Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 116, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 709 & 710, September/October 2000

He lived in a carefully decorated showpiece of a residence, a Bohemian sanctuary he rented by the square foot from a pair of elderly stockbrokers. He could easily afford it. No self-respecting collector could be without at least one small Fuller. Second and third floors, loft on the third, apartment on the second. A place of fresh roses every day and a Polish cleaning lady twice a week; filled with Chippendale originals and his own modest collection of Constable landscapes; a cultural preserve where the emotions of love, hate, and doubt held no sway. A hermitage where his own inner life of paint, easel, and brush sustained him with a soul-enriching satisfaction. Now rocked like a ship in a gale, the prevailing mood as discordant as one of Schonberg’s twelve-tone string quartets, the uncertain outlook as perplexing as any of the single-color canvases of Mark Rothko.

He didn’t like to leave his Bohemian sanctuary unless he absolutely had to. Unless it was for an evening out at any of his favorite restaurants, or an afternoon in the galleries, or, if need be, a business meeting with his agent, Valerie Bintcliff. And when circumstance forced him to venture beyond the reach of its golden hardwood floors and handwoven Persian carpets, he never took a taxi, always hired a long dark sedan from a car service. He lived, as his brother once remarked, a cocooned life. And certainly a women’s detention center was the last place he ever expected to find himself, especially one as far-flung as the remote hinterland of the Bronx.

But here he was, in a facility as architecturally stimulating as a septic tank, dating from the days of Theodore Roosevelt’s bumptious reign in the White House, a cage smelling of ammonia and cream com, and the fulsome muskiness of too many unwashed women crammed together in a small space.

He sat in the visitors’ room and stared through the glass at Barbara Gatt, erstwhile tablemate at Cafe des Artistes, the Rainbow Room, and Da Umberto’s, here in the hope that Barbara might tell him Craig’s confession was so much bosh. Here to find not only absolution for his brother, but also contradiction. To rediscover in the hoped-for contradiction his own peace of mind, a way to get on with “Mallards on the Marsh,” a way to finally bring the confounded fowls alive.

“He had the two sides, didn’t he?” said Barbara, speaking of her late husband. She was a wisp, with the tawny color of a woman predisposed to melanoma. Inherited. Her mother was end-stage in Ohio. A bad time for Barbara. “You knew him as a curator. As an authenticator of fifteenth-century religious art. I knew him as a husband. As a brute. As a man who wanted to take my child away from me.”

Neil admitted familiarity with the theme, the sad leitmotif of divorce in modern times, with the melancholy refrains of custody disputes and restraining orders.

“A persistent man,” he said, hoping that would be diplomatic enough. “He took hold of Christine?” he asked.

He dared not enter the forbidden zone of her own culpability.

“Hoisted her like a hundred-pound sack of wheat,” Barbara clarified.

“And Craig took the knife to him?”

Her tawny eyes gazed at him as if he were a specimen. “Anthony’s advised me against casual disclosure,” she said.

Anthony, of course, was her lawyer, a phlegmatic dome-headed man with the complexion of a ghoul and eyes as dark as pitch, the Fuller family lawyer, presented in pinstripes and wingtips to Barbara, by Craig, as the great shining way, the savior who would set her free.

“Craig was a kind boy,” he said, feeling he had to defend his brother. “A gentle boy. Always fooling with gadgets. Helped me with my car when I still had the gall to own one.”

He hoped these words might coax from her the peace of mind he so ardently wished for. But she smiled fondly in that wispy way of hers, like the Queen of the Fairies.

“He’s good with Christine,” she said. “He’s the only one who knows how to calm her down. He soothes her. He doesn’t antagonize her the way Paul did.”

And not long after, the guard came and got him. The doubt remained. Who killed Paul Gatt? His brother’s confession, now twenty-four hours old, struck him as nothing more than a bad dream, something that couldn’t have actually happened, the result of too much jerk sauce on his chicken last night. His brother was made of finer fabric. His brother might argue with Paul Gatt, even lay a diffident hand on Paul’s shoulder, but the visceral outcome of Paul’s three-hundred-pound corpse exsanguinated on the terra cotta tiles, his hound’s-tooth alpaca a ruin, his beard glued and coagulated with blood, struck Neil as so much faulty joinery. The crime didn’t fit Craig, and Craig didn’t fit the crime.

As he eased his own three-hundred-pound figure into the backseat of his hire car, he desperately tried to convince himself of Craig’s finer moral impulses. But doubt made him queasy, and for the first time in years he found he had no appetite.