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

“You need a shower, too. You’ve still got paint in your hair.”

Sean Ellis grunted but didn’t move. He entered each day with the ease of a twelve-pound breech birth.

“You better get a move on. I’m not waiting. I’ll take all the work myself.”

“Like hell you will.” He rolled over, swung his legs over the side, and followed his brother out of the bedroom. He went into the shower and watched his brother go into the kitchen.

Matthew Ellis opened the refrigerator and took out two bagels and a block of cream cheese. Dropping a bagel into the toaster, he reached up and got down two coffee mugs and poured a cup for himself and one for his brother. He carried his cup, milked and sugared, into the living room.

His mother lay asleep on the sofa. Matthew walked around the living room chairs and turned off the television. More and more often he found her asleep in her clothes in the living room, as if she had only enough energy to get inside the front door.

Chris Ellis was a petite woman, barely over a hundred pounds. Her son thought she was slipping from lean to frail but hoped that he was wrong. Her blanket had slipped down to her waist and her book was open on her chest.

He sipped his coffee and looked at himself in the mirror over the sofa. Stocky and muscular, he was dressed in khaki shorts and a dark blue T-shirt from his stint at the medical examiner’s office. Across his chest ran the unofficial motto of that office:

               Homicide?

                Suicide?

                I decide.

He looked down at his mother’s tiny fists, clenched in her sleep like a baby’s. Her thumbs were tucked inside her fingers. He wondered if she had been fighting in her sleep and hoped that she had won. He wanted to cover them but knew that if he adjusted her blanket, she’d startle and waken.

The phone in the kitchen rang and he rushed to answer it.

“Hello,” he said.

“Matthew, boy. Is that you?”

“Yeah. Who is this?”

“It’s your dad. Don’t you recognize my voice?”

He did, but denied it so that his father would have to identify himself. Every little bit of distance helped. “What do you want?”

“I’d like to see you and your brother. Talk about things. See where we stand.”

“Not a chance. You made your choices, now five with them. We sure as hell had to.”

“Look, Matt, I know you’re angry...”

“Angry? I’m homicidal, you bastard.”

“Put your brother on.”

“Sorry, I can’t hear you. You seem to be breaking up.”

He hung up the phone and began to massage his temples with his fingertips.

“What’s up, Matt?” his brother asked as he walked into the kitchen.

“What else? That was Dad with his Monday-morning overture. Let’s talk, boys, let’s start over, let’s forget everything that happened. I’m a changed man. I’ve found Jesus.” He squeezed his eyes shut and began to use his palms. “I get such a headache talking to him. You gotta take the next one, man.”

“Whatever.” He fixed his coffee, handed Matt the bagel from the toaster, and put one in for himself.

He was as long, lean, and fair as his brother was short, wide, and dark. Like his brother, he’d dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. August around D.C. made anything else unbearable without air conditioning.

“Sean, let me ask you a question.”

“Okay.”

“Have you noticed how gray Mom is getting? She’s only forty. Do you think stress can do that to you?”

“I don’t know, man. I’m the art major, remember. I didn’t take psychology.”

They ate in silence, washed their cups and plates, stacked them to dry, and turned out the lights before they left the apartment. Matt stood by the door, his hand on the light switch, looking at his mother’s shape on the sofa.

“You know, Sean, when I was little, I thought the worst times of my life were those nights Mom came home with a date. I was wrong. I’d give anything for her to come home with somebody now. She doesn’t even use the bed for herself anymore.”

“Let it be, Matt. We’ve got work to do.”

Their ten-year-old Subaru had all the pickup of a pair of drunken oxen. Like their previous car, they had bought it at an auction for less than a hundred bucks, planned to drive it till it stopped and then get another one. Maintenance had no place in their plans. It was just delaying the inevitable. Like a respirator or a feeding tube. Besides, it cost money.

Mickey Sloan’s office was tidy and well organized. He had a sofa along one wall for his field agents to sit on and read the papers they were going out to serve. He sat facing them inside a U-shaped desk. His desk phone had five lines. A missed call was a job lost and so he carried a cell phone and a pager with him at all times. A copy machine sat on top of a wall of file cabinets. On the opposite wall, next to the window, was a large map of the metropolitan region. Through the blinds, Mickey could see the courthouse across the street; a giant paper factory, without any smokestacks. His computer screen had a screen-saver design of a bearded caveman with a piece of paper in his hands, trotting forever across a barren landscape.