The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

Gregory Fallis And Maybe the Horse Will Learn to Sing from Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

“It’s my husband,” Chloe Stenning said. “He’s... I think he’s been cheating on me.”

Now that’s a sad thing for a person to say out loud to a total stranger. Even if the stranger is a private detective.

And me... was I the least bit sympathetic? Did I feel even a lick of empathy? No, I wasn’t, and no, I didn’t. What I was thinking was this: I hate this work. I was thinking: I really hate Kevin Sweeney.

“Why do you think he’s cheating on you?” I asked.

“Well, Mr. Wheeler...”

“Call me Joop,” I said. No need to be formal. I mean, the woman was fessing up her deepest, darkest suspicions about her husband. I could let her call me by my name.

“Joop?” she asked. “Is that Dutch? I notice you have an accent.”

I come from South Carolina. Which is separated from the Netherlands by a big chunk of the Atlantic Ocean. “Tell me about your husband,” I said.

And she told me. It was, sad to say, a common story. Her husband Eddie had been working late for the last six weeks or so. Not terribly late... just a couple of hours. And not every night...just once or twice a week.

“But you don’t think he’s really working late,” I said. “Is that right?”

She nodded.

“I’ve tried calling him at his office when it happens,” she said. “His co-workers always tell me he’s gone.”

“Maybe the co-workers made a mistake,” I said. Though it didn’t seem likely.

Chloe Stenning didn’t seem to think much of the idea either. She shook her head. “No, he’s cheating on me. I know it.”

“How do you know it?”

“I just know it.”

Well, it’s hard to argue with that logic. “Have you asked him?”

She shook her head.

“Don’t you think you should?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t want him to think I’m suspicious.”

“I see,” I said. Which was as big a lie as I’ve told in recent history.

I looked at my notepad and silently cursed Kevin Sweeney. And as long as I was silently cursing, I put in a word or two for Sweeney’s wife Mary Margaret. And a few more for Professor Warren Lister. I gave my own fool self a few choice words as well.

Sweeney and I have a small private investigative agency in one of those quaint little Massachusetts seacoast villages north of Boston. Mostly what we do is criminal defense work. A little arson, a little murder, a little drug dealing in the night. It may not be nice, but it feels cleaner than most domestic work. There is something about an imploding relationship that makes a simple robbery-homicide seem almost tidy.

But sometimes, when the cash flow gets a tad tight, Sweeney and I have to take on domestic cases. And our cash flow had become a cash trickle. Which was why I was sitting in our conference room with Chloe Stenning and Warren Lister.

Professor Warren Lister. He was the reason I was silently cursing Sweeney and his normally charming wife. Mary Margaret had decided to go back to school and finish her degree. Which is a fine thing in itself. But she took a sociology course that happened to be taught by our boy Warren. And when he learned Mary Margaret’s husband was a licensed private investigator, he went quivery all over and asked her to arrange a meeting with him. Which she did. Who wants to irritate their professor?

Sweeney, to give him credit — which I sorely hate to do — wasn’t at all happy about meeting Warren. Sweeney’s a former police officer, and he’s got a cop’s disdain for and suspicion of academics. Still, he dearly loves his wife and would do just about anything for her.

So Sweeney agreed to meet Warren for lunch one day. And he persuaded me to tag along as well. I thought it could be a hoot. And I figured I’d get myself a free lunch. And besides, I’d do just about anything for Mary Margaret Sweeney my ownself.

We met in one of those trendy restaurants. Lots of wood and brass, high fern content, omelettes with goat’s cheese, a microbrewery. After we ordered, Warren told us he wanted to study us. Not us in particular but private investigators. He wanted to follow us around over the summer break, he said, and look at what we did and how we did it. He said he wanted to explore our “occupational milieu” and our “work culture.”

Sweeney was reluctant. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not even sure we have an occupational milieu.”

It was clear Sweeney didn’t want his wife’s sociology professor hanging out with us over the summer. You could almost see his flesh crawl at the idea. He looked to me for support.

“Sure we do,” I said. “We’ve got bags full of occupational milieu. We’ve got enough occupational milieu to choke a donkey.” I dearly love making Sweeney uncomfortable. It’s wrong, I know, and I ought to be terribly ashamed of myself.

Warren looked at me when I spoke up. I knew that look. A lot of folks up north, the moment they hear a Southern accent they think two things. Dumb and racist. They seem to think all Southern white folks spend their time picking their teeth and trying to find some way to keep black folks down. I’m used to it. Mostly. Besides, in this biz it sometimes helps to have folks think you’re dumber than you really are.

“I don’t know,” Sweeney said again. “Dr. Lister, we do...”

“Call me Warren,” Lister said. He was trying for that just-us-boys thing. But it wasn’t working.

“Warren, we do private investigations,” Sweeney said. “The operative word there is ‘private.’ I don’t think our clients would like it if we brought along observers.”

Warren was ready for that one. He told us about the “rigorous human subject policies” of the university and offered to show us the confidentiality restrictions covered in his research proposal.

I don’t know about other folks, but I’d rather shove a fondue fork in my eye than read a research proposal.

“Oh, I don’t think we need to see the proposal right now,” I said. “You can mail a copy of it to Sweeney.”

Sweeney didn’t seem amused. I pointed with my fork. “You going to eat those fries, Warren?”

Warren pushed his french fries in my direction. Then he proceeded to swear enough oaths to secrecy and confidentiality and discretion to please the CIA, MI5, and a computer software company.

Sweeney tried a few more discouraging words, but old Warren said he was ready to do whatever it took. And me, I egged the poor sap on.

Which is where I made my big mistake. Most of the misery I’ve suffered in my semi-long and somewhat wicked life has been self-inflicted. I’d forgotten that when the semester ended Sweeney and Mary Margaret were heading to Ireland for two weeks. Which meant I was the only person with an available occupational milieu for Warren to study. So in trying to tweak Sweeney’s nose all I’d managed to do was to step on my own dick. There’s a lesson there, I suspect.

So that’s how I found myself sitting in the conference room with a Yankee sociology professor and a woman who’d decided her husband was cheating on her.

“Mrs. Stenning, do you love your husband?” I asked.

She nodded. “Yes, I do.”

“Talk to him,” I said. “Ask him what’s going on. There might be a simple explanation for his behavior.”

“I can’t do that,” she said. “I can’t confront him until I know.”

“You don’t need to confront him, Mrs. Stenning,” I said. “But if you love your husband, you should trust him enough to...”

“But I don’t trust him,” she said. “Why are you trying to talk me out of this? Don’t you want my case?”

Well, no, I didn’t want her case. But I did want her money. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just don’t want you to rush into this. This is an important decision.”

She gave me a cold look. And got out her checkbook.

Before I let Chloe Stenning leave the office, I asked her a lot of really nosy questions and suggested some rude behavior she should try. A lot of detective work involves really nosy questions and rude behavior. I asked about her sex life with her husband — folks having affairs often show either an increase or a decrease in their sexual appetite. It turned out she and Eddie hadn’t done it at all in the last couple of months. I asked if her Eddie had showed any radical mood swings, any bursts of anger or tears — having and hiding an affair plays hell with a person’s nerves. Chloe said Eddie had seemed sort of quiet and depressed ever since he started coming home late.

Warren sat quietly through all the questions, trying not to look uncomfortable. It’s not pleasant, listening to folks bare their souls. But you get used to it.

I suggested that Chloe start searching her husband’s clothes, looking for anything that might indicate he was trashing around. Motel receipts, the scent of perfume or smoke on his clothes, someone else’s hair. What Sweeney would call trace evidence. And I suggested she go through all of Eddie’s old credit card receipts. And that she listen in on his phone calls if she could. And that she start keeping track of the odometer on Eddie’s car so we could tell how far he was driving.

I suggested all sorts of despicable stuff, stuff you should never ever do to a person you love.

Chloe seemed eager to help.

Warren sat there taking it all in. Soaking up that occupational milieu. I think he was trying for a hard-boiled look, but he was only managing to look professorial and confused.

So there we were the next day, Warren and I, sitting in my car parked outside the gate to the Creighton Shipyard. We were waiting for Eddie Stenning to come cruising through the gate in his company car. A white Saturn.

I’m a Southern boy. I belong to a culture well grounded in conversation. I found it impossible to sit there with another person in the car and not talk. So I heard myself putting voice to the thought that had been wasping around in my brain ever since we took the case.

“I hate marital work,” I said.

“Why?” he asked. He opened his little notebook. To record my thoughts, I suppose. I must have been letting a little work culture peek out. But that’s what he was there for, so I gave it to him.

“I hate it on account of it’s ugly,” I said. “Two folks who are supposed to love each other. Who probably used to love each other. And now one of them is paying us good money to follow the other. It’s just ugly. And besides, it probably won’t matter what we learn.”

“Why not?”

Cars were beginning to leave the shipyard gate. The day shift was over.

“It never does any good,” I said. “Once a person is suspicious enough to hire a PI to follow their spouse around, the relationship is headed for disaster. If we confirm the client’s suspicions, the relationship usually goes down in flames. If we don’t confirm the client’s suspicions, the client usually stays suspicious. Which means the relationship will probably go down in flames.”

“If it doesn’t do any good, why do you do it?”

I grinned. “A man’s got to buy beans and tortillas,” I said. “Besides, I keep hoping that if I can give a suspicious spouse some good news maybe they’ll keep things together long enough to work out their problems. Maybe the horse will learn to sing.”

Warren looked at me like I’d taken leave of my senses. I’ve seen that look before. Sweeney looks at me that way all the time. “What’s that about a horse?” he asked. “I don’t understand.”

“There he is,” I said. I pointed to a white Saturn in the middle of the slow stream of cars leaving the shipyard.

I started the engine, shifted into first, and then just sat there.

Warren leaned forward as the Saturn drove off. “Let’s go,” he said. “He’s getting away.”

I shook my head. “Maybe not,” I said, and pointed out the window. “ ’Cause there he is again.”

A second white Saturn was leaving the gate. Then a third. And a fourth.

Over the next fifteen minutes we counted fourteen white Saturns. It seemed every mid-level executive in the Creighton Shipyard was issued a white Saturn.

“Now what do we do?” Warren asked.

“Do you watch the television news at eleven?” I asked.

Warren looked confused, but he nodded.

“Good,” I said. “I’ll come pick you up at your house when the news is over. We’ll take care of it then.”

Warren was sitting on his porch waiting for me when I drove up. He was in my car almost before it stopped. Grinning like he’d just won the pumpkin judging contest.

“What is it we’re going to do?” he asked. He was dressed all in black. Black jeans, black turtleneck, black sneakers. The sneakers had that right-out-of-the-box look. I suppose I was lucky he wasn’t wearing a ninja mask and toting those little throwing stars.

“We’re going to make it a little easier to follow Eddie Stenning from work tomorrow,” I said.

Warren’s eyes were all glittery bright. It affects some folks that way. Being out late at night when all the decent people are at home in bed. Out on some secret mission, preparing to do something a little shady. Some folks get caught up in it. They think it’s sexy.

And it is, sort of. It’s a sick thing, maybe, but it’s fun. Not that I’d have admitted it to Warren.

“I see,” Warren said. “We’re going to plant a tracking device on his car.”

“Well, we’re going to do something a tad less James Bond than that,” I said. “I’m a low-tech sort of guy.”

Warren was grinning like a coke fiend. That boy was like to wet his pants with excitement.

It didn’t take long to get to the Stennings’ house — a two-story Tudor-looking unit with a bay window and some sort of creeping ivy that was slowly destroying the neighbors’ privacy fence. Stenning didn’t live all that far from Warren. The upper middle class tends to congregate in convenient clumps.

I mentioned that to Warren, thinking he might like a bit of PI wisdom.

“Propinquity,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“Propinquity,” he said again. “The tendency toward geographical proximity among social classes.”

“Ah,” I said. “Propinquity. Right.”

I drove a block past the Stenning house and parked.

“Pass me over that flashlight, would you?” I keep a big five-cell Maglite in the car. Everybody should. You never know when you’re going to need a flashlight.

Warren handed me the flashlight. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“I don’t want you to do anything,” I said, “except hush up. This is only going to take a second, but you need to be quiet. Take some notes or something.”

The lights were off in the house. The Saturn was parked in the drive.

Warren was hovering around me like a moth. “Won’t the flashlight attract attention when you turn it on?” he whispered.

“Why on earth would I turn it on?” I asked.

I walked up to the Saturn and used the big Maglite to smash the right taillight. Didn’t hardly make a sound at all.

Tuesday afternoon only one white Saturn with a busted taillight drove out the shipyard gate.

Eddie Stenning was a delight to tail. He drove like a Mormon. He used his turn signals, he came to a full stop at stop signs, he slowed up and prepared to stop at yellow lights. My grammy could have tailed Eddie. And my grammy drinks a bit.

Eddie drove straight home.

He did the same thing Wednesday afternoon.

That’s the nature of surveillance work. There’s a lot of waiting. You just have to learn patience. It’s a zen thing — sitting quietly and waiting, being aware without anticipation or expectation. Taking the world exactly as it comes.

I’m used to it. I even sort of enjoy it. But old Warren, he didn’t have a good grasp on the tao of surveillance. He had no tolerance at all for sitting and watching. Not many Yankees do. I blame it on the fact that there aren’t enough porches up north. Folks never acquire the knack of sitting quietly and watching the world move by.

Warren fidgeted like a drunk with the Dt’s. And the man could not keep quiet. Once he got over his Yankee reserve, he began to ask questions. Asked me about PI work, about growing up in the segregated South, about the lack of depth in the Red Sox bull pen, about the Mars lander.

By Thursday afternoon I was giving some serious thought to tying Warren up and chunking him in the trunk.

That was the afternoon Eddie Stenning turned off his usual route home.

“Where’s he going?” Warren asked.

“How should I know?”

Warren’s eyes got big and lit up. He was jazzed. “This is it, isn’t it. He’s going... to wherever it is he’s going.”

And this guy is a college professor. “There’s no need to get ourselves in a sweat just yet,” I said. “He might just be heading for the drive-thru window at Colonel Sanders. Or maybe he’s got to pick up the dry cleaning.”

“My God, this is fun,” Warren said.

I wasn’t sure why Warren was so worked up. It wasn’t like we were in a high-speed pursuit. Eddie was still driving with all the reckless daring of Ward Cleaver on tranquilizers.

Then Eddie turned into one of the arched entrances of the Steadwell Gardens Cemetery.

I was stunned. “Well, I’ll be damned and go to hell,” I said.

Warren goggled at me. “What? What’s the matter?”

I drove past the entrance and pulled the car over to the curb.

“Aren’t we going to follow him in?” Warren asked.

But I was already halfway out the door by that time, and jogging back to the entrance. I heard Warren open his door and follow along after.

By the time I got to the entrance Eddie and his Saturn were nowhere to be seen.

I couldn’t help but grin. “That dog,” I said.

“What’s going on?”

“We just got scraped off,” I said.

“What? What? Scraped off? I don’t understand.”

“Scraped off,” I said. “It’s what you do when you don’t want to be followed. The followee scrapes off the follower.”

But it was clear Warren was still confused. So I explained.

Steadwell Gardens is the oldest and largest cemetery in town. It takes up three or four suburban blocks and looks like a private golf course. Lots of tall trees, softly rolling hills, narrow curving roads. The trees are planted in such a way as to give grieving families lots of privacy, so Steadwell Gardens feels more like a whole bunch of little cemeteries instead of one really big one. And surrounding the whole thing is a lovely green privacy hedge about six feet tall and thick as brick.

Steadwell Gardens is a great place to be dead. It’s also a great place to spot and lose a tail. First off, it’s just plain tough to tail somebody in a cemetery. Any cemetery. At any time. There isn’t a lot of traffic in cemeteries, and folks tend to drive real slow. So it’s easy to spot somebody following you. Stevie Wonder could probably spot a tail in a cemetery.

Second, Steadwell Gardens has six different entrances on four different streets. Which means you can enter on Willow Street and exit on Pine, or on Mission Avenue, or on Dugdale Street. Or you can leave by another exit farther down on Willow. That means a single PI can’t cover all the exits. Which basically means you lose the subject. Scraped off.

“And you think he drove in there deliberately?”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “Nobody drives into a cemetery by accident. The question is, did he drive in there deliberately to scrape us off.”

“Couldn’t he just be visiting a grave?”

“Sure he could,” I said. “That’s the most innocent and most likely explanation. But here’s a true thing about PI work. The most innocent and most likely explanation isn’t necessarily what happens.”

Warren actually wrote that down. “What do we do now?”

“We get back in the car, and we drive around the block for a while looking for Eddie,” I said. “And later on, unless we get real lucky, we’ll call Chloe Stenning and tell her we lost her husband.”

And that’s just what we did. Drove around the block four times without seeing any white Saturns. Drove through the cemetery twice, but that’s a big chunk of land and it would have been really easy to miss Eddie. Drove to a nearby convenience store and stopped at the pay phone.

“Mrs. Stenning?” I said into the telephone. “Your husband took a different route out of the shipyard this afternoon. But I’m afraid we lost him.”

“Lost him?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I did what most folks do when forced to admit failure. I fell back on jargon in an effort to sound competent. “The subject — your husband — left the shipyard west gate at 5:11 P.M. My associate and I maintained mobile surveillance until we reached Willow Street, at which time—”

“Willow?” she asked. “What was he doing over there?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know, ma’am,” I said. “We lost him at 5:26 P.M. We attempted to reacquire the subject — your husband — for approximately twenty minutes without success.”

I hurried on before she could comment on that. “Would you please note the exact time he arrives at home this evening? And check his odometer. That will help us to determine the radius of his possible movements.”

It was all nonsense, of course. It probably wouldn’t tell us anything useful at all. But it had the sound of military precision about it, and clients eat that military-sounding stuff up with a spoon. If you can’t give them good service, you can at least give them the illusion of it.

Warren and I got back in the car. “Now what?” he asked.

“Now we go home,” I said. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”

“That’s it?” he said. “We just go home? That’s not very satisfying. In fact, it’s damned frustrating.”

“Welcome to the exciting world of private investigation,” I said.

The next morning Warren and I discussed a plan in case Eddie tried to scrape us off at the cemetery again. “Are you a good runner?” I asked him.

“I do three miles every morning.”

I looked at him. Three miles. In the morning. I have never understood the attraction of running for fun. The whole concept is foreign to me. I declare, it must be a form of madness. But it’s not a form I’m familiar with. Madness in South Carolina takes a less strenuous form. My Uncle Peawood is loonier than a peach orchard boar, but he knows enough not to get up in the morning and go running.

“Good,” I said. I handed him one of our Handi-Coms, a little two-way radio, and showed him how to use it.

“If it looks like we’re going to the cemetery again,” I said, “I’ll pass Eddie and drop you at the first entrance. You head in and try to follow him on foot. I’ll keep circling the cemetery. If I see him pull out, I’ll tail him. You’ll have to grab a cab home. If I don’t see him, I’ll keep circling until you come out. Any questions?”

I’ll say this for the professor — he was game to try just about anything. He thought the idea of jogging through a cemetery sounded like fun. He even went home to fetch a bright red jogging outfit before we headed for the shipyard to tail Eddie. Said he wanted to stay in character. Whatever that meant.

I admit I had high hopes for that afternoon. It was a Friday and a payday. Perfect time for old Eddie to be meeting his outside squeeze. If that was what he was doing.

Eddie, though, was a good boy; he drove straight home. He did the same thing for the first three days of the next week. The only excitement was on Tuesday when Eddie pulled into a gas station. I was able to scribble in my notepad that Eddie put seven dollars of unleaded in his Saturn. It was going to be hard to make that sound impressive in our report to Chloe.

It was a painful time. Warren decided we were meant to be friends and friends “share” things. He took to telling me all about his life. He talked about his academic career (he was unhappy with it), about the pressure he was under to publish in the most influential scholarly journals (he was unhappy with it), about his colleagues (he was unhappy with them), about his marriage (guess what).

Now, Southern folk talk a lot. At least, we do in my part of South Carolina. But we don’t talk about ourselves. And certainly not about our feelings. Not with near strangers. But we’re also raised to be polite, so I nodded and clucked and sympathized with poor Warren’s terrible hardships. But I was never so happy as I was on that Thursday when Eddie turned off his usual route home.

When it looked like he was headed toward Steadwell Gardens again, I turned to Warren. “You ready?” I asked.

“Ready,” he said. His eyes were sparkling, and he was grinning like he was the illegitimate child of Charles and Camilla. He began to do stretching exercises in the car.

I passed Eddie just before we turned onto Willow. And got caught behind a big funeral procession. Not mafiosi big, but big enough that it had traffic backed up a bit as they turned into the leafy archway of Steadwell Gardens. I kept an eye on Eddie in the rearview mirror just to make sure he made the turn and was behind us. I’d have looked like a pure born fool if our boy had kept going straight through the intersection.

I passed the funeral procession, made sure Warren had the Handi-Com turned on, pulled over to the side of the road, and dropped him off. He was jogging merrily through the arch as I drove away.

At the stop sign on the corner I held a long stop, waiting for Eddie to appear in the rearview mirror. The funeral procession had made it in the gate and the cars backed up behind it were just breaking free.

I watched Eddie Stenning turn under the arch.

“He’s coming your way,” I said into my Handi-Com.

“Roger that,” Warren said, his voice flattened by the little speaker. “I have visual contact.” Roger that? Visual contact? Give the man a walkie-talkie and he becomes General George Patton. Pretty soon he’d be calling in coordinates for an artillery strike.

I drove slowly around the corner.

“Subject is turning right,” Warren said. “Proceeding at a moderate... uh... at a moderate...”

“Pace?” I suggested. I made a U-turn and drove back the way I’d come. “Speed?”

“The funeral,” Warren said. “It’s stopping right in front of us.”

“So?” I said. “It’s a cemetery. They have to stop to bury the bodies. No drive-by burials allowed.”

“What do I do?”

“What do you mean?”

“All the mourners are getting out of their cars,” Warren said. “I can’t go jogging through them.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not done,” Warren said.

“What’s Eddie doing?”

“He’s driving slowly,” he said. “The mourners are letting him pass. But he’s in a car. I’m in a red jogging suit.”

“Warren, you said you wanted to study the private investigator’s work culture,” I said. “Well, our work culture includes jogging through funerals. Get after Eddie.”

I drove slowly and cursed amateurs. Which wasn’t fair. I know if I’d been wearing a bright red jogging outfit I’d have found it difficult to jog through a group of mourners. But that didn’t stop me from cursing.

“What’s going on?” I barked into the Handi-Com.

It took a moment for Warren to answer. “He... I, uh, I got... we got scraped off.”

“We what?”

“I lost him,” Warren said. And even through the tinny Handi-Com speaker I could hear the embarrassment and failure in his voice. “He went around a corner, and by the time I got there, he was gone. There’s a Y intersection. One way goes over a hill, the other around a small grove of trees. I guess I chose the wrong branch.”

Well, at least he’d stopped talking like GI Joe.

I sped up, hurrying over to the south side of the cemetery. No Eddie in a Saturn. I continued to circle the cemetery. Nothing.

“What should I do?” Warren asked.

“I’ll pick you up outside the west gate,” I said.

Another hesitation. “I don’t know which gate is the west gate,” he said.

“You went in the east gate,” I said. “The west gate will be on the opposite side.”

“I’m all turned around,” he said sadly. “I don’t even know where I am.”

“Head toward the setting sun,” I told him.

“I’m sorry,” Warren said. “I messed up.”

Roger that.

It was not fun to report to Chloe Stenning that we’d lost her husband again. And lost him in the very same neighborhood we’d lost him in the last time.

“Did he know you were following him?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “He wasn’t driving like he thought he was being tailed. But he’s lost us twice now. Does he have any reason to think he might be being followed?”

“Maybe,” she said. “If he’s cheating on me, he might be expecting to be followed. It’s happened before.”

“You hired a detective agency before?” I asked.

“Not me,” she said. “His ex-wife. When Eddie was having an affair with me. She had us followed.”

“Oh,” I said. What else was there to say?

“I should have known,” she said. “You marry a man who cheats on his wife, you marry a man who cheats on his wife.”

The next afternoon I took up station outside the shipyard gate alone. Entirely alone. Sans Warren. Warrenless. It was great.

I hadn’t booted old Warren out of our occupational milieu. I’d just put him in his own car and stationed him inside the east entrance of Steadwell Gardens. As long as Eddie Stenning followed his usual pattern, we were fairly well prepared. My biggest fear was that Eddie would get that taillight fixed. Then I’d have to vandalize his car all over again.

Two nights later Eddie turned off his usual route, heading toward Steadwell Gardens. When we were in range, I alerted Warren.

“Red Dog One, this is Red Dog Leader,” I said. “The Eagle is landing. I repeat, the Eagle is landing.”

“What?” Warren asked.

“Eddie,” I said. “He’s about to turn onto Willow. So hop out of your car and start stretching.”

“Ten-four.”

This time when Eddie pulled into the arched cemetery entrance I hung back a moment, then followed him in.

“I see him,” Warren reported. “He’s turning right, just like before. I’m behind him but keeping apace.”

A creature of habit, our Eddie. I turned right and dawdled along, out of sight of both Eddie and Warren.

“He’s at the Y intersection and going up the rise,” Warren said. “Just as I thought. I chose the wrong turn last time.” He sounded pleased with himself, although a tad winded.

I could see Warren jogging over the rise as I came to the Y intersection. I slowed down just a bit.

Warren reported his position faithfully, if a bit breathlessly, as Eddie took a circuitous route through the cemetery. I was actually enjoying myself. The trees were pretty, the grass was summer green. And if I’d had the windows down and the air conditioning off, I suspect I’d’ve heard the birds singing. It was like driving slowly in a park. Well, a park full of buried dead folks.

“Whoa!” Warren called out. “He’s stopping.” He and Eddie were just a short ways in front, around a blind corner blocked by tall poplars.

“Stopping?” I pulled to a stop. “Did he spot you?”

“I don’t think so. What should I do?”

“Keep jogging,” I said. “Act like you’re just jogging through the cemetery. Once you get past him, find a place to hide and wait. Report back when you’re set.”

A few moments later Warren buzzed back. “I’m set,” he said. “I don’t think he can see me.”

“What’s he doing?” I asked.

“He’s still there.”

“Still where?” I’m normally a calm man. But I declare, there were moments when I wanted to beat Warren Lister like a redheaded stepchild.

“He’s at a grave.”

A grave? I got out of the car and hurried to the poplars. I peeked through them. And sure enough, there was Eddie Stenning’s Saturn. And a few yards away, near some pretty little juniper bushes, was Eddie Stenning his ownself. He was sort of crouched in front of a modest granite headstone. Tidying up a grave.

“I see him,” I said to the Handi-Com.

“You see him? Where are you?”

I told him.

“What do we do now?” Warren asked.

“We have him surrounded,” I said. “He’s not going anywhere. Now we wait and we see what happens.”

And we waited. Waited about forty-five minutes. During which Eddie fussed over the grave and talked. I suppose he was talking to whoever was dead under the headstone.

I went back to the car, got my camera, and took a few photographs. Just to document it.

Eddie stood up eventually. He put his hand on the headstone. It seemed a strangely intimate gesture. I’ve seen Sweeney reach out and touch his wife’s shoulder like that when he’s heading out the door. There was a sweetness to it.

It was almost too intimate to photograph. But I fired off a frame anyway.

“He’s leaving,” Warren informed me.

“I see that.”

“Shall I follow him out?”

I told him not to bother. We knew where Eddie was spending his lost moments. We just didn’t know who he was spending them with. After Eddie drove off, Warren and I slowly converged on the headstone. It said:

“His mother?” Warren asked.

I pointed out the dates. “Wasn’t old enough to be his mother,” I said.

“His sister, then.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“Then who?”

“His ex-wife.”

Warren’s eyes went wide. “My goodness,” he said.

And suddenly I was grinning. I felt like I’d just won a roll of quarters at the slot machines.

“What?” Warren asked. “Why are you grinning?”

“We get to give good news to Chloe Stenning,” I said. “Maybe the horse will learn to sing.”

“That’s the second time you’ve said that,” Warren said. “What does it mean?”

“It’s an old Persian folktale,” I said. “There was a criminal, a thief, who was scheduled to be beheaded. As he was being led to the chopping block, he called out to the king, saying, ‘If you spare my life, I’ll teach your horse to sing hymns.’ The king must have had a sense of humor on account of he spared the thief s life and gave him a year to teach the horse to sing. If he failed, at the end of the year he’d go back to the block. So the thief began to spend all his time with the king’s horse, singing hymns to it. All the other criminals laughed. ‘You’ll never be able to teach that horse to sing,’ they told him. And the thief just smiled. He said, ‘I have a year. A lot can happen in a year. Maybe the horse will die. Maybe the king will die. Maybe I’ll die. And who knows, maybe the horse will learn to sing.’ ”

Warren blinked at me a few times. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“We’re giving Chloe Stenning good news,” I said. “We’re telling her that her husband isn’t having an affair, which is what she’s expecting to hear. Maybe this will give them the chance to work out their problems. What we’re really doing is we’re giving Chloe and Eddie time to teach the horse to sing.”

“That bastard,” Chloe Stenning said.

“Pardon?” I said.

After we left the cemetery, I called Chloe to tell her we’d discovered where her husband was spending his time. She said Eddie had just walked in the door and she couldn’t talk. She asked us to come over the next day.

By the time we met the following day I’d done a bit more research. Imelda Stenning had in fact been Eddie’s ex-wife. She’d died of uterine cancer a couple of months ago. About the time Eddie began coming home late.

Chloe invited us into the living room. We all sat on the edges of the furniture, like funeral-goers. I explained the situation, showed Chloe the photographs, and gave her a nicely jacketed copy of the final report. With a bill discreetly attached.

She flipped through the photos, pausing at the last one. The one with Eddie touching the headstone.

“I knew it,” she said softly, with resignation. “I knew he was cheating on me.”

“Cheating on you?” I asked.

She nodded. “I never thought it would be with his ex-wife.”

“Uh, Mrs. Stenning... his ex-wife is dead,” I said.

“I know,” she said. She dropped the photographs on the coffee table. “I know she’s dead. And he still loves her. How am I going to compete with her now?”

Warren and I left as soon as we politely could. “Goodness,” he said when we were in the car. “It was like something had died inside her. Is it always like that?”

I shook my head. “Not always. Some folks get angry and throw things.”

“Maybe you should have told her the story about the horse.”

“It’s a good story, isn’t it,” I said.

Warren nodded. “But it’s just a story.”

I shrugged. “Maybe.”