Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 124, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 757 & 758, September/October 2004

An hour later, having called a friend at Qwest, he had an address to go with the number Murphy had given him. A place on Live Oak Boulevard in Littleton, Colorado, suburb south of Denver. The town had been on the news a couple of years back but Arturo couldn’t remember why.

He headed his Lexus four-wheeler north out of San Antonio toward Austin; he needed to get to Denver quickly but he wouldn’t take a plane. No way. If it’d been intended for him to fly, he’d have feathers on his butt. His stomach roiled at the mere thought of boarding a plane.

The next evening the doorbell chimed and Jack peered out the window.

A cop shuffled in place under the portico’s hanging light, apparently nervous about calling on a member of the upper class, Jack frowning through a gap in the music-room drapes.

Leah was out again, for the evening. Silver high heels and a slinky black dress, red bikini panties he’d seen just before she’d shimmied into the tight dress. Jack felt his marriage slipping away but didn’t have it in him to care; she was probably bonking the decorator. A guy who shows you swatches, for Christ’s sake.

“Don’t drive so goddamn fast in the neighborhood,” he’d yelled after her.

She’d flipped him the bird — Teach you that at Vassar? — not looking back, door from the house to the garage swinging closed... roar of her Beemer as she tore out of the driveway and down the street.

And now he’d got this cop here.

He swung the front door open. “Yes?” Glancing up and down the quiet street, scanning for skulkers and would-be assassins.

“Could I step inside, Mr. Hafner?” the cop asked quietly, respectfully.

Jack frowned. What the hell is this? He hadn’t called them about the phone call with the hit man. This cop serving an order to vacate? Well, it was her house.

Oh Christ! A setup.

Jack stepped back quickly, swinging the door to close it, sure this was Arturo from San Antonio impersonating a cop. Goddamn gun on his hip.

The cop reached out and stopped the door, stepped forward with his black boot in the way. “Sir, I need to talk with you... it’s about your wife.”

Jack frowned. “Tell me from out there,” he whispered, not believing the guy.

After a couple of beats of hem-hawing, the cop said, “She was involved in a traffic accident, sir — I’m afraid she was killed.”

Arturo Zuniga watched the cop at the door talking to the blond-haired man. The police officer had his arm outstretched, holding the door open, the man having tried to close it.

The cop spoke.

The man took a staggering step backward and then swayed for a moment, almost out of sight from the street. He seemed to ask something and the cop nodded. They talked for just a minute longer and the man nodded, closed the door, and the cop turned and headed back to his cruiser, parked half-in, half-out of a pool of glowing orange from the sodium-vapor streetlight, old-growth trees towering into darkness and marching away in a long queue down the center of the grassy boulevard bisecting the street.

Zuniga frowned, shaking his head.

The man in the house wasn’t Murphy. The man was a complication.

“He killed her... as a warning or something,” Jack said aloud to the empty foyer. His voice echoed down the tiled hall, seemingly bouncing off distant surfaces, the intensity of his voice diminishing as it got farther off, fading completely away.

He headed for the side bar and poured a glass tumbler full of bourbon. Drank it down. Poured another.

A clock ticked impossibly loudly from off somewhere... He could hear the faint murmur of a breeze passing under the roof of the portico, muffled sounds of crickets from outside.

Jack frowned. The son of a bitch must have run Leah off the road, making her crash into the bridge abutment. Instant death, the cop had said. Air bag useless at that speed, he’d said. Merciful, at least. He’d said.

Arturo popped the plastic interior-light cover and unscrewed the bulb, got out of the Lexus, and walked up the street toward the wide stone walk leading to the man’s front door, the man who wasn’t Murphy the go-between. He had to cross a side street and walk another block before coming to the end of the sloping walkway, standing there, gazing at the huge house: twenty-foot-high portico, six fluted columns, widow’s walk railing at the roof line, huge black shutters at the tall windows. Big bucks.

He stretched, tight from tension after the long drive. Hefted his briefcase, feeling the weight of the thick dossier; background of the man he’d been hired to deal with, a man who himself was now history as far as his employer was concerned. In fact, to the client, the man had never existed.

Now, he needed to get paid.

The doorbell rang and Jack drunkenly padded on stocking feet down the hall and into the foyer. Had to be the cop coming back with details about where to get the body and such. Christ, couldn’t they wait on that stuff?

Looked out through the curtain gap. Not the cop. Who the —