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

Craig the athlete. On the pole-vaulting team in high school. Skiing in Colorado every winter. A compulsive jogger. Season tickets to the Knicks. His dresser drawer full of jockstraps. And, of course, tennis. His obsessive quest for the perfect backhand. His Holy Grail.

“I haven’t played tennis with Craig in twenty years,” he said.

“He has a strong backhand,” said Brooks. “His serve is strong. Everything he does with that hand is strong.” Neil didn’t understand. In one breath, Brooks swore Craig wasn’t the type. In the next, he talked of Craig’s strong backhand. “I’m not sure my esteemed colleague at the district attorney’s office needs to know about Craig’s backhand.” How was this supposed to settle Neil’s doubt? “It’s not exactly up to us to tell the D.A. how much Craig’s game has improved over the last year, is it?”

Neil looked disconsolately at his lamb, knowing he would never eat it now.

“No,” he said. “I suppose it isn’t.”

He felt hopelessly mired in the ambiguity of the thing. How was he ever going to decide between Barbara’s maternal instinct and his brother’s strong backhand?

He drew the line at Runamok.

“I’ll take Christine for a few days,” he said, “but you’ll have to kennel the collie.”

Craig stood before him, small and well-muscled, with the physique of a GI fresh from boot camp, ready to fly to Ohio, still a pioneer state as far as Neil was concerned, off to make funeral arrangements for Barbara’s mother, who’d finally succumbed to her malignant melanoma.

“Christine loves that dog,” said Craig.

“And I love my furniture,” insisted Neil.

Craig kenneled Runamok. Craig canceled Christine’s cello lesson, elocution lesson, swimming lesson, and jazz-dance lesson. He deposited Christine in Neil’s teak and marble foyer three days before Neil was to testify as a character witness at Barbara Gatt’s trial.

Christine Gatt was tall for a twelve-year-old, rangy and uncoordinated, her dark coarse hair sheared in a pageboy cut. She had big hands, big feet, peach-fuzz on her upper lip, a pimple on her nose. Here was the girl who suffered from retrograde amnesia, who couldn’t remember a thing about her father’s murder, who couldn’t be called upon to testify, who had been ruled an unreliable witness by a court psychiatrist, a ruling currently under appeal by Brooks’s esteemed colleague at the district attorney’s office.

Christine wired a game system to Neil’s TV. He sat on his eighteenth-century Georgian loveseat and watched her connect and test with nervous fascination. When the system was ready, she snapped the game disk into the console, grabbed the controls, and sat on the couch. She engaged the game. Something called Jersey Devil. Skipped the animated short at the beginning. Went right to Level One.

A purple imp with rabbit ears, Jersey Devil, walked through the darkened grounds of a museum at night, turning this way and that, prompted by Christine’s skilled thumbs, gathering bright pumpkins, popping them like soap bubbles, accruing points.

“So you don’t remember a thing,” Neil lamely ventured from his perch on the loveseat.

She raised her hand peremptorily. “Don’t interrupt,” she said. “I’ve got a mad bomber.”

She was right. One of the pumpkins transformed with startling quickness into a caped figure — a mad bomber — and hurled bombs at Jersey Devil. Jersey Devil, with an adroit flicking of Christine’s thumbs, fought back, punched the mad bomber once, twice, three times, made the mad bomber explode.

With her opponent destroyed, an odd smile came to Christine’s face, one of triumph, her jaw hard, her lips tight, the smile of a girl who believed she was unconquerable. A smile full of vigorous gloating. Full of ego. Much like her father’s smile. The smile of a girl who thought she was the center of the universe and would challenge anybody who believed otherwise. She turned to Neil.

“No,” she said. “I don’t remember a thing.”

He let it go. He was a timid man, even with twelve-year-old girls. She deserved to play Jersey Devil without the meddlesome interruptions of an overweight, middle-aged watercolorist, a heartsick man who wished only to see his brother restored to honor.

Like the mad bomber, he preferred a cape. A cape provided enough protection from the elements and ample ventilation for his corpulent frame. He wore a cape to court.