Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 105, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 640 & 641, March 1995

This month we are featuring stories by an unusually large number of authors who have made their mystery short story debut in EQMM. Besides our two Department of First Stories features, we have contributions by former Department of First Story-ers Terry Mullins, Steven Saylor, and Joan Richter, and by British writers Jeffry Scott and Ruth Rendell, whose first U.S. short story publication was with EQMM. To their number we add Barbara Callahan, who appeared in the Department of First Stories in 1974. Ms. Callahan has written at least a dozen stories for us since, although we haven’t had from her before a satire as broad as this one...

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Ricardo wanted me. Maurice wanted me. Zazu wanted me. All those daytime TV show hosts wanted me to appear as a guest. It was a bit overwhelming. Ever since the tabloid SLEEZ printed my story and told where I worked, I’d been hounded by producers. They jumped out of cars in the parking lot of the We Never Sleep convenience store, falling all over each other to get to me first. Some of my regular customers got real mad, like Hector Goertz, the town cabbie.

“I come in here every morning, Ruth Anne, expecting fresh coffee, and what do I get lately? Some stuff that’s been sitting out all night and tastes like diesel fuel because you’ve been larking around with the blow-dry crowd. Well, I can take my business elsewhere.”

I felt bad because there is no elsewhere. No other store is open at 5:30 when Hector goes to work. Instead of sympathizing with Hector, the Ricardo producer laughed and told me I should chuck my job and take the “big bucks we can offer.” Then the Maurice producer shoved the Ricardo producer into the Spuds potato chip display and told me his show could top Ricardo’s offer any day. His comment amused the Zazu producer, who said, “We can top their paltry fees any day. And naturally, we want Billy on the show, too. He’d like that, wouldn’t he?”

Billy is my ex-boyfriend who is now my current boyfriend and is responsible for this national interest. After I won him back in a bingo game from my ex-friend Sally Sue, Billy contacted SLEEZ with our story. Sally Sue and I have been competing for Billy’s affections for ten years, since junior year in high school, and we have done some bizarre things to take him away from each other. The SLEEZ headline read, “Bingo! Ruth Anne Wins Billy.”

SLEEZ ran pictures of the three of us, right there on the front page, the one everyone looks at in the supermarket checkout lines. Billy was so proud. He went to the market and while I shopped, he posed himself right next to the SLEEZ rack. He had a pen in hand, ready to sign autographs, but nobody recognized him. Maybe it’s because Billy sent SLEEZ his high-school photograph, the one where he looks like Sylvester Stallone with a crew cut. And Sally Sue’s and my cooking have added a few chins to his original one.

It was a real challenge winning Billy back. I had to cover the four corners on eight bingo cards under the rules Sally Sue and I agreed on. At first, Billy seemed happy to be with me, but lately he’d been acting bored. I think it was our living quarters. “I’m too mobile for a mobile home,” he said. That’s because Billy used to drive a truck before his sciatica forced him to spend his days on the sofa, drinking beer and watching TV.

I hadn’t told him about the letters the three TV producers sent me before they came to the store because Billy always makes fun of the guests on daytime TV shows. When he saw the Zazu show with the man who actually does go out and sleep in the dog house when his wife is mad at him, Billy hooted about him for days.

Being pursued by three gentlemen who shave and change their shirts every day should have been a boost for my dysfunctional self-esteem (Billy teaches me those terms he learns from the TV therapists), but it didn’t. I lost my job that day. Hector complained to the owner of the store, who came in and saw me talking to the producers instead of waiting on customers. That and the bags of potato chips squished by the Maurice producer made the owner say it was the last straw.

Billy would have said something funny like, “You mean the last chip,” but I don’t have that quick sense of humor.