keep your fat ass away from that back door!” Bud blurted. “If I hear ya movin’ those crates, I’ll put a bullet in that belly and kill the both of you!”

I hauled myself up. “And here I was thinking of asking you to be the godfather.”

In the backroom, I could see that the pile of crates and boxes blocking the door were indeed something I couldn’t move without getting caught at it — even if I hadn’t been pregnant. Kneeling, I checked Halloran; he was dead, all right — on his back, an angled smeary stripe of red on the concrete indicating how he’d been dragged. Three bloody scorched wounds on his chest, poor bastard — I closed his eyes for him. Wished him God speed. His holster was empty; apparently Bud had taken Halloran’s piece, though I hadn’t noticed him having it — probably stuck under his Cubby coat. The officer’s nightstick, however, was still there. I plucked it from his belt, took it with me into the bathroom, where I again urinated (I hadn’t been lying about the need), even as I stuck the baton up my sweater sleeve, holding its tip in the heel of my hand.

Peter was sitting behind the counter; he gave me a pitiful look, and I whispered from the doorway, “Don’t you have a gun back there?”

And he shook his head no, looking ashamed.

He shouldn’t have, really: half the merchants who trade shots with stick-up men wind up dead. A fascinating statistic that didn’t mean diddly right now.

I came out of the backroom, and around the counter; near the LOTTERY sign, where my purse was tucked, I paused. Frank noticed me.

“Get back over in that other aisle,” he said, “and keep your big fat trap shut.”

I shrugged a response and left my purse where it was. Just didn’t want to take the chance.

I joined the mother in their aisle; it smelled of chemicals there and I glanced at the shelves and smiled. Then I sat next to the woman, who was huddled with her daughter, who clung to her mutely. The mother’s eyes were brimming with tears. She was stroking her daughter’s hair.

I sat. Legs stretched out before me.

The woman whispered harshly. “How can you talk to them?”

I shrugged.

“Just leave them alone!” the woman whispered. “Don’t say anything to them — you just make them mad!”

Frank’s voice called, “Shut up over there!”

As if in response, a grating loud voice, courtesy of a bullhorn, said, “Send the people out!”

“Fuck you!” Bud called.

I withdrew the late Halloran’s nightstick from my sweater sleeve. The mother look at me, and it, startled.

“What are you...”

I shushed her with a finger to my lips as I placed the baton on a shelf behind me, amid some bathroom supplies.

The bullhorn was barking: “You boys are going to have a world of trouble if you harm those people. Now, send them out, slowly...”

Frank didn’t bother to reply. But to Bud he said, bitterly, “World of trouble. We shot a cop. How the fuck can you get in more trouble than that?”

“You shot a cop,” Bud reminded him.

“You’re as dirty as me. Felony murder. We’ll both go down.”

“You gotta deal us outa here, Frank!”

I lifted a bottle of liquid drain cleaner off the shelf. Read the directions; savored the poetry of its warnings... “poison”... “burns on contact”... “harmful to eyes”...

The woman touched my arm; squeezed hard. She looked at me with wet, hard eyes and shook her head no, furiously.

“Don’t you risk my child’s life,” she whispered.

“I have a child at stake, too,” I whispered back.

“I said, shut-up over there!” Frank almost screamed.

The phone rang and everybody jumped. Me, too. Even Peter — I saw his head bob up.

On his hands and knees, the big revolver in hand, Frank scrambled over behind the counter, as the phone rang and rang, and he plucked the receiver off and was down behind the counter, where Peter was, as he answered.

“How many? I’ll tell you how many. We got a greaseball clerk, a mommy and her little girl, and a pregnant woman. How do you like our little party?”

I unscrewed the cap of the liquid drain cleaner; sniffed its harsh bouquet...

“What do we want? We want a jet! We want a car, and a police escort to O’Hare...”

I could guarantee them the police escort.

“...and then we want the biggest goddamn jet they got!... Where?” Frank paused, apparently thinking, then his voice called to Bud: “Where do you want to go?”

Bud seemed to think for a while, then his voice called: “Vegas?”

“You moron! Somewhere foreign! Some other country!”

“Alaska?”

I would have laughed, except the frozen little ballerina whose head was in her mother’s lap was looking at me with eyes that could not widen enough to express her fear.

Frank was saying into the phone, “Never mind where. Just have plenty of fuckin’ fuel onboard. We’ll tell the pilot where to take us... and we want money, too!... How much?”

Frank, despite the lousy luck of his last attempt, called out to Bud for an opinion. “How much dough should we ask for?”

Bud didn’t hesitate; he knew just the amount. “Ten million bucks!”

“Get real,” Frank snorted. Back on the phone, he said, “A million in cash. Small unmarked bills — nothin’ bigger than a fifty.”

Shrewd boy, this Frank.

“Okay,” he was saying. “Call back when you got an answer for me.”

Frank’s hand reached up and slammed the receiver on the hook.

I figured drugs were why this skinny pair was after the money — all but forgotten in the garbage bag, bills spilled out on the floor over by the counter, like discarded lottery winnings. But like a lot of addicts, for whom stealing was a job, they had apparently planned ahead, not waiting till they needed a fix, not wanting to go out on a heist in that condition.

Still, sometimes it pays to needle a junkie.

“You boys might be here a while,” I said to Frank as he crawled by. “Lining up that jet’s gonna take time. Getting the mayor to approve all that dough — and hauling some banker out of his country club dance to unlock a vault. We could be here for hours.”

Bud, from the next aisle, said, “Frank — I’m gonna need a shot before that!”

“Shut up, Bud,” Frank said; but he was frozen on his hands and knees, looking at me, thinking over what I said. “You got a point, lady?”

“Frank!” Bud yelled. “We can’t wait that long. I’m gonna need a shot! Ask for less money. Get fifty K or something.”

“Shut up! Lady — what’s your fuckin’ point?”

“Let this mother and her daughter go,” I said. “It’ll buy you some good will, and show the authorities you’re reasonable guys. Besides... you got me — a pregnant woman — what better hostage could you ask for? Nobody’s going to shoot at you guys if you’re walking behind a pregnant woman.”

Frank’s eyes were turning to slits as he smiled. “You could be right about that last part. I don’t know about giving up no hostages, though...”

“You’ll have the cashier,” I said, nodding toward the counter, where my purse sat, a million miles away, “and me. One hostage for you, one for your friend. You can take us with you in the car to O’Hare — which you can’t do with mommy and her ballerina, here. Let ’em go. You’ll be popular.”

“Don’t listen to her, Frank!” Bud whined. “I don’t trust her!”

Frank was studying me, like a lab tech studying a slide. “Who are you, lady? Why do you know so much? Why are you so fuckin’ chilled out?”

I shrugged. “My late husband was a cop.”

That seemed to satisfy him.

“Let the mother and her kid go,” I said. “You don’t need them. You didn’t mean for this to happen, did you, Frank? This is just something that got out of hand... let ’em go.”

Bud was sticking his head around the aisle to watch this conversation. He was on the floor on his stomach. He looked like a bug with a big head.

He said, “Don’t do it, Frank.”

Frank was thinking it over. Something had flickered in his eyes — traces of humanity, maybe? — as I’d spoken. Was he looking past me at the woman hugging her child? Was there something human or humane in this lost teenager’s white trash past?

He swallowed and said, “She’s right.”

“Frank...”

“Shut the fuck up, Bud. There’s only two of us... we can manage better with just her and the guy back of the counter.”

“O... okay, Frank,” Bud said, half-sticking out in the aisle on his belly. “But let’s shake it... I’m gonna need a fuckin’ shot before long!”

Bud did seem to be getting the shakes, and it wasn’t fear alone. The little hop-head, by his own admission, slammed his drugs — injected them — as opposed to smoking or snorting, which meant time was going to catch up with him.

Suddenly Frank yelled; it startled the mother, and the child, and me, too. Peter probably peed his pants.

“Hold your fire!” Frank was calling to the cops outside. “We’re sendin’ out some hostages!”

Frank crawled back around the counter, so he could get a better vantage point I guess — and it did give him an angle where the cops outside couldn’t see him, or get a bead on him — and he said to the mother, “Okay, you and your little girl get up and walk out. Real slow.”

The mother allowed herself the briefest smile, and glanced at me with an expression that might have been of thanks, as she helped her child up. She could spare me any gratitude, now or later: I hadn’t done this for her.

The little ballerina hung onto her mother’s waist as they slowly walked out of the aisle and past the counter where Frank held a gun on them. They walked by the aisle where Bud was taking cover, up to the front of the mini-mart where the mother gingerly opened the metal framework of the shot-out glass door and they were outside.

With a sigh of relief, I watched from my aisle, where I sat leaning back against the shelf of bathroom supplies; I could see the mother and daughter as two cops rushed to help them past the parked cars toward the street filled with squads, moving them toward the Winnebago command center.

“That was the right thing to do,” I told Frank.

“Shut up,” he said, and he moved out from around the counter.

As he walked past me, I hurled Halloran’s nightstick under his feet, and Frank’s Nikes hit the baton and he did a crazy, log-rolling dance, and as the kid was twisting around, I splashed the liquid drain cleaner in his face and he screamed and I splashed it again and he screamed again.

“Frank!” Bud yelled. “Jesus, Frank!”

He landed hard, on his back, his hands clawing his face and eyes, the big revolver dropping to the slick wood floor and spinning, like a top, till it came to a rest at my feet. I scooped it up, as Frank continued to scream and Bud yelled incoherently.

Before the little hop-head could get his wits about him, I came around the other side, up the other end of the aisle, behind him, where he continued to crouch, and cower, the nickel-plated revolver in hand, watching his pal wriggle and writhe like an insect under a pin.

Bud’s incoherent yelling stopped when I put the nose of Frank’s revolver in the back of his stubbly head and told him to stand up.

“You bitch! What did you do to Frank?”

Frank was still screaming.

“Cleaned his drain.” I reached my left hand past his left ear; held the hand open, palm up. “Let’s have the gun, Bud. Give it to Mommy...”

He placed the shiny revolver in my palm; swore at me some more.

“March up by the counter. By where your friend Frank is. By the way, we ought to hurry — if he doesn’t get some first-aid soon, he’s going to need a cane and a guide dog.”

“You’re evil!”

“I guess you’d know. Move it.”

He did.

The phone was ringing. The cops were wondering was going on in here; through the neon beer-ad and butcher-paper sign cluttered window, vision was only so-so.

“Get that, would you, Peter?” I asked.

Peter’s dark face with its wide eye peered over the edge and the fingers of both hands were pressed against the countertop. He looked like Kilroy Was Here.

“Stand up,” I said. “Situation’s under control.”

I placed Bud’s shiny nickel-plated revolver on the counter. Frank was on the floor, on his side, in fetal position, his hands covering his face, and he wasn’t screaming now, whimpering instead, saying something about “burning.” Bud was standing next to him, looking down like he wished he could help.

Peter, who had answered the phone, covered the receiver and said to me, “They want to know what’s going on.”

“Tell them to come in and see for themselves,” I said, and then I thought about the reporters who’d soon be swarming, and I was rustling around in my purse for my lipstick when Bud pulled Halloran’s gun out from under his Cubs jacket.

“I’m going to kill you, you fat bitch,” the round-faced little junkie said, his saliva making a mist in the air.

I shot him through the bottom of my handbag and the top of his head.

He flew back, flopping next to Frank, leaving a mist of blood this time, and his body made a squishing sound when he landed on the brain matter he’d spilled. They were both on their backs, but Frank didn’t seem to notice the company. He was busy.

The garbage bag of spilled money was nearby — a cheap irony, but it couldn’t be helped.

Peter’s mouth had dropped open.

I shrugged. “He said he needed a shot.”

It seemed to Deborah that every cell in her bloated body was about to burst. If her period didn’t start soon, she was going to kill somebody!

She sat back in the leather chair and tugged viciously through her red silk dress at the tight elastic waistband on her pantyhose. Then she leaned forward and opened the top right drawer of her mahogany desk and pulled out a pair of long, silver scissors, which she dropped into her open purse on the floor by her feet. She got up from the desk, taking the purse, and walked briskly, tensely, to the closed office door. But as soon as she opened it, she forced her body to relax, and changed her cross expression to one of pleasantry.

“I’ll be back in a minute, Shirley,” she said sweetly to the secretary who sat behind a desk in the outer room.

The secretary, a rather homely woman with short hair and big, round glasses, looked up briefly from what she was doing. “Yes, Ms. Nova,” she said, then returned to her work.

Deborah walked down the plush-carpeted corridor toward the executive’s washroom, nodding and smiling at a few people along the way... but once inside the bathroom, behind its thick bronze-colored door, her expression changed back to one of annoyance as she marched across the marble floor, her high-heeled shoes click, click, clicking.

She threw open a stall, entered, then slammed it shut.

She got out the scissors and yanked up her dress.

“I’d like to get my hands on the son-of-a-bitch that designed these pantyhose,” she snarled, sliding one of the silver blades down between her stomach and the hose, cutting away savagely at the binding band. “You can bet it wasn’t a woman!”

Her discomfort somewhat relieved, she held up the scissors in front of her face. Snip! snip! went the blades, glinting in the overhead light. “I’d take this to his...”

Water ran in a sink.

Composing herself, Deborah exited the stall.

A younger woman in a dark tailored suit stood at one of the shell-shaped basins washing her hands. Her blonde hair was pulled back from an attractive face and held at the nape of her neck by an ornate barrette. Expensive earrings clung to delicate ears.

“Hello, Deborah,” the woman said.

“Heather,” Deborah responded, noncommittally. She moved to an adjacent basin and turned the crystal knobs on the faucet. The two women, standing side by side, eyed each other in the mirror. They looked similar, despite their difference in age, which was almost a decade.

Deborah thought she herself looked better.

“I need your help,” Heather said, breaking the silence.

Deborah, wiping her hands on a paper towel, turned to face the woman. “Oh?” she smiled.

“I understand the second chair hasn’t been filled yet for the Owens case. I’d like a shot at it.”

Deborah continued to smile.

“I would do a good job,” the woman said confidently.

“Yes, I believe you could.”

“Then you’ll recommend me?”

Deborah, finished with the towel, wadded it up. “Certainly, I will,” she said.

Heather smiled and thanked Deborah, and left the bathroom.

Deborah stared after the woman, nerves strung out as tight as pantyhose in a strangler’s hands.

“Certainly, I will,” she repeated. “Not!”

She reared back and threw the wadded-up paper towel angrily at the wastebasket. “I didn’t claw my way up this good-old-boy network just to hand you a plum position on a silver platter!”

Deborah turned back to the mirror and got lipstick out of her purse and applied the blood-red color to her collagen-injected lips.

“You’d better go home,” she warned her reflection, “before you blow it. Remember Laura.”

The thought of that woman, and what happened to her, brought a new rush of heat to Deborah’s already flushed cheeks.

It was fifteen years ago that Deborah, fresh out of law school and new to the firm, was an associate to Laura. The woman was her idol, a Harvard graduate of distinction, a talented and brilliant lawyer... and the first female certain to become a partner in this all-boys-club.

But it never came to pass. Because Laura made a fatal mistake one day: she showed some emotion.

Mr. Laroma, a senior partner in a pin-stripped suit, looked at Laura from across the conference table and smirked, “Maybe we should discuss this later... after you’ve had your period.”

Though a stunned silence hung in the air, Deborah would never forget the collective look on the men’s faces: one of masked approval. Laura fled the room, and a short time later, the company.

The incident was a turning point for Deborah; after that, she told herself, she would be a man in drag.

And now, with partnership so close she could almost reach out and touch it, she’d better not show any female weakness. Especially hormonal.

Deborah walked back to her office.

“If Mr. Laroma should need me,” Deborah informed her secretary, “he can reach me at home.”

Deborah packed up her briefcase, then took the elevator down to an underground garage where she got in her gray BMW and drove out to the street. After a few blocks, she pulled into a “No Parking” zone in front of a dry-cleaners, got out of the car and entered the store.

A thin young man with a bad case of acne stood behind the counter. She stepped up and set her purse down, then rummaged around in the bag for her dry-cleaning ticket. She stopped, realizing she’d left it at home.

“Damn,” she said irritably. “I don’t have the ticket... but it’s a white silk blouse and blue suit.”

“Sorry,” the kid said flatly, “I need the ticket.”

Deborah softened her expression and voice, “Can’t you make an exception?” she asked sweetly.

“Nope. Those are the rules.”

Deborah studied him for a moment, then sighed deeply. “And I so wanted to wear them to the AIDS benefit tonight.” For a second the kid seemed to reconsider. But then he said, again, “I need the ticket.”

Deborah slammed both fists on the counter making her purse jump. “Listen, you pimply-faced faggot,” she growled, “give me my clothes or I’ll...”

“I’ll call the cops,” he said firmly, and moved toward a nearby phone to make good his threat.

Deborah turned in a huff and stomped out to the curb where she found a different kind of ticket on the windshield of her car.

She grabbed the pink parking violation, nearly dislocating the wiper, and looked up and down the street. She spotted the policewoman who had given her the ticket.

“I was just in there a minute!” Deborah shouted at her.

The cop ignored Deborah.

So Deborah screamed, “Why don’t you get a real job!” and tore the ticket into tiny pieces, scattering them to the wind.

She got in her car and, without looking, pulled out from the curb, nearly causing an accident. Brakes squealed as the other motorist honked his horn.

She gave him the finger.

Weaving recklessly in and out of the downtown traffic, Deborah caught the north-bound expressway that would take her out to her home in the suburbs. But before long the expressway slowed, congested with commuters, and Deborah, behind the wheel, fumed, then found some classical music on the radio to calm herself down. But after a while, the violin concerto sounded like fingernails on a blackboard and Deborah shut off the radio with a click.

Now the traffic was at a near standstill, and Deborah, crawling past an exit, got off. She’d wait out the rush hour at a nearby mall, and besides, she thought, shopping always made her feel better. And she could use the time to find a present for her mother’s birthday — though it didn’t matter how carefully Deborah picked out the gift or how expensive it was... nothing ever pleased her mother.

It seemed to Deborah that she spent her entire life looking for affection; though she got it, briefly, from her father — until she was eight years old. That’s when he left her. He didn’t have the decency to wait until she had gone off to school that morning. She stood crying at the window — just a little girl — watching him get in the car with his suitcases. He didn’t even look back.

She didn’t see or hear from him again until a few years ago. He called her at the office, out of the blue... said he was sorry he had dropped out of sight. He’d like to make it up to her.

She wanted — so badly — to reach out to him, to know him, to love him. But the little girl wouldn’t let her.

She told him to go fuck himself.

Deborah pulled her car into the parking lot of the mall, which was full. She drove around and around looking for a place to park. The third time she passed the empty handicapped spaces up at the front, she complained, “How many do they need? They get all the breaks!”

Then two heavy-set women in jogging clothes — obviously on their way to use the mall as a track, a trend Deborah hated — stepped out in the cross-walk, and she had to slam on her brakes and let them pass.

She watched the women disdainfully, envisioning elephants, and rolled down her window and hollered, “It’s not working!”

Around she drove again, when suddenly, up at the front, and very close to the mall, brake lights went on.

“There is a God!” Deborah cried, and zoomed ahead, putting on her turn signal to lay claim to the spot.

Impatiently she tapped her fed nails on the steering wheel, waiting for the Chevy truck to back out, its body perched precariously up on big wheels.

“Come on, come on,” she muttered. “Show me a jacked-up truck and I’ll show you a man who wishes his dick were bigger.”

Slowly the Chevy backed out and started to leave, but as soon as it did, a black Porsche roared around the corner and stole the parking space.

Behind the wheel of the Porsche was a businessman in a suit. And a smirk on his face.

Shouting a string of obscenities, Deborah exploded, slammed her accelerator to the floor and aimed the front of her car for the back of his ass!

Senator Jim Rawson, Democrat, Iowa, 45 years of age, pulled the sleek red sports car over along the edge of the gravel road. Virginia farmland, washed in moonlight, surrounded him, a fertile and yet desolate landscape, serene in its isolation. Not a farmhouse in sight; certainly not a car. And the only other human being present was a dead one.

Vicki.

The busty young woman wore a pink T-shirt and jeans and running shoes — though she was in her late twenties, she might have been a college girl. Her features were cute — big long-lashed eyes (shut now), pert nose, pouty puffy lips. She was slumped against the other window of the Jaguar. He’d have to move her.

Leaving the driver’s side door open, Rawson — in University of Iowa yellow-and-black sweatshirt and black jeans and black leather gloves — came around and carried her from the rider’s side of the vehicle. It was as if he were carrying a bride across the threshold, although the only threshold Vicki Petersen had crossed was death’s, and she’d done that several hours ago.

Rawson — tall, raw-boned, with blonde-brown hair touched at the temples by distinguished gray — had a Marlboro man look that bode well with his conservative constituency. Iowans rarely voted Democrats to the Senate. Rawson had maintained the office for three terms (with dead-certain re-election coming up next year) by balancing his own slightly left-of-center politics with country charm.

As he gently conveyed the shapely and very dead body of the woman who had been his mistress for three years, he was bitterly aware of his own reputation as a champion of women’s rights, a battler for ERA, a vocal defender of Anita Hill. This irony left a bitter taste in his being as he arranged the corpse behind the wheel of the sports car, which had been purchased by him, in cash, with PAC money a little more than a year before.

“I loved you, Vicki,” he said, and could hear his voice waver; tears were blurring his vision, if not his mission. “But you betrayed me.”

Could she have really believed he would marry her? A Catholic in a predominantly Protestant state, Rawson knew the good people of Iowa would never stand for him divorcing, childless marriage or not, particularly not with a wife who was bedridden back home, wasting away with MS.

And then to threaten him with exposure — “How would you like to see our story on ‘A Current Affair,’ or maybe ‘Hard Copy’? Maybe I could play myself in the TV movie!” — truly contemptible.

You little bitchy he thought, and raised a hand as if to slap her, but the beautiful, eternally slumbering woman behind the wheel was past feeling any such sting, and he immediately felt a flush of shame.

He sighed. A summer breeze riffled a nearby field of wheat, and his own wheat-colored, dead-dry hair. The moon was like a hole punched in a black starless sky, letting in too much light. He looked at his watch, shut the girl’s car door with a thunk that echoed across the world. Where was Edward, anyway?

It was highly unlikely this dead girl would ever come back to haunt him. He knew that. The only nervousness he felt was immediate — once Edward had arrived, and he was back safely in his townhouse on P Street in Georgetown, Jim Rawson would be secure, with his best and only true friend — the big gray mixed-breed cat, Tricky Dick — settled on his lap.

He wondered if Dick would mourn the missing Vicki — the cat and the girl had taken to each other from the start....

A little over ten years ago, Vicki Petersen had been a cheerleader at the University of Iowa, a small-town girl with a big future — until she flunked out in her sophomore year, and found her way to New York, where an acting career seemed to beckon. Naturally top-heavy, her high, soft yet firm silicone-free breasts became tickets to stardom on the strip club circuit.

This had been prior to the more recent influx of upscale topless nightclubs, venues in which she might have made some real money. But a few years ago, stripping was less lucrative, and when Rawson met her in a D.C. bar called the Gentleman’s Club, she was at a low ebb.

He had encouraged her to quit her job as a stripper and get back to pursuing her acting career; as a senator, he’d met and maintained personal relationships with any number of Hollywood celebrities and could certainly help her make some connections.

She had been drawn to him immediately, he could tell — after all, not only was he a senator, and as handsome as Robert Redford, but a superstar celebrity back in her home state. Their affair had begun that first night.

Rawson didn’t like risking motels — you never knew when some sleazeball reporter was lurking in the bushes, waiting to make Gary Hart out of you — so early on in the relationship he had ensconced the girl in a suite at the Watergate. Irony was second-nature to Rawson, and he relished having his mistress spirited comfortably (and handily) away in the hotel and apartment complex where a break-in had once led to that sleazeball Richard Nixon’s downfall.

Vicki had been a private person. Her family back in Iowa — farm folk — had been kept in the dark about her stripping career. She would hardly have told them about an affair she was having.

Nor did she have any girlfriends among the strippers on the topless circuit — her aspirations toward acting had made her a snob toward them. They were sluts, tramps, low-lifes; she, on the other hand, was an actress reluctantly taking on this demeaning “role” on her way to a real career on stage or screen.

He knew she had made a few friends with other single women tenants at the Watergate — secretaries and such. But he had been adamant about her not sharing any secrets with them — after all (as he had drilled into her), these were women who swam in the same dirty Washington waters as he, working for this lobbying firm or that Political Action Committee; the wrong word to the right one of them, and he’d be sunk. And, so, he felt confident she’d protected him.

Even if she had mentioned him to a girl friend (and he doubted it), he knew they had never been seen together; no photographs of them, as a couple, existed to become a nasty surprise on the Enquirer cover.

She invariably would be picked up by Edward in the limo with its dark windows and brought into the townhouse from a garage in the alley that connected with an underground passageway that connected all of the homes on this block. Only Rawson knew about it, however, and that allowed Edward to bring Miss Petersen into (and out of) the P Street townhouse undetected.

“If people see us together,” he would tell her, “it will taint our eventual marriage. When Marge passes away, we’ll ‘meet’ for the ‘first time,’ and you’ll be a Senator’s wife with all the respect and attention you deserve.”

He could see how much she liked the sound of that, and knew she wouldn’t risk such a future. But she had grown impatient of late, saying, “That woman is never going to die! Divorce her! No one will blame you.”

She didn’t understand that she was asking him to commit political suicide.

And now, thanks to the cocktail she’d sipped at the town-house, laced with a deadly, tasteless and thankfully painless poison, she had committed literal suicide.

Not intentionally, of course, but the world wouldn’t know that. They would find a frustrated would-be actress, and ex-stripper, an empty pill bottle beside her lifeless form, a poor dead girl who wound up along the country roadside in a Jaguar purchased her by some unknown gentleman friend who had, perhaps, dumped her, sending her into this fit of final despair.

If this sort of tragedy was not unknown to Washington, neither was it unique to that city.

For this once, he had invited her to drive directly to him; Edward was off tonight, he told her, so there would be no chauffeured limo ride from the Watergate.

But Edward was not off. Edward — the towering discrete manservant with the faintly British accent and long, blankly cruel face, a combination driver/cook/valet highly recommended to him by a senator friend of his from Massachusetts — was waiting in the wings for Miss Petersen’s cocktail to kick in, after which he carried her to the garage where the Jag waited.

The limo, parked on the street for this once, was to follow Rawson and his deceased passenger to this prearranged spot, and Edward was overdue. Just by two minutes, but that was not typical for Edward, and it unnerved Rawson, who was not thrilled to be standing on the roadside near a sports car with his own murdered mistress in it.

But then the limo rolled into view, kicking up some gravel dust, and soon Edward — uniformed, formal, so elegant and proper — stepped out, opened the back door of the black Lincoln Continental, and Rawson crawled into the secure, leather-smelling womb of it. Edward even had a drink waiting on the extended bar tray — a Dewars on ice.

“Unexpected traffic, sir,” Edward said, as he took off.

“Thank you, Edward,” Rawson said. “I’d like some privacy if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all, sir,” the driver said, and closed the compartment off.

Rawson gulped greedily at the drink; he could not keep from looking back out the smoky glass window at the receding sight of the red Jag and the slumped blonde figure behind its wheel. When it was but a small red drop of blood on the moon-washed country landscape behind them, the limo took a hill, and the girl and the car were gone.

Mark Twain once came to town. He wrote about seeing the most magnificent sunsets here. Nestled serenely on the Mississippi River, our little city offers its citizens good quality life.

But all life ends, eventually. Sometimes abruptly.

My name is Joan Munday. My partner is Frank Lausen. We make up one-third of the six man — actually, five man, one woman — detective unit of the Port City Police Department.

It was Saturday, June 18, a day so perfect I could have killed to be out with Dan and the kids on the river: but instead, Frank and I were called to a new housing addition on the north side of town.

The homes in Mark Twain Meadows were expensive — by small town standards, anyway — with manicured lawns and well-tended flower gardens. The streets had quaint names — Samuel Clemens Road, Tom Sawyer Drive and Huckleberry Finn Lane.

We pulled up in front of 714 Pollyanna Place, and got out.

Walter, our crime lab technician, met us at the door. He was pushing fifty, balding, and looking tired.

“This way,” he said, turning.

We followed.

The living room was tastefully decorated — perhaps too tastefully; it could have been the showroom of a pricey furniture store: couch and chairs matching in fabric, pictures and knick-knacks coordinating in color, all working together in harmony to produce somebody’s idea of wonderful. Not mine. I couldn’t imagine anyone “living” in this living room.

And there was one person who obviously agreed with me.

He was stretched out on the floor, on his face, in front of the fireplace, like a big bear rug. About six feet, two hundred pounds, he wore black cowboy boots, blue jeans and a torn white T-shirt. His hair was blonde — except on the left side of his head, where it was now a blackening red.

Walter broke the silence. “A single blow to the head. His name is Travis...”

“I know who he is,” I cut in.

Every town has a bully. Travis Wykert was ours. As far back as junior high, his penchant for pounding those smaller than him had got him in trouble with the law. As an adult, he’d been brought up several times on assault charges, but no one would testify.

“That the weapon?” asked Frank. He was a sandy-haired, husky man in his late twenties — ten years younger than me. He gestured toward the couch, where a trophy lay encased in a clear plastic bag.

Walter nodded. “Wiped clean.”

“Went there,” Frank said, pointing to the mantle above the fireplace. “See the spot in the dust?”

I looked, and caught my reflection in the large mirror over the fireplace; should have spent a little more time on my hair this morning.

I crossed over and picked up the bagged trophy, a heavy bronze statue of a woman holding a baby. A plaque on its base read World’s Greatest Mother.

“Where’s the owner?” I asked Walter.

“In the kitchen,” he said, “down the hall.”

The kitchen, in the back of the house, was a bright, spacious room, so clean the cabinets gleamed. But like the living room, it too didn’t look lived in. There was nothing on the counters, not even a toaster. Lace curtains framed the windows, while flocks of country geese roamed the walls.

At a round, oak table sat three women. The one on the left, smoking a cigarette, was middle-aged. She wore dark slacks and a black turtleneck top. Her brown hair, streaked with gray, was short, mannish. She wore no make-up.

The woman in the middle, in a white skirt and a blouse with kittens on it, was also middle-aged. Her hair was dark blonde, shoulder-length; her face was obscured, buried in her hands as she sobbed.

The one on the right was young and slender, with long, ice-blonde hair. She wore jeans and a sweatshirt with a Port City Community College logo on it. The girl sat motionless, in apparent shock, staring, her face a mask.

A uniformed cop, who was first at the scene, stood behind them taking notes on a pad.

“This is Louise Harris,” he said, pointing to the woman in the middle. “She owns the house. And this is her daughter, Laura.” He gestured to the young girl. Then he nodded to the woman on the left. “That’s Pamela Schultz. She’s renting a room.”

I approached them. “Who wants to tell me about it?” I asked.

Pamela Schultz threw her head back and blew out smoke, then stubbed her cigarette out in an ashtray. “He was hurting Laura so I hit him,” she said, matter-of-factly, like she was giving me the weather report.

Louise Harris looked up from her hands. Her eyes were red, swollen, her face puffy. “Don’t try to protect me, Pam,” she said. “I did it.”

Now the younger woman, Laura, turned her face toward me, slowly, robot-like. “They’re both lying,” she said softly, and then announced, as if ending a game of Clue. “I killed Travis Wykert in the living room with the trophy.”

Before he signed on as medical officer aboard the Carnival Fun Ship Fantasy, Dr. Tom Swayze had interned at Cook County Hospital. At first, the excitement of working in the notorious Chicago emergency room exhilarated him, made him feel indispensable and important; but, in time, the incessant array of blood and pain, torn tissue and red tape, began to chip away at him, and one day the thirty-one-year-old bachelor woke up feeling that if he didn’t get out of that Dante’s Inferno of an E.R. soon, he would be the next patient admitted, strapped to a gurney and shuttled off to the nearest psychiatric unit.

When a former colleague approached him to work for the Carnival line, Tom eagerly “jumped ship” and turned in his hospital resignation. The idea of sun and snorkeling and shipboard romances was irresistibly seductive — fun, even glamorous activities he’d never had time for in his current life.

But after four years of sun and snorkeling and shipboard romances, Dr. Tom Swayze — his hair sun-lightened to the color of a sandy tropical beach, his boyish, round-as-a-coconut face handsomely tanned — woke up one day feeling that if he didn’t get out off this ship soon, they’d be wheeling him down the gangway, strapped to a gurney and shuttled off to the nearest psychiatric unit.

Shipboard life, he found, was incredibly boring, and this latest cruise was no exception. The Fantasy was about to leave Port Canaveral, Florida, for a four-day trip to Nassau, and out of two thousand passengers only three had bothered to look him up in his office adjacent the infirmary on the Main Deck. Two were a husband and wife, Anthony and Margaret Vane, who the doctor found seated in his outer office after coming back from the pharmacy.

The husband was perhaps in his early fifties, suavely handsome, already deeply tanned, with dark, slicked-back hair in the time-honored Valentino fashion, and dark, deep-set eyes hooded with apparent concern. He was wearing tailored tan linen slacks and a silk cream-colored shirt, open at the neck, his black chest hair curling out; his left hand sported an expensive gold watch and a gold ring with a diamond that was no larger than the knuckle it rode.

Seated next to the aptly named Mr. Vane, the wife was a bundle of twitches and tics. Perhaps fifteen or even twenty years older than her husband, she had been beautiful once, but her face had been ravaged by one too many lifts. She, too, was expensively dressed, wearing a white pants suit with gaudy silver rhinestones and too much jewelry.

“Margaret, I’m afraid, has misplaced her medication,” Anthony Vane said, after introducing his wife and himself to the doctor. There was mild irritation in his tone, but Vane seemed, for the most, anxious, genuinely worried for his companion’s welfare.

“I’m so sorry, dear,” she said to him, her body moving in jerky, bird-like fashion. “I’m afraid I’m getting forgetful in my old age.”

Vane slipped his hand in hers. “You? Never... But it was hectic at the hotel — we stayed overnight at Cape Canaveral, and I blame myself, really. When she’s feeling good, my wife tends to put her medication out of her mind...”

“That’s understandable,” the doctor said.

Vane smiled tenderly at his elderly bride. “I just don’t want anything to spoil this trip for you, dear.”

Her smile in response was more a twitch than a smile.

“I’m sure we can remedy the situation,” Swayze told them, in his practiced, calm tone. It was what he said to everyone who came to see him, to put them at ease. He gestured toward his inner office.

Once inside, with the couple seated in front of him, Swayze sat behind his desk as Vane handed the doctor a folded sheet of paper.

“It’s a letter from our doctor,” the man explained. “Just in case something like this might happen. You can give him a call if you like.”

Swayze read the note regarding the woman’s medication, which was written on stationery from a Fifth Avenue doctor in New York. Fifth Avenue doctors didn’t seem to have any better penmanship than anyone else in the medical fraternity

“This will be fine,” Swayze told them. “I’ll just make a photocopy and return it to you.” He looked at the wife, fidgeting in her chair. “And I’ll need to ask you a few questions...” He consulted the letter again. “...uh, Margaret?”

Her reply was a mouse-like squeak: “Yes.”

He gave her his best bland, meaningless physician’s smile. “How long have you been taking this anti-depressant, Margaret?”

The woman peered sideways at her husband as if asking permission to answer. He nodded reassuringly.

“About a year now.”

“And you feel it’s helping your depression?”

Again she looked at her husband, who again nodded.

“I think it is,” she said.

Swayze didn’t. He thought this bundle of nerves needed something a whole lot stronger, and soon. But it wasn’t his job aboard ship to fix a gaping wound, just slap a Band-Aid on it.

He wrote on his prescription pad. “This should be sufficient to carry you through the cruise... Then you’ll need to see your own physician as soon as you get back, understand?”

The woman smiled, relieved. “I will, and thank you doctor.”

“Don’t hesitate to come see me again if you have any more trouble,” he told them, as he told everyone when they left.

The third person who came to see him the morning the ship sailed for Nassau required a bit more of his time; but he didn’t mind — he had plenty of it to spare. And besides, she was attractive, and (he soon discovered) single.

Wearing navy slacks and a red top decorated with little gold anchors, the thirty-something blonde with shoulder-length hair sat across from his desk, her poise undermined by hazel eyes that hinted that not all was well, and in fact carried a look of controlled hysteria.

“Thank you for your time, doctor,” she said. Her voice was a melodic alto. “You’re probably very busy.”

Swayze half-smiled, saying, “Whatever your problem is. I’m sure we can remedy it,” then wondered if he’d sounded too openly flirtatious.

She shifted in her seat. “I wish you could,” she said sadly, “but I don’t think you’ll be able to... I don’t think anyone would be.”

He frowned.

“My name is Jennifer Kafer,” she explained. “I’m on the cruise with my mother, Cora Hazen, and I have reason to believe she’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.”

Swayze leaned forward in his chair. “I am sorry,” he said. “You haven’t seen a doctor at home, then?”

“No, this is a problem that has accelerated rather rapidly, I’m afraid,” Jennifer said, and went on to explain. “After my father died last year, I had Mother move in with me and my six-year old daughter, Lisa, who’s staying with her father while Mother and I take this trip... We’ve been divorced for several years.”

He managed not to smile at this good news, keeping a professionally concerned expression in place; and he was concerned, even if his musings about this pretty passenger were somewhat less than professional.

“Anyway,” Jennifer Kafer continued, “Mother seems fine most of the time — I would have canceled the trip, if she weren’t — but every now and then, more and more often, Mother just isn’t herself. She’s almost like a child. Last week, I came home and found her playing with my daughter’s Barbie dolls... She looked at me like she didn’t know who I was. But then, a few hours later, she was back to her old self again.”

Swayze leaned on his elbows and made a tent with his hands. “Has your mother shown any violent tendencies?”

Jennifer shook her head. “No, she’s always quite cheerful.” She paused, then added, “I guess I should be thankful for that. My girlfriend, Susan, her mother has Alzheimer’s... and Susan’s mother has turned very mean. Last year, when Susan bought a new television, her mother smashed it with a baseball bat and cursed her for buying a TV that played commercials. Her mother became so abusive she finally had to be institutionalized.”

Swayze sat back in his chair and heaved a sympathetic sigh. “It’s quite typical, people suffering with Alzheimer’s venting their anger and frustration on family members. But if your mother remains cheerful, and content, as the disease progresses, you will indeed be lucky... at least as lucky as a caretaker of a loved one with Alzheimer’s could ever hope to be.”

Jennifer nodded in agreement, then dug into her purse. “I’d like to give you this picture of her,” she said. “Even though I’ll be with her every moment on the ship, well... Sometimes small children can wander away, if you know what I mean.” She placed the photo on his desk. “It could be helpful in finding her.”

Swayze looked at the photo. “Is this a recent photo?”

“Just a year ago, before any signs had become apparent.”

Cora Hazen was a vibrant older woman with short red hair, a dazzling smile and intelligent bright eyes that in time, he knew, would be dimmed by the insidious disease, robbing the poor woman, and her family, of the last years of her life.

“I could arrange to sit at your table during meals,” the doctor offered.

Jennifer’s face lighted up like fireworks off the starboard bow. “Oh, that’s very generous, doctor!”

And it was a generous offer, but then, the lovely woman seated in front of him would be enjoyable company, and he’d grown tired of eating at the staff table.

“That is,” he said, “if you think my observations might help, or at least give you some peace of mind.”

“Oh they would, and I hope I can find some way to repay you, doctor,” she said, her expression radiant.

He said, “No thanks are necessary,” thinking that he hoped she would find a way, adding, “And of course, don’t hesitate to come see me again if you have any more trouble.”

When the woman had gone, Dr. Swayze put the picture of Cora Hazen aside, filed away his thoughts for a promising shipboard romance, and settled back in his chair for yet another uneventful cruise.

“Introduction: His” Copyright 2001 © by Max Allan Collins

“Introduction: Hers” Copyright 2001 © by Barbara Collins

“Eddie Haskell in a Short Skirt” Copyright © 1998 by Barbara Collins; written with Max Allan Collins. First appeared in Lethal Ladies II

“Dead and Breakfast” Copyright © 1995 by Barbara Collins. First appeared in Murder Most Delicious

“Cat’s-eye Witness” Copyright © 2000 by Max Allan Collins. First appeared in Crafty Cat Crimes

“Reunion Queen” Copyright © 1997 by Barbara Collins. First appeared in Vengeance Is Hers

“Inconvenience Store” Copyright © 1994 by Max Allan Collins. First appeared in Deadly Allies II. “Ms. Tree” characters created by Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty; a trademark of Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty

“Seeing Red” Copyright © 1992 by Barbara Collins. First appeared in Women on the Edge

“Catgate” Copyright © 1993 by Max Allan Collins. First appeared in Danger in D.C.

“World’s Greatest Mother” Copyright © 1994 by Barbara Collins. First appeared in Murder for Mother

“A Cruise to Forget” Copyright © 1999 by Max Allan Collins and Barbara Collins