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

Christine’s bag sat packed by the door. She waited in Craig’s car with Runamok, the dog she loved so much. She was happy because the suppertime anchorfool had told the good burghers of Manhattan in his best anchorfool voice that her mother would be acquitted; the jury couldn’t in good conscience hand down a guilty verdict when new evidence, namely Craig’s confession, pointed toward another possible suspect. Any doubt was reasonable as far as an American jury was concerned.

Neil and Craig stood in the living room. Neil’s TV was just a TV again, not the nocturnal battleground for Jersey Devil and the mad bomber. The bed in the spare room was just a bed again, not the stage for a young girl’s remorse. And Craig was just his brother again, kind, affable, sensitive, but still changed, still afflicted, transformed forever by the violent death of another human being.

“And will they go after you?” asked Neil, because he saw this, too, in the looking glass: the reason for Craig’s confession, the logic behind Anthony Brooks’s court performance, his own surprising role as unwitting collusionist. Saw all the careful but necessary card-stacking Craig, Barbara, and Brooks had craftily undertaken in order to protect Christine.

“All they have is your testimony,” said Craig. “And they can’t convict me on that. Not when there’s so much conflicting evidence. Thanks for looking after Christine. She really likes you.”

“She does?”

Craig looked away. “We did it for Christine,” he said. “You understand that, don’t you?”

Yes, he did. What he didn’t understand was how he could have been so obtuse. How he could have been duped.

“What about the jurisprudence of the thing?” asked Neil, still uncomfortable.

Craig shrugged apologetically. “Christine’s going to have her life,” he said. “Isn’t that jurisprudence enough?”

The calm returned. But it wasn’t like the old calm. Neil sat in his studio trying to find that deft stroke or two, the elusive brushwork that would render his family of mallards with the color and form his collectors had come to expect from him. Not like the old calm, because Paul Gatt was dead. He tried a dab of cobalt blue to darken the green, but that just made the drake look like a gander. And never had he seen a gander in the marsh. Putting mallards in the marsh had been a stretch in the first place. He shook his head, his brush poised, and thought of Paul. Nothing would change the terrible but commonplace sequence: he and Craig out with the Gatts, those vulgar shooters, and the simmering inclinations of Craig toward Barbara. Nothing would stop those deadly dominoes from falling: Paul like a bull, his daughter like a Jersey Devil, and the Wiltshire Staysharp like a Turkish thrust.

He put his brush down. He stared at his picture. And he knew he was going to have to start over. He liked the marsh. But the mallards didn’t go. He unclamped the watercolor from his easel. He would do the marsh again. But this time he would do it in darker tones. Tones that would capture the hidden meaning of... of all this. He pinned a fresh sheet to his easel, the best, Arches 300-lb. hot-press, knowing that doubt would remain an unwelcome guest in his Bohemian sanctuary from now on. He lightly penciled a sketch of the marsh. He raised the water level. But the problem of the empty space in the lower left corner remained. He quickly sketched in the great blue heron. And took solace in knowing that he had at last solved the problem.

The great blue heron, she of the Payne’s gray and cerulean blue, had come home to the reeds, lilies, and shallows of the marsh. And in his rendering of the bird, he again found the soul-sustaining satisfaction of a pure and simple labor. Christine Gatt was a killer, Paul Gatt was dead, and Craig would remain forever changed. But at least in his own inner world, the world of the studio, where the rhythms of life were slow, measured, and certain, and potential found its form in the soft illumination of the north light, he could weather any gale, sweeten discord to harmony, and carry his new doubt not as a personal sorrow but as a way to better understand his own personal cosmos.

Whatever It Takes by Benjamin M. Schutz

Edgar Award winner Benjamin M. Schutz described his latest story for us this way: “It is a day in the life of two young private eye/process servers — Hardy Boys for the nineties. It is the product of a summer listening to my sons, two young private eye/process servers, learn bow the real world operates as the bearers of bad tidings.”

* * *

“Wake up, Sean, Mickey called. We’ve got work.”

His brother, Matthew, prodded him with a toe.