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

Rough words, unpoetic words, but true words. His tongue tripped over the miserably hard consonant four times, sounding like four Turkish thrusts, damning his brother once and for all, letting the world know that Craig had indeed delivered the said quartet of stab wounds with the perfect backhand he was so famous for.

Later, with the girl in her bed and the dishwasher humming in the kitchen, and the anchorfool on the late local news telling the good burghers of Manhattan that the jury would deliberate on Barbara Gatt’s guilt or innocence tomorrow, Neil pondered the nature of truth. He wasn’t a man predisposed to dyspepsia, yet now he suffered from it constantly. Wondered about his compulsion to tell the truth no matter what the cost. Even a bit of low-cal cottage cheese and caraway seed could rankle his stomach. He questioned the sagacity of his own moral code. He was perplexed by the nature of truth. He lifted the TV remote and zapped the anchorfool. Was the truth inviolate, never to be shaped or softened according to need? He wondered how he could so easily savage Barbara’s character in front of all those people, then, with a single stuttered sentence, turn his brother into a murderer. Though no longer a practicing Catholic, lapsed in early youth like so many other casualties of the Sexual Revolution, he felt, at least in this case, that he must define himself by one of the New Testament’s more famous mythological contexts, that of Judas.

He got up and ambled down the hall toward the loft stairs. He checked the girl.

He was surprised to see her sitting up in bed, the glow from the theater sign across the street lighting her face, her hands clutching her blankets to her collarbones, her dark eyes staring at a wayward maple leaf stuck to the rain-soaked window pane. He had never seen such a woeful child.

“You’re not tired?” he asked.

She turned to him, her intelligent but plain face quickly crumbling into an agonized visage of hopelessness, her thick dark eyebrows pinching toward the bridge of her big nose, her lower lip curling toward her chin in a rictus of grief. She began to cry. The bleak and piteous sobs of a twelve-year-old child who had no father, who might lose her mother, whose grandmother had succumbed to malignant melanoma in Ohio. Neil didn’t know what to do. What new territory was this? He approached the bed cautiously, keeping his eyes on the sobbing child, afraid she might behave with the unpredictability of a wild animal. What was a temporary parent to do in an emergency like this? He sat on the edge of her bed. He put his hand on her shoulder. He was surprised, even alarmed, when she clung to him. Her sobbing intensified, as miserable and desperate a sound as Neil had ever heard.

“You should try to sleep,” he said, not knowing what else to say, putting his arm around her, rocking her. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”

“I’ll never feel better,” she said.

Then she cried some more. She pressed her head against his chest. He stared at his Second Empire armoire with carved ivory handles against the wall, wondering what he could say to make her feel better, but finally thought, as the rain came down outside, that he shouldn’t say anything at all. No one had ever clung to him like this before. Her girlish muscles squeezed him with bitter strength.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

He stopped rocking her. Stopped because it was as if, with this unexpected apology to her father, Christine had given him a magic looking glass; and in that looking glass he at last saw the truth, understood, with a startling and even frightening clarity, who, exactly, had killed Paul Gatt. By peering into this looking glass he knew how a young girl like Christine might feel if she were hoisted over her father’s shoulder and told she would never see her mother again. He understood her outrage, and the indomitable will of her ego, an ego as strong as her father’s. He could easily understand how, carried over Paul’s shoulder like that, she might make a grab for the Wiltshire Staysharp on the counter, and how she could readily muster the strength, especially in her terror, to swing low and deep, like Jersey Devil at the mad bomber. Was she not, like her father, a force, with a personality as compelling as a thunderstorm? Was she not, like her father, the center of the universe, and willing to challenge anyone — including her father — who threatened the equilibrium of her own personal cosmos? Not a Turkish thrust at all. In the looking glass, Neil saw overhead thrusts, but overhead thrusts from a girl hanging upside down over her father’s capacious back.

In the looking glass, Neil saw a sad little episode of patricide.