Murder and Mayhem in Muskego Read online

  MURDER & MAYHEM IN MUSKEGO

  An Anthology

  Jon and Ruth Jordan, editors

  Compilation Copyright © 2012 by Jon and Ruth Jordan

  Individual Story Copyrights © 2012 by the Contributors

  All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover design by JT Lindroos

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Murder & Mayhem in Muskego

  Welcome to Murder & Mayhem in Muskego

  Penny Halle

  Hollywood Lanes

  Megan Abbott

  Pattern Recognition

  Dana Cameron

  Slider

  Reed Farrel Coleman

  Undying Love

  Hilary Davidson

  Nice Guy Type

  Sean Doolittle

  Kross Kill

  J.M. Edwards

  Loose Lips

  Andrew Grant

  The Name of the Dame

  Ted Hertel, Jr.

  The Great Plains

  Chris F. Holm

  Serenity

  Brad Parks

  Chatter

  Gary Phillips

  Chemotherapy

  Kat Richardson

  The End is Never Pretty

  Greg Rucka

  Gravity and Need

  Marcus Sakey

  The Muskego Long Count

  Tom Schreck and Nathan Banks

  The Particular Talents of Lenny Bright

  Zoë Sharp

  Last Call

  Bryan VanMeter

  Universal Donor

  Jeri Westerson

  Acknowledgments

  Jon and Ruth Jordan

  Contributor Biographies

  Other Titles Available from Down & Out Books

  Preview from Gravesend by J.L. Abramo

  Preview from Finders Keepers by David Housewright

  Preview from An Ice Cold Paradise by Terry Holland

  Welcome to Murder & Mayhem in Muskego

  (M&M, the convention not the candy)

  I’ve often been asked how M&M began. My story has always been that I blame a late night, a fully loaded pizza and one too many bottles of mediocre wine. While that’s a colorful story, in reality, only one part of it is marginally true, alcohol was involved just not wine. The reality is Jane Genzel, my friend and partner in crime at the library and I were commiserating about not being able to attend all the mystery conventions we would like. Financial and time constraints were weighing heavily on us. We felt our only option was to bring the mystery community to us! Sounds simple enough, we would select some of our favorite authors, invite them to Muskego Public Library, share the event with other mystery readers and have a great time! It was a Mountain to Muhammad moment. The problem had been solved!

  In the cold clear light of Monday morning, when common sense is said to prevail, we still knew we had a great idea. We really were brilliant! But brilliance only lasts until you actually have to make the idea work. Two months later our collective brilliance was on a downward spiral and gaining momentum, when Jane and I attended the local MWA dinner meeting. We were assigned the table with friends Jon and Ruth Jordan and somewhere during the second course I scraped up enough courage to ask if a day long library event with selected mystery authors might work. Before dessert was served we had mapped out a plan and the rest is history.

  In November 2012, Muskego Public Library will host the 8th Edition of Murder & Mayhem in Muskego. Has it been easy? Well, no. We’ve had our share of bumps and bone jarring pot holes, but it has been a spectacular adventure. Nothing can compare to welcoming 350 mystery readers and knowing you’ve brought these people a one of a kind program. Seeing the authors everyone knows, reads and enjoys actually in my library gives me goose bumps every single time.

  M&M has hosted the most incredible list of authors, far too many to list, the number is well over 400. Without their generous gift of time and their unbelievable talents, Murder & Mayhem would not exist. To each and every one, I say thank you.

  To the Friends of Muskego Public Library, I owe a huge debt. They said yes to the vague plan for this event and every year since, they say yes again. The Friends spend all year raising money to support Murder & Mayhem. Thank you, thank you and thank you. Support your local library and Friends group, they need you.

  And you, Dear Reader, thank you!

  Penny

  Muskego Public Library

  May 2012

  Back to TOC

  Hollywood Lanes

  Megan Abbott

  The way their banner-blue uniforms pressed up against each other, the wilting collar corners, her twitchy cocktail apron and his regulation pinman trousers—I was only a kid, but I knew it was something and it made my head go hot, my stomach pinch. Eddie worked the alley, made the lanes shine with that burring rotary machine. Carol slung beer at the cocktail lounge, heels digging in the heavy carpet, studded each night with peanut skins, cigarette ashes, cherry stems.

  They were there every day, at 3:30, in the dark, narrow alley behind the pinsetting machines. And I saw them, saw them plain as day as I sat just outside the machine room on a metal stool, picking summer scabs off my knee. First time by accident, just hiding out back there, where it was quiet and no one came around.

  Eddie’d been there a month, he and his wife, Sherry, who ran concessions with my mother over by the shoe station. He had blue-black hair, slick like those olives in the jar at the Italian grocery store. When he walked through the joint, coming on his shift, everyone, the waitresses, even old Jimmy, the sweaty-faced manager, lit up like a row of sparklers because he was a friendly guy with a lot of smiles and his uniform always finely pressed and the strong smell of limey cologne coming off him like a movie star or something.

  No one could figure him and Sherry. Sherry with the damp, faded blonde features, eyes empty as the rubber dish tub she was always resting her dusty elbows on. Cracking gum, staring open-mouthed at the crowds, the families, the amateur baseball team, the VFW fellas, the beery young marrieds swinging their arms around, skidding down the lanes, collapsing into each other’s laps after each crack of the pins, Sherry never moved, except to shift her weight from one spindly leg to the other.

  Just shy of thirteen, I was at Hollywood Lanes every day that summer. Husband three months gone, my mother was working double shifts to keep me in shoes, to hear her tell it. I helped the dish washers, loading racks of cloudy glasses into the steaming machine, the only girl they ever let do it. Some days, I helped Georgie spray out the shoes or use Clean Strike on the balls.

  But I always beat tracks at 3:30 so I could be behind the pin racks. Eddie and Carol, his hands spread across her waist, leaning into her, saying things to her. What was he saying? What was he telling her?

  Sherry’s face looked tired in the yellow haze of the fluorescent pretzel carousel.

  “Kid,” she said. “You’re here all the time.”

  I didn’t say anything. My mother was stacking cups in the corner, squirming in her uniform, too tight across her chest.

  “You know Eddie? You know him?” Sherry gestured over to the lanes.

  I nodded. My mother spun one of the waxy cups on her finger, watching.

  “I know what’s what,” Sherry said, looking over at my mother. I felt something ring in my chest, like a buzzer or school bell.

  “You don’t know,” my mother said, looking at the rotating hotdogs, thick and glossy.

  “I got eyes,” Sherry said, gaze fixed on the lanes, on Eddie, running the floor waxer over them jauntily. He liked using the machine. He kind of danced with it, not in a showy way, but there was a rhythm to the way he moved it, twirled around on it like he was ice skating. Billy, the last guy, twice Eddie’s age, looked like he would fall asleep as he did it, weaving down each lane, hung over from a long night at Marshall’s Tavern. His hands always shook when he handed out shoes. Then he threw up all over the men’s room during Family Night and Jimmy fired him.

  “Don’t tell me I don’t got eyes,” Sherry was saying.

  “We all got eyes,” my mother said. “But there’s nothing to see.” Her brow wet with grease from the grill, her eyeshadow smeared. “There’s not a goddamned thing to see.”

  I didn’t say anything. I never said anything. But something was funny in the way Sherry was looking at Eddie. She always had that blank look, but it used to seem like a little girl, a doll, limbs soft and loose, black buttons for eyes. Now, though, it was different. It was different, but I wasn’t sure how.


  Back there in that space behind the pins, it was like backstage and no one could see even though all eyes were facing it. As soon as you walked in a bowling alley that was where your eyes went. You couldn’t help it. But you never thought that could be going on behind the pins, so tidy and white.

  And each day I’d watch. It was a hundred degrees or more back there. It was filled with noise, all the sharp cracks echoing through the place. But I was watching the way Carol trembled. Because she always seemed so cool and easy, with her long pane of dark hair, her thick fringe of dark lashes pasted on in the Ladies Room one by one. (“They get her tips, batting those babies like a raccoon in heat,” Myrna, the old lady who worked dayshift concessions, said. “Those and the pushup brassiere.”)

  Carol was talking to Diane, the other cocktail waitress. Diane used to work at the Stratton but, to hear her tell it, the minute her tits dropped a half-inch, they put her out on her can. She hated the Lanes. “How much tips can I get from these Knights of Columbus types,” she always groaned. She worked at Whitestone Lanes too and had plenty to say about the customers there as well.

  I was sitting at a table in the cocktail lounge, looking at pictures of Princess Grace in someone’s leftover Life Magazine. I wasn’t supposed to be in there, but no one ever bothered me until Happy Hour.

  “She can jaw all she wants,” Carol was saying, eating green cherries from the dish on the bar. “It’s all noise to me.” She was talking about Sherry.

  “She should take it up with her man, she has something to say about things,” Diane said.

  “I don’t care what she does.”

  “What I hear, she can’t show her face in Ozone Park. They all remember her family. Trash from trash.”

  “I’m going to haul bills tonight, I can tell. Look at ‘em,” Carol said, surveying the softball team swarming in like bright bumble bees.

  “Yeah, good luck,” Diane said, then nodded at Carol’s neckline. “Bend, bend, bend.”

  In the bathroom once, right after, I pretended to be fixing my hair, snapping and resnapping a colored rubber band around my slack ponytail. I knew Carol would be in there, always went in there after. When she came out of the stall, I looked at her in the mirror. Her face steaming pink, she brushed her shiny hair in long strokes, swooping her arm up and down and swiveling a little like she was dancing or something. She was watching her own face in the mirror. I wondered what she was watching for.

  I saw the dust on her back, shaken between her shoulder blades. I wanted to reach my hand out and brush it away.

  Eddie was oiling the lanes and saw me watching, eating French fries off a paper plate at the head of Lane 3.

  “And there’s my girl,” he said. He said it like we talked all the time, but it was the first time he’d ever said anything to me. “Stuck inside every day. Don’t you like to go to the Y or something? Go to the city pool?”

  “I don’t like to swim,” I said. Which was true, but my mother didn’t want me to go there by myself. When summer started, she let me go once to a pool day with the kids at school, but when I got home, she was sitting on the front steps of our building like she’d been waiting for me for hours. Her face was red and puffy and I never saw her so glad to see me. That was the only time I went. Besides, she’d never liked it. Mr. Upton, before he left, was always telling her I’d get diseases at the public pool.

  “All kids like to swim, don’t they?” Eddie was saying. He tilted his head and smiled. “Don’t girls like to show off their swimming suits?”

  I ate another fry, even though it was too hot and made my mouth burn, lips sting with salt.

  “I always liked to go, just splash around and stuff,” he said. “You got no one to take you, huh?”

  “I don’t really swim much,” I said.

  He nodded with a grin, like he was figuring something out. “I get it. Well, I’d take you, but I guess your daddy wouldn’t like it.”

  I felt my thigh slide on the plastic seat. I looked at the far end of the lanes. I felt my thigh come unstuck and slide off the edge of the seat and it was shaking. “He’s gone” I said.

  Eddie paused for a flickering second before he smiled. “Then I guess I got a chance.”

  Fred Upton was my mother’s husband. My real old man died when I was a baby. He had some kind of infection that went to his brain.

  There were some guys in between, but two years ago it was all about Mr. Upton. We moved from Kew Gardens when she got tangled up with him and quit her job at Leona Pick selling dresses. She’d met Mr. Upton working there, sold him a billowy nightgown for his fiancée and he took her out for spaghetti with clams at LaStella on Queens Boulevard that very night. They got hitched at City Hall three weeks later.

  Before he left, times were pretty good. It was always trips to Austin Street to buy new shoes with t-straps and lunch at the Hamburger Train and going in the dress store with the soft carpet, running our hands through the linen and seersucker dresses—with names like buttercup yellow, grasshopper green, goldenrod, strawberry punch. One day he bought her three dresses, soft summer sheaths with boatneck collars like a woman you’d see on TV or the movies. The sales lady wrapped them in tissue for her even when my mother told her they weren’t a gift.

  “They’re a gift for you, aren’t they?” the lady had said, her pink cake icing lips doing something like a smile.

  Those dresses were sitting in the closet now, unworn for months yellowing, smelling like stale perfume, old smoke. Never saw my mother out of one of her two uniforms these days, except when she slept in the foldout couch, usually in her slip. Some days I tugged off her pantyhose while she slept.

  “He said he was going to the Aqueduct,” I heard my mother say on the telephone to a girlfriend soon after he left. “But his sister tells me he’s in Miami Beach.”

  It had been three months now and wherever Fred Upton went, he wasn’t in Queens. Someone my mother met in a bar told her he heard Mr. Upton was dead, killed in a hotel fire in Atlantic City the same night he’d left. That was the last I heard. I didn’t ask. I could tell she didn’t want me to. I hoped she’d forget about Mr. Upton and marry a mailman or a man who worked in an office. As it was, I figured us for six more weeks of this and we’d be moving in with my grandmother in Flushing.

  “She’s got ants in her pants, that one,” Myrna was saying to Sherry. Myrna had a big birthmark on her cheek that twitched whenever she disapproved of something, which was a lot. She was talking about Carol, who she called “Lane 30,” because that was where the cocktail lounge was. “Thinks she’s got it coming and going.”

  “Don’t I know. She better watch where she shakes that,” Sherry said, face tight and sallow under the fluorescent light. She looked like a sickly yellow bird, a pinched lemon.

  “You got ideas.”

  “Sure I got ideas. And I’m no rabbit. Maybe she needs to hear that.”

  “I’ll see she does.”

  Sherry nodded. Those flat eyes were jumping. That slack lip now drawn tight. Her face all moving, all jigsawing around. She looked different, more interesting. Not pretty. It was all too much for pretty. But you couldn’t take your eyes off it.

  I wasn’t supposed to be back there at all. Once, years before, some kid, not even fifteen-years-old, was working at the Lanes. He got stuck in the pinsetter machine and died. There were a million different stories of how it happened, but ever since, no one under twenty-one was supposed to be back there. But I never got near the clanging machine. I stayed in the alcove where they kept the cleaning equipment.

  From there, I could see them and they never saw me. They never even looked around.