Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 09/01/12 (20 page)

 
By the time Bartleby’d been in office through the falling snow and
the blooming of daffodils, Rolf visited his cottage, and said: “Time has come
for you to figure out who owes what and to start collecting the Village Dues.”
Looking more confused than ever, Bartleby began to tremble. “No need to be in a
muddle,” the entrepreneur assured him. “All you have to do is think of it as
community tithing.” Well, the collector still didn’t get it, but the next day he
put on his Sunday best—green checkered pants and striped yellow shirt—greased
down his claylike hair with Vaseline, set up a folding table and chair in his
front room, sharpened a coupla pencils, laid out a pad of lined paper, and put a
pot of coffee on the electric hot plate.

Outside the village proper dues were figured at a dollar an acre and three
dollars a kid. If you had no kids at home, it was a flat five bucks, plus
acreage. In town, dues went for a dollar a kid, and three dollars per tree.
Despite a fair policy aimed at equaling things out, the farmers on the outskirts
of Gopher tended to be charged higher dues and tended to take longer to pay.
Farmers had more acreage, and with too many long winter nights to occupy, they
tended to have more kids; another reason they paid a larger share for public
services was that some village residents—without mentioning names—were so cheap
they started cutting down their trees for firewood, helping them to save money
in two ways.

That first week, no one showed up at Bartleby’s cottage to pay their dues, and
the look in his eyes became more puzzled, more worried than usual. That’s why I
was the first one to come across that year—didn’t want the Village Collector to
get too down on himself. But others didn’t follow my example, as I’d hoped.
Could be the constituents thought they might get away without paying dues since
he was new on the job, and especially since it was Bartleby. Halfway through the
month I found myself stopping at his place more often than usual to prop up his
drooping spirits.

In response to one of my pep talks, Bartleby said, “Mitty, looks like no one
’round here wants to set aside money to put out brush fires.”

“Folks in Gopher are just slow in letting go of their cash,” I assured him. “Just
you wait and see—they’ll be lining up at your door any day now.”

And they finally did start trickling in, dragging the dust of the street and dirt
of the fields with them into his front room. Gratefully he collected the dues of
Mr. Dodsworth, and Mr. and Mrs. Goodman, Mr. Lonigan, and old Mrs. Killegrew,
calling everyone Mr. and Mrs. throughout the process. But he was disappointed
none of them stayed for coffee afterwards, the way they used to do at the Bumppo
place. Rather than tell him they might have been put off by his thanking them
five or six times during each transaction, I asked him if he could fill my cup
with more of that rusty-tasting coffee. (Between all that burnt caffeine, and
Martha elbowing me to stop rolling around the mattress all night, I didn’t get
much sleep during that period.)

As for the collecting of monies, everything went down as easy as a slice of apple
pie until the last day of the month, the dues deadline. The Sawyer boy pushed
through the screen door, dragged his lazy sneakers up to Bartleby, and dropped a
fingerprint-stained white envelope on the table. Going on fourteen, Chick Sawyer
was big for his age and was courting Cassy Pask at the time. Obviously aware of
the importance of his mission, Chick stood there bold as a bank teller: “What
you gonna do with all that money, Mr. Village Collector?”

“I’m gonna put out fires,” said Bartleby, grinning like a pyromaniac as he shook
the greenbacks out of the envelope onto the table.

Young Sawyer snickered. “Don’t you know dollar bills’ll burn in a fire?”

Bartleby didn’t notice Chick’s attempt to make him look dumb. He was too busy
counting the crumpled, mostly one-dollar bills. All of a sudden Bartleby ran a
thick finger down his list of names on the pad and cried out, “Whoaaa! Your
dad’s dues is ninety-three dollars and there’s only seventy-eight here.”

“You better count again, Mr. Collector,” said Chick, his left thumb coming
unhooked from the right strap of his overalls.

I looked up from the baseball scores on the back page to see what this was all
about, and I watched Bartleby count again—just a formality because he was always
dead sure of his math. “No doubt about it,” he said. “Not one bean more, not one
bean less than seventy-eight.”

Blood pumped into Chick’s face, and his voice got squeaky as a rusty gate. “You
musta done something with the rest of the money ’cause my pa put that dues in
this envelope and that’s what I brought you.” Before Bartleby could say anything
else, straight out the screen door dashed the Sawyer boy, slamming it behind
him. The Village Collector sat there looking sadly at the cash a long while. At
last he reached into his back pocket, pulled out a skimpy calfskin billfold,
counted out five singles and two fives, and set them with the greenbacks on the
table. No wonder they laughed at him in the barbershop, and over to the
Grange.

Half an hour later, just as I was standing up on my own two legs to head back to
Sylvester’s Pharmacy—I’m retired, but I keep his shelves stocked on a part-time
schedule—the boy returned, but this time he wasn’t alone. Father and son banged
through the screen door, and strutted up to the table like a pair of fightin’
roosters. They stood with legs apart, arms crossed. Papa Sawyer was a
leather-hided dirt farmer with teeth like kernels of corn left to rot on the
cob. The boy’s teeth were in better shape, but it wouldn’t be long before he was
growing rotten corn in his mouth too. In this corner of America we don’t get too
much drama, except that phony baloney on TV, so I dropped onto the arm of the
sofa to take a good gander at the second act of this little play.

“My boy here says you lost fifteen dollars on me,” the elder Sawyer’s voice
screeching like the circular saw at the mill outside town. “I don’t have no
money to be throwing away, so you better find that cash fast or there’s going to
be hell to pay!” Like a bull getting ready to charge, the farmer scraped the mud
off his boots on the oval scrap of braided rug.

“It’s like this, Mr. Sawyer,” Bartleby started, “I counted the money twice, and
there was only seventy-eight, but—”

“You callin’ my son a liar?”

The Sawyer boy uncrossed his arms and backed up a few feet. I started to pipe up
that I’d seen Bartleby count out every dollar, but the farmer swiveled his head
toward me and snapped, “You keep out of this, Francis Mitty!” I’d learned a long
time ago that when someone calls me by my full name, it’s smarter to keep out of
it, especially when the name-caller is six feet or more in height. (I may be
wiry, but I’m no fool.)

“Look here, Mr. Sawyer,” said Bartleby, “if you’ll simmer down a second I’ll
explain.”

“Don’t you be telling me to simmer down, you flake!” Sawyer roared, shoving the
table aside—sending pencils flying across the floor and moving up eye-to-eye
with Bartleby: The tops of their heads were pretty much even with each other’s,
so if it came to that, at least it would be a fair fight.

“Let’s not get our feathers ruffled,” I advised, climbing to my feet again, but
they didn’t even know I was in the county, much less in the room.

“You’re worse than a flake,” Sawyer kept on, “you’re a damn thief!”

Though Bartleby was bolted together as solid as a hot-water boiler, he was as
easygoing as a carousel. But far as I knew, no one had ever called him a flake
to his face before, and certainly not a thief. As I stood there feeling
helpless, an amazing change came over the Village Collector: His neck thickened
and his jaw extended and his chest puffed up like a grouse getting ready to
mate. Catching his breath, he raised his hands slowly in front of his face and
stared at them as if he hadn’t seen them in a long time. That was the first time
I’d noticed how big and muscular they were, the blue veins popping out like
rivers on a map.

The collector and the farmer stood two feet apart for half a minute, neither one
of them blinking or budging or burping, the air so thick you could’ve bitten
into it like a Granny Smith. At long last Bartleby lowered his hands to his
sides and muttered, “I’m jess trying to tell you, Mr. Sawyer, that after your
boy left I found the missing money on the floor—must’ve slipped off the table
when I wudn’t looking.”

Sawyer’s chest seemed to deflate like a punctured inner tube. “Why the hell
didn’t you say so ’fore?” But he couldn’t hide the relief in his voice. And why
not? The farmer had stuck his head into the fiery furnace of Bartleby’s anger,
and had quickly learned to respect the flake. Besides, fifteen dollars was a lot
of money to him: All these farmers around here worked the soil not because they
could scrape a decent living out of it, but because they were determined to
spend all their days and nights with earth under their fingernails until they
were buried in the stuff. Young Sawyer, who had dirt under his nails too, had
his back pressed against the screen door.

To this day I can’t say if the farmer was bluffing because he was short on cash,
or if his boy had been hard up for a few dollars to take his girlfriend to the
movies over in the county seat. (A lad that age’ll do just about anything to
impress a girl, one of the few things that hasn’t changed in the world they’ve
twisted out of shape.) And it’s just as hard to say if Bartleby was backing
down, or if he was just being kind to Sawyer. The lines between such matters,
like the markings between properties in this part of the state, are always hard
to stake out. All I know is I still haven’t managed to rid myself of that mental
picture of Bartleby, intense on the edge of violence, puffy red hands dangling
at his sides.

When the Village Collector didn’t show up at his job on Monday morning, Zack
Cowley sent the Wesley boy over to Bartleby’s cottage. The boy went up and
knocked and, when he got no answer, walked right in: The drawers of the wooden
bureau were left open, and his shirts, pants, and socks were gone. Along with
everything else he owned, which wasn’t much. It didn’t take long for folks to
start repeating what had jumped out of Sawyer’s mouth—that Bartleby was a thief;
a few of them seemed pleased with the notion he’d run off with the Village Dues.
Nor did it change people’s minds after the dues were found, all counted out and
recorded on a sheet of paper, in a cigar box in his refrigerator. More than once
I found myself trying to straighten out the facts for my neighbors. But it
didn’t do much good. Once a story gets told in a certain way, it keeps on going
in that direction until folks get hold of another story they like better.

These days, Bartleby’s name hardly ever comes up at the barbershop, or the
general store. But I still think about him now and again. It didn’t make sense
to me that he would up and leave such a fine town as Gopher without saying
goodbye, and all because a corn-toothed farmer had called him a coupla names.
Then one day I remembered how Bartleby had stared at his huge red hands that
day, how no one really knew anything about his past, and I suddenly had an
inkling of why he went away. Sometimes I wonder where Bartleby is, and what he’s
up to. I wonder if he’s being as kind and generous as he used to be in Gopher.
Or if he’s just getting angrier with every hardening of life around him, egging
him on to repeat whatever it was he’d done with those hands that had made him
hide out in Gopher.

Copyright © 2012 by Tom Tolnay

Art by Ron Bucalo

 
Owen Keane, Terence Faherty’s first series character and
protagonist of his debut novel
Deadstick,
has appeared in
EQMM
a number of times over the years, always in thought-provoking cases. In December
2011, The Mystery Company published a twentieth anniversary edition of
Deadstick
that includes a new afterword and a Keane chronology.
It’s available as a trade paperback and in e-book formats. This new Keane short
story is characteristically reflective and
revealing.
 

1.

 
“We all know what happened to Jesus after the Wedding Feast of Cana,
where he performed his first miracle. He began his public ministry. But John the
Evangelist doesn’t tell us what became of the young people who were married that
day. We can only assume that they had the same chance that every newly married
couple has: the chance to make a happy life.”

Two seats to my left, Mary Ohlman squeezed her husband’s hand. They were no
longer a newly married couple—they had a five-year-old daughter—but Harry and
Mary still held hands. My date for the afternoon, a young woman named Beth
Wolfe, didn’t reach for my hand, nor I for hers. We’d been set up a few months
back by Mary, and though the match had failed to ignite, we’d become friends and
occasional escorts for one another. At the moment, I was the one providing the
service. We four were seated in a crowded church, witnessing the wedding of a
teacher friend of Mary and Beth’s. As usual on those rare times when I found
myself inside a house of God, my mind was wandering in the past. Then the
minister, a guy so young his complexion had yet to settle down, said something
that caught my attention.

“We here gathered today are a community. A unique community. As a group, we’ve
come together to celebrate Kit and Emile’s wedding. If they hadn’t fallen in
love and decided to pledge their lives to one another, this particular
congregation would never have existed. Their love has created a couple from two
separate human beings, but it has also created a new community of friends and
family. As we join together to share their joy, let us also pledge to work
together to support this beautiful union.”

He then returned to his earlier point about the Wedding Feast at Cana, wondering
at the luck of a couple whose love had created a community that included Jesus
Himself. When he took it one obvious step further, pointing out that this
Wedding Feast at Basking Ridge, New Jersey also had Jesus as a guest, I drifted
off again.

I started by asking myself if the minister’s theory of community could apply to a
solitary man like me. Was there an Owen Keane community, made up of the people
I’d interacted with in a meaningful way over the years? If so, it wasn’t a
tightly packed group, like the one around me now. It was a crooked, straggling
line with one member barely in sight of the next.

Later I thought of that linear group again, while standing in the receiving line,
watching the bride fuss over a gray-haired man in a wheelchair. Mary and Beth
were discussing homeschooling and Harry was out running the air conditioner on
his new BMW and probably sneaking a cigarette.

In addition to being thin on the ground, the trail of people I’d left in my wake
was less homogenous than the happy, well-dressed throng jostling for space in
the vestibule of the church. My troop was occasionally seedy and often strange.
I was, for my sins, an amateur detective, an impulsive inquirer into things that
didn’t concern me. Or rather, things that shouldn’t have concerned me but did.
At a time in my life when I’d needed answers badly, they hadn’t been around to
find. Now, a dozen years on, I still searched for them, turning over every oddly
shaped rock I came across. Some remarkably odd.

I was yanked back to the present by a subtle elbow to the ribs from Mary. Then I
was shaking the hand of the groom, a kid still so pale from his ordeal that the
black stubble on his chin stood out like the studs on his shirt front. The
bride, petite but lovely with glistening eyes and a stray sprig of baby’s breath
hanging down from the floral wreath that anchored her veil, took my hand next
and squeezed it as Mary had squeezed Harry’s.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, as though she actually knew who I was. “Thank
you for being part of our community.”

2.

 
The reception was held at Killdeer Country Club, a small place near
the church. Small and old, its golf course tree-choked and the wood paneling of
the room where we had our cocktails dark and well scarred.

Harry looked the worm holes over approvingly and even smiled down at a worn spot
in the carpet. “These old-money guys know how to squeeze a nickel,” he said.

He wasn’t exactly new money himself, being the descendant of a sturdy grove of
Boston lawyers that had sent out shoots as far south as New York City. Harry was
now the head man of that southern outpost, and it was getting harder to remember
him as the college roommate who’d often had to borrow beer money from me. For
one thing, he looked quite different, the dark hair he’d had at Boston College
now as thin and as lovingly preserved as Killdeer’s ancient carpeting. The face
beneath it had also changed, too many expense-account lunches having both
widened it and softened its regular features.

Mary, another college friend, looked more like her old self, though she’d also
sacrificed in the hair department, in her case to the gods of fashion. Her
honey-colored hair, once long and incredibly straight, was now short and curled.
There was a subtler difference too, one that fell under the category of
behavior. She’d never been much of a drinker at Boston, but she’d already
reduced her first Killdeer Manhattan to a glass of musical cubes.

She noticed me noticing that and spoke before I could comment. “My bad back is
acting up. That church pew must have been designed by Cotton Mather.” And then,
before I could comment on her comment, “So Kit’s family is old money?”

“Emile’s too,” said Beth, whose family had a little bit of their own socked away.
As usual, she was barely sipping her champagne cocktail, the better to preserve
a figure that was elegantly thin.

“Then why Quebec for a honeymoon?” Harry asked. “I heard somebody talking about
that outside the church. If they’re loaded, why not the French Riviera?”

“Why not the Buick Riviera?” I said, just to be saying something.

“One of them has family in Quebec,” Beth replied. “Emile, I think. And, as you
said, you don’t get to be old money by spending it.”

An hour or two after the best dinner I’d had in months, I worked up the nerve to
ask Mary to dance. To earn that privilege—and to limber up—I’d danced several
times with Beth, acquitting myself okay, though we hadn’t exactly moved as one.
Dancing with Mary, on the other hand, was as comfortable as walking beside her.
We’d been more than friends back at Boston College, prior to Harry’s ascendancy,
and we’d had more than our share of awkward moments since, but the club’s small
dance floor seemed to be neutral ground.

“You’re not counting,” Mary observed. “You used to count when we danced to keep
time.”

“Now I say the rosary.”

“That’ll be the day.”

I told myself that we’d reached a new plateau, courtesy of the passage of time.
In five or six years, we might even be confidants again.

Mary’s next words made that goal seem closer and less desirable. “Do you think
Harry’s happy?”

“If he’s not, he’s losing more upstairs than his hair.”

“Maybe he’s just been married too long. Maybe he’s in a rut.”

“It can’t be that,” I said.

I was saved from saying more by a collision with a couple of dancing bears. I
moved us to a neutral corner, but awkwardly.

“Sorry, Owen,” Mary said. “I’ve got you counting again.”

The other dancers all seemed to be following our example and moving away from the
center of the dance floor. I understood the trend when the bride and groom took
that place of honor. He’d lost his tuxedo jacket and she her veil and shoes, but
they were both still smiling like happy newborns.

“I wonder how they’ll be feeling in ten years,” Mary said, a little
wistfully.

“You and Harry can ask them then,” I said.

3.

 
Two days later I was at my day job, sorting packages for an express
shipper that had several acres under roof near the Newark airport. It was the
latest in a long series of jobs I didn’t care about, but one of the pleasanter
ones, as the place was clean and dry and well lit. The work was steady and
usually kept my mind from wandering, which might have been a bigger benefit than
the dental plan. My supervisor, Martha, around whom the place had been built,
had a soft spot for me. She was flexible about my shifts, which was important on
those rare occasions when I had a case to investigate.

I’d just taken my place on the line that morning when Martha tapped me on the
shoulder. One of her assistants was at her elbow, ready to cover for me. Martha
led me away from the noise of the machines.

“Telephone for you, Owen. Some kind of emergency.”

I took the call in her office, wondering which of my dwindling list of relations
would be on the other end. It turned out to be Harry Ohlman.

“Owen, sorry to be bothering you at work. Mary was so upset I promised her I
would.”

“Amanda okay?” I asked, naming their daughter.

“Yes, she’s fine. It’s about Kit and Emile Derival. Owen, they’re dead. They were
mugged on some street in Quebec last night. Robbed and shot. Mary’s sick about
it. I am myself.”

I sat down heavily at the little table where I got my performance reviews. “What
do you know?”

“That’s most of it. They’d gone out to dinner and a play. They were walking to
some nightclub district when it happened. I guess Quebec’s a city where you feel
safe at night.”

I never would. “I’m sorry, Harry. And I’m sorry Mary’s upset. You said you had to
promise her you’d call me?”

“You know why, Owen. She still thinks you’re Sherlock, Jr. She thinks you’ll
figure out why this happened, when there isn’t any deeper reason than some drug
addict needing a fix. Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to find the guy who did this
and fix him for good. If I thought there was a chance of that, I’d drag you up
to Canada myself. I tried to tell Mary there wasn’t anything anyone could do,
but she wouldn’t listen. Sorry to lay this on you. Call me if you think of
anything.”

“I will,” I said.

4.

 
I assumed Harry had meant that I should call if I came up with
anything useful, so I didn’t bother him with the thoughts that spoiled the
accuracy of my sorting for the first hour or so after his call. Those thoughts
included the memory of Kit Derival’s last words to me, “Thank you for being part
of our community,” and some reflections on grief. Did it help the family, I
wondered, if the grief over these senseless killings spread out as far as
possible, so far that they affected the work of a package handler none of them
even knew? Did that make the pool of grief they were drowning in the slightest
bit less deep? I decided it didn’t.

Still, the idea that I was a member of a community, a grieving community, haunted
me. And it made Mary’s suggestion that I should do something about this
senseless crime a little less absurd. The minister had called on the people at
the wedding to support Emile and Kit. Our duties might be stretched to making
sense of their deaths, if that were only possible.

But did that community even still exist? The minister had said that Emile and
Kit’s love had created us, a single unit where there had previously been
separate families and an assortment of friends and acquaintances. Now that those
two were dead, was the bond broken? It would last a bit longer, I decided. Long
enough for the community to gather again. This time for a funeral.

That thought made me sit down hard on the little stool at my station. For a
moment, the familiar boxes from Land’s End and Pottery Barn slipped by
unobserved. I was seeing something else, only in outline, but no less
mind-seizing for that. Then the next person in the line threw an empty Dunkin’
Donuts cup at me, bringing me back.

When my break came, I hurried to the pay phone near the lavatories. Harry must
have given instructions about my possible call, because his secretary, the
original immovable object, put me right through.

In place of hello, Harry said, “So, we going to Quebec?”

“It’s coming to us, maybe. I need you to find something out for me, if you
can.”

“Now I’m doing your legwork?” This was a reference to a time in the not very
distant past when I’d worked for him as a researcher.

“Mary’s legwork,” I said.

“Right. What is it?”

“I want you to identify a guest at Emile and Kit’s wedding. He or she will be a
recluse, probably very wealthy, who lives in some kind of high-security
environment.”