Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 150, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 914 & 915, November/December 2017
- Автор: Фузилли Джим, Харрис Шарлин
- Год: 2017
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: 0013-6328
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 150, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 914 & 915, November/December 2017». Краткое содержание книги:
“The vinyl of my almost generation,” Deena said, ten years later.
The detective — Cassell, she remembered, Lucas Cassell — looked at her. “Sorry?”
“I was just — can you play it again?”
“We don’t have to do this right now.” He covered his phone with his hand, like she was a child and would forget it was still on the table.
Deena wrapped her arms around herself. “I’m listening now. I was just distracted. It’s not as clear as I thought it would be. Not that I thought about it, but—”
“The sound quality’s not very Hollywood,” Cassell agreed. “But if you need to do this later, we can do it later. No? Okay. Here we go.”
He pressed play. Green digital spikes sprouted like grass on the black screen, tracing the ups and downs of Deena’s mother’s voice, the 911 operator, the background chorus of smaller, fuzzier sounds. It was somehow crushingly mundane: not very Hollywood. The 911 operator had one of those flat, sing-songy Hoosier voices; Deena’s mother’s voice was shrill, panicked. The digital grass leapt up alarmingly. What was her emergency? Her husband. He’d fallen, he’d slipped in the bathroom, his head, the blood. Was he breathing? Yes, please hurry, yes, he was breathing, he was talking, honey, honey, are you okay? Hold on, Kenneth, hold on.
And then, like they were playing catch with the word and Deena’s father had grabbed it out of the air, this, faint and fuzzy but there: her dad’s voice. “Oh, honey. Honey, hold me.”
A fresh burst of weeping from her mother. “Please! Please hurry!” A rattling off of their address: staccato beats on the screen.
The rest of it, Deena already knew, because she had arrived only half an hour after the ambulance: She had seen the huge red splotch of blood on her mother’s soaking wet blouse from where her mother had cradled her father in her arms. “In my arms,” she’d kept saying, over and over again, as the water off her neat khaki capris had spread dampness into the bedspread. “He died in my arms. I held him. He wanted me to hold him. Oh God.” She hadn’t even turned the water off in the shower: that was something the police, their hands swallowed up in blue latex, had had to do. The gloves had infuriated Deena. What did they think was happening here? She had screamed at them, but it had been her mom, quietly rocking back and forth, the EMTs had given the settle-down shot to. Even now, her mother’s arm was lightly bruised on the inside of her left elbow.
“I’m sorry,” Cassell said, after the file closed out into silence.
Deena nodded. Tears were standing in her eyes and so the nod was just the barest dip of her head, so she wouldn’t shake them out.
“I mean it. For your loss and for — upsetting your family. My partner, he’s the one who listened to the call the first time, and his hearing’s not what it used to be. He didn’t pick up on your father’s voice. You can confirm it’s your father’s voice?”
She looked at him and he held up his hands, like a little boy caught playing cops and robbers.
“I have to ask.”
“It’s my dad,” she said.
Cassell’s eyes were clear; he could nod with more confidence. He had the kind of square-jawed, craggy network TV cop face, hard but earnest, the kind of guy who never cried and who didn’t believe in apologies or coincidences, and Deena could tell she was supposed to read all kinds of things into that nod. She wasn’t interested. If Cassell could not outright say that he was sorry for taking her mother’s fingerprints while her father lay dead twenty feet away, if he could not admit how moronic it was to not have listened to the 911 call in full and to have heard her dad’s last words that would render all their suspicions not only moot but terrible, then Deena had no time for him. None. She had her mother to shepherd; she had a funeral to help arrange.
“Did you play this for my mom?”
“Of course not. She knows what he said.”
“Then why play it for me? She already told me.”
“I thought you’d like to know.”
“Proof? That my mom wasn’t lying to me about my dad’s last words? That she wasn’t lying to me about not killing him? Can you leave, please?” Cassell slipped his phone into his pocket. “Proof is good, Deena,” he said. “It’s the not knowing that hurts you. You would wonder, eventually. You’d look at the bills your mother could suddenly pay without a flinch, you’d look if she married again, you’d start to doubt, but now you won’t. He wanted her with him when he was dying: That’s what you’ll know, now. And you won’t wonder at all.”
“You’re saying I have you to thank for that?”
He had already turned around to leave, so he just said over his shoulder, “I’m just saying you should be thankful. Proof is something most people never get.”
Deena went on without being thankful. She took time off work. She spent an afternoon on her hands and knees on her mother’s bathroom floor, trying to scrub blood out of the grout between the tiles: Cassell had given her the number of a cleanup company that handled crime scenes but it felt wrong to trust her father’s blood to strangers. She wore her fingers to the bone. In the end, the grout just looked a little rusty, and that had to be good enough. Her mother didn’t seem to notice it.
She had hardly noticed the funeral either. It had been hopeless to try to take her shopping, so Deena had gone through her closet twice looking for a demure black dress: She kept turning up cocktail gowns, too low-cut or too glamorous, and finally had to settle for navy. They’d been on their way to the funeral, the lead car in the black-flagged highway processional, when her mother had suddenly said, “I want a hat.”
“Okay,” Deena said, looking out the window. “We can get you a hat.”
“No, now. I want a hat now.” Her mother touched her head. Her hair was brown but graying, not touched up at all since her husband had died, and it was as though she had spent the last two weeks trying to formulate this single thought: a mourning hat, black, with a little veil. Deena tried to explain that they didn’t make those anymore or that, if they did, no one wore them, that her mother would look out of place. Finally, she said, “It doesn’t go with your dress,” and her mother looked down at the dark blue-clad knees and said, “Oh,” flatly, and began to weep.
She arrived at the funeral still crying, her disarrayed hair blowing slightly in the breeze. Deena wished Cassell were there, so he could see everything they had to be grateful for.
But in the end, her mother got her hat. Its veil was just a little half-circle of black tulle. Despite Deena’s prior reservations, she looked good in it. She wore it for the next month or so in church, pinned into her freshly retouched hair. “Kenneth would want me to look my best,” she said. Deena believed this to be true. She went with her mother to pick out new lipsticks; to stand by her in department stores while experts with heavily plucked eyebrows redid her mother’s makeup. It was all comforting, in its way: the way eating disorders picked up during stressful times refocus all of the energies on the physical. (Deena had spent half her freshman year on the bathroom floor.) She was confident her mother would pass through it.
They ran into Cassell at the grocery store.
“You look well,” he said, with every sign of politeness.
“She does, doesn’t she?” Deena’s mother said, as if that had been what he’d meant. “I keep telling her she doesn’t have to follow me around. A girl her age should be out with someone other than her mother.”
So finally, reluctantly, Deena let herself separate from her mother. “I’m half an orphan,” she said sometimes, usually when she had a drink in her hand. But eventually she too started to look welclass="underline" stopped drinking so much, went back to consistently washing her hair, remembered why it mattered to wear socks that were at least in the neighborhood of matching. She pulled out of a work skid that, bereavement or no bereavement, would have cost her her job if it had gone on much longer. She bought a headset for her phone and started calling her mother only when she was in the car going somewhere else, which seemed like a practical way to deal with one’s family.