Backstory
I watched from the kitchen window at the back of the cabin as a pair of headlights crept down the gravel road and turned in behind my Maserati. The backyard light was on, but the vehicle–a pickup truck, based on the height of its headlights–sat on the periphery of the floodlight’s reach. With its passenger side facing me and its cab dark, the pickup idled in the cool autumn darkness like a sullen, steaming shadow.
I wasn’t expecting any guests. And despite being famous, no one knew I was here.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine – January/February 2022
Lovers and Thieves
It was the kind of rain favored by lovers and thieves. A misty, November rain. The kind that hangs low, veil-like, obscuring the dark, desperate world beneath it. The kind that sends lovers into their bedrooms and thieves into the night.
I was more like the thief, waiting outside the Bon Vivant on La Brea, a tired, three-story, stucco apartment building with a name more festive than its architecture. Waiting inside my gunmetal gray 1934 DeSoto Airflow Coupe.
It wasn’t where I wanted to be. It wasn’t where a P.I. makes any real money in this town. That kind of dough–the kind I never seemed to have–was found up in the Hollywood Hills where the famous and the desperate-to-be-famous always managed to find trouble where trouble shouldn’t be found.
But at the Bon Vivant, trouble came in the form of two lovers, a mid-level oil executive, Frank “Mac” McKenzie, and his youthful secretary, Teresa Vail. She lived in Apartment 311. The one on the top floor, right side, on the corner. The one with the lights still on at one fifteen in the morning.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine – April 2016
The Best American Mystery Stories 2017 – Edited by John Sandford and Otto Penzler
The Echoes
The four quick rings of the telephone party line startled him. A shrill jangling that broke the empty silence.
Pope County Sheriff Dan Parrish, standing in his unironed uniform at the front picture window of his house overlooking Lake Minnewaska, felt a stir deep inside, a tangle of anticipation and dread. He checked his watch, careful not to spill any coffee on the living room floor. Seven fifteen A.M. Calls this early meant only one thing: Death.
Someone had died somewhere in this rural farm and lake community, but not from old age or disease, the most common ways folks passed in Pope County. Those calls usually came in at the station and were handled by his deputies.
An early call to his house meant a different kind of death, one untimely or unnatural.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine – March/April 2017
No Uncertain Terms
When Doreen Martin opened the door that led from the garage to the mudroom, she knew her husband was dead. She sensed it in the dense, whispery silence that closed in on her like a shroud. A silence that made her aware of her own breathing. Of her own mortality.
She knew Tom hadn’t gone anywhere. His cancer had made him a prisoner in his own home. But it hadn’t progressed that far yet. He’d looked thinner this morning when she’d left for the casino, his face more gaunt and more gray than usual, but the death sentence in October had been six months. Only three had passed. How could he be dead?
And that’s when she knew. That’s when Doreen’s heart stumbled and her vision splintered at the edges. When her words came out in a shaky hiss. “That son of a bitch.”
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine – January/February 2012
Icarus
THE COMPLETE JOURNAL ENTRIES OF PROFESSOR JAMES ENRIGHT:
Icarus is coming for me.
I can feel it.
Can sense it.
It’s not paranoia.
I know he’s coming.
Because he knows I can see what he does. Can see the results of his depravity. The results of his madness.
Icarus is coming for me.
I am a psychic. It is not a gift.
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine – March/April 2011
The Brass Compass
I was standing on the sidewalk of Holmes Avenue South, staring at Terry Bormann’s brass compass and wondering what to do next, when I heard the shot. I wasn’t sure of its direction because its report had sounded muffled, like it had been fired indoors, muted by the plaster flesh and wood bones of a house. But which house? There were more than a dozen two-story four-squares on this stretch of Holmes, hidden behind the swollen green canopies of the oaks and elms that shadowed the street.
But then I knew. In the short breath of time that lives between a shot and its echo, I knew everything. Where the shot had come from. Who had pulled the trigger. Who was dead.
I knew in that moment whose blood was on my hands.
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine – July 2009
The Sleepless Soul
I stood in the back room of the Sourdough Bar staring at the Lost Wall. Hollow faces stared back at me, their eyes a leaden gray. Two hundred. Maybe three. Each one different. Each one the same. All of them trapped in a black-and-white world–a black-and-white cell–bounded by thick, glossy white borders. Scores of faces, each frozen in the same moment. The moment they found themselves on skid row. The moment hope had died.
The owner of the Sourdough, a bear of a man who called himself the Pope, leaned over my shoulder. He was studying the collection of photographs he had shot and pinned to the wall over the course of a decade as if seeing them for the first time.
“Did you say he had light hair or dark hair?” the Pope said. He filtered each breath through his hose and it came out a whistle. Glenn Miller’s “A String of Pearls” filtered from the bar through the cheap plywood door and came out flat.
“I didn’t say, but it’s dark.”
It was 5:30. I’d spent the better part of the day striking out in my search for Tommy Parrish. I’d questioned dozens of bums on the street, a handful of pawnshop owners, and the desk clerk at the Senate Hotel. None of them knew who he was. All of them were liars.
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine – March/April 2008
The Coronation Coin
The first time I saw Julia Gallagher, she was lying naked on the bed in the Honeymoon Cabin at Pezhekee Resort near Glenwood. In the close heat of midnight, she was sprawled across the rumpled sheets like a pinup girl. Her skin was a whispery bronze, her hair the color of cinnamon toast. She gazed up at me through eyes that were sharp circles of blue blown glass.
Needless to say, she was dead.
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine – February 2008