Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 111, No. 1. Whole No. 677, January 1998

Where Do The Balloons Go? by William Link

© 1997 by William Link

Speaking of William Link’s longtime collaboration with Rickard Levinson in the creation of TV mysteries, Encyclopedia Mysteriosa says: “More than any other writers in the medium, [they] were committed to the classical aspects of the mystery story: the clues and the solutions.” But in his solo work for EQMM, Mr. Link mostly departs from the classical clued mystery to create fascinating psychological studies.

Mickey Matrano was a gambler. Mickey gambled on anything and everything: Indiana-Orlando basketball, the dog races in Miami, whether the next person coming in a restaurant would be a man or a woman. Nick the Greek had told him that everything in life was six to five against, but that didn’t stop Mickey from being an incorrigible optimist where gambling was concerned.

Even in the case of Craig Detweiler.

Poker was the game and Craig was down to him for eleven K. Or eleven large as some of the other incorrigibles liked to say. Mickey figured that if Craig (an only child) didn’t have it, at least Mom did. Mom was eighty-two, a Locust Valley real estate heiress, and the word on the street was she was suffering from inoperable and terminal cancer of the pancreas.

So Mickey decided to pay a call on young Craig, who had a nice showy bachelor’s pad on upper Park Avenue. Zebra-striped cushions like the old El Morocco, leather-padded bar, Erté prints in black-lacquer frames, daunting wraparound views of the metropolis. Sometimes, mysteriously, furniture and prints were conspicuously missing, like articles removed from a showroom, and the apartment had an echoing funereal air while multiple white phones rang endlessly and Craig sucked joints and pretended everything was hunky-dory.

Today everything seemed normal, no blank spaces in the decor. Craig was wearing one of his Cuban bolero shirts, which hung over his white linen trousers. He was a big blond guy with old eyes in a baby face framed by a Scandinavian beard.

He greeted Mickey with a crushing handshake, leaving his fingers tingling. “Welcome, amigo. How ’bout a taste?”

Mickey was still sweating from the summer heat, wearing his usual suit and tie. He removed his straw hat with the flowered band and palmed sweat from his bald spot. He was sixty-seven and starting to feel a certain slowness, the deacceleration that came with the years. “A Chivas and short-water would be fine.” Craig went behind the bar. “What’s this ‘short-water’? Some kinda hip new expression?”

Mickey laughed. “Old as the hills. Thing we heard in South Philly growing up. It’s how the swells ordered — just a classy way of saying a chaser.”

Craig had lost interest; it was as if everything in his world was just another channel on his inner remote. He made Mickey his drink and then produced an extra-fat joint from his shirt pocket, torching it up with a new gold lighter. When he handed Mickey the scotch he noticed there was plenty of vibrato (as the jazzmen say) on his hand. Craig was one nervous fella this morning.

Mickey took his glasses over to the glass slab of a coffee table and eased himself down on the zebra-striped sofa. He slowly sipped his scotch, letting the silence settle in, biding his time, watching Craig nervously take another toke on his economy-sized joint. The gunmetal gray Venetian blinds were slanted against the hot metallic light outside and the sound of multiple sirens suddenly corkscrewed up from the street — police or emergency vehicles.

Craig came around the coffee table, slow as a water buffalo, as if the grass had already put him in a state of hyponoia. He sat down heavily across from Mickey, breathing deeply like an emphysemic. He extended the joint over the table. “Wanna hit?”

“No, thanks,” Mickey said. “I don’t mix medications.”

Craig shrugged. “Forgot.” Closer, he looked dissipated, gray, a night creature caught in the hard headlights of noon.

“Eleven K,” Mickey said, friendly. He didn’t like the young man’s pallor; maybe he should be in the hospital like Mom. “When do I get it?”

“I’m a little short these days.” A laugh. “Like your water, amigo.”

Mickey purposefully didn’t smile. He sipped his drink.

“Wanna refill?” Craig asked. He was making a serious effort to keep things light, congenial.

Mickey nodded and Craig went back to the bar, returning with the bottle of Chivas. He poured Mickey a healthy portion and set the bottle on the coffee table between them. He took another soul-satisfying toke.

“Getting stoned isn’t going to help,” Mickey warned.

“I can handle it.”

There were more sirens in the street, harsh scissors cutting into the fabric of their silence.

Craig made a face. “I hate that sound. There was a fire in my neighborhood when I was a kid. One of those hook-and-ladder trucks ran over my dog.”

“When?” Mickey asked after a pause.

“When? Mid sixties, I must’ve been five or six.”

“I meant, when am I getting my money.”

Craig tried a smile. “Oh. That.”

Mickey let him chew on it. He knew the marijuana was tamping down the fear, slowly smothering it with a safe layer of euphoria. Craig had set the joint carefully on the edge of the table. Mickey reached over, picked it up, and dropped it into his glass of water.

Craig’s reaction was on tape-delay. “Hey,” he said finally. “You drowned my roach. Why did you do that?”

“This is a business conversation, amigo. We’re not just two old friends sitting around killing time shooting the breeze.”

Craig was staring at Mickey’s straw hat, which was sitting on the cushion next to him. “What is that thing?” Craig laughed. “Circa nineteen thirty? It dates you, Mickey. My grandfather used to wear a hat like that. Christ, that band with the cockamamy flowers looks like a sarong or something.”

“Next time I’ll wear a baseball cap with the bill turned around backwards. Isn’t that how the street punks wear them?”

Craig looked mournfully at the roach floating like a small dead gardenia in the glass. “Next you’ll be saying you’re going to wear it to my funeral.”

“Who said anything about a funeral?” He realized that he had miscalculated Craig’s state of intoxication: This was a guy who started on the grass when the alarm went off in the morning.

“You’re a very deceptive dude,” Craig said, the not very friendly smile back in his beard. “You come shuffling up here with your straw hat and tie, nice as pie, like you’re the whole world’s grandpa. But if I don’t settle up you go talk to one of your ‘collectors.’ And if I don’t pay them — I come out of a disco some night and somebody puts a Glock to the back of my haircut.”

There were more sirens, adding to the commotion thirty stories down in the chasm of the street.

“Isn’t that how it works?” Craig asked. “All over a stinking measly eleven K.”

He had unconsciously raised his voice over the growing cacophony outside, to which was now added the deep bass admonitions of a bullhorn.

“How’s your mom?” Mickey asked.

“Not good. They don’t think she’ll last the month.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah, well, she’s had a pretty good life, all things considered. I mean, on good days, when she’s up to it, she’s getting takeout from Le Bernadin. If you’re gonna live in style I guess you gotta die the same way.”

Mickey smiled sympathetically, not sure whether there were any species of sincerity in Craig’s comment. He decided not to ask the obvious question, preferring to let the son bring it up himself.

“Of course, once she assumes room temperature I’ll be coming into a pile of money.” He grinned conspiratorially as if Mickey were in the will too.

Mickey finished the scotch. “Estates take a long time to clear up.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll be getting advances from the bank.”

“So you’re asking me to wait.”

The decibel level had gotten higher. Annoyed, Craig jumped up and went over to the window. With a surprisingly quick movement he lashed up on the blinds — instantly revealing a startling scene across the way. Interested, Mickey got up and joined him at the window.

A young woman was standing on the ledge of an office building directly opposite their condominium. Even at this distance she looked fairly well dressed, a secretary or assistant from one of the offices, a dark-haired, dark-complected woman, probably a Latina.

“Jumper,” Craig muttered. They both looked down simultaneously at the burgeoning crowds of pedestrians and emergency vehicles far below on the street. Across from them police were hanging out of a window trying to talk to or distract the woman, but to no avail. She was pressed against the stone face of the building, arms outstretched, staring down, seemingly fascinated by the crowds and activity that she herself had created.

“This city’s got some kinda record for crazies,” Craig said. “Let ’er jump if that’s what she wants.”

“Where’s your compassion?” Mickey asked, digging him.

“At Lennox Hill Hospital. I got a dying mother, remember?” He seemed mesmerized by the woman on the ledge; a cop started to climb out of the window and the woman frantically waved him back.

Craig started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

Craig turned from the window. There were bright stars of merriment in his grass-dulled eyes. “Wanna make a bet?” he asked Mickey.

Nothing amazed Mickey anymore. “What do you mean? Bet on—?”

“The jumper.” He was back watching the scene on the ledge. Now the cops had opened another window nearer the young woman and a man in plainclothes was leaning out. The man’s heavy-rimmed glasses flashed like a heliograph in the sun.

“Come on, Mickey,” he teased. “You’re the dude who’s famous for betting on anything.”

He had him there, the old man conceded to himself. He had even bet an L.A. chum how many houseflies he could kill in an hour — calculating his odds on the fact that California flies were slower than their Big Apple counterparts. Almost without thinking he said, “She won’t jump.”

Craig was suddenly, literally, in his face, so close Mickey could count the premature gray hairs in his Nordic blond beard. “Eleven K. If she jumps we’re even-steven.”

Mickey’s foot was asleep; he had been standing too still too long. “You’re on,” he said and immediately felt like a goddamn fool. Why was he taking on this stupid bet — trying to maintain his reputation as an indiscriminating gambling idiot?

The man with the glasses was talking to the woman, who was silent, rigid, keeping her own counsel.

“He’s gotta be one of those police shrinks,” Craig said. “Suicide-prevention guy.”

“They know what buttons to press.”

“Yeah, but she ain’t buying. The only button she’s gonna press is the one going down.”

He went quickly back behind the bar and broke open a bottle of tequila.

“I thought you potheads didn’t juice,” Mickey said, rubbing the pins and needles from his leg.

Craig sloshed liquor into his glass. “It’s like Sinatra said — booze, broads, cigarettes — whatever gets you through the night.”

“Or the afternoon,” Mickey said, still weighed down with misgivings. “She could be up there for hours.”

“Somehow I think you’ll stick around,” Craig said. “If you came all the way over here to put the squeeze on me for eleven K, I really think you’ll wait around to lose it.”

“Who says I’m going to lose it?” The old competitive spark was back.

“That shrink’s batting zip. I’d like to see his track record. You wanna bet he’s lost more than he’s won?”

The portable phone rang on the bar. Craig ignored it and it rang and rang, a torturous finger in their ears.

“Will you answer your goddamn phone?” Mickey said.

“It’s a bookie. But he’s got all the patience of a fruit fly. Two more rings and he’ll fold.”

It took three and the phone finally stopped. Craig was at the window again, pointing, laughing. “Lookit the pigeons—”

Mickey replenished his glass from the Chivas bottle. On an empty stomach he began to feel the effects of the alcohol, a slowly numbing drowsiness.

A little convoy of pigeons was calmly walking around the woman, searching for nonexistent food on the ledge. She barely noticed them, still intent on the activity below.

“Wanna increase the bet?” Craig asked later.

“No.”

“Getting a little nervous?”

“They’ll talk her in.”

Craig had gone into the kitchen. He came out with a lime for his tequila and a knife. “Anything new?” he asked, not even glancing at the window.

“They got a TV camera now.”

A T-shirted technician was aiming a mini-cam from the far window. The woman seemed oblivious that she was being shot, and if she noticed she didn’t seem to care.

Craig was busy hunting around for the remote. He finally found it between two cushions on the sofa. “It’s gotta be on one of the local stations,” he said. “Those vultures are always downwind of a good story.” He was clicking through the channels.

The phone began ringing again.

“If you’re not going to answer it,” Mickey said, “why don’t you take the damn thing off the hook?”

Craig grinned. He had found nothing on the television and was now slicing wedges of lime on the bar. “I just wanna see how persistent this guy is.”

“How many guys are you in to?”

“Few. Don’t let it eat you up.”

“Why don’t you give them the inheritance story like you gave me?”

“You think it’s all bull, a con job? My mom’s not dying?”

“I didn’t say that. I’m just saying it might get some of these guys off your back, buy you some time.”

Craig lifted the bolero shirt, was scratching his hairless white belly. “You hungry? I’m getting these hunger pangs.”

“It’s the grass, amigo. Gets you ravenous.”

Craig was genuinely puzzled. “But I didn’t smoke that much — thanks to you.”

Now it was Mickey’s turn to jibe back: “Maybe it’s the fear kicking in because they’re going to talk her down.”

“No way.” He glanced out the window, where the woman was edging farther away from the window with the guy in the glasses. Even from a distance they could see the lines of frustration etched deeply on his face.

“You feel like some pizza?” Craig asked.

“Why not.”

Craig picked up the phone. “Pepperoni? Anchovies?”

“No anchovies.”

Craig called a neighborhood pizzeria and placed the order. “They deliver pretty fast,” he said after he hung up. “Unless they’re all outside watching the jumper.”

Time dragged on while they watched the woman on the ledge and waited for the delivery. The sun had shifted in the hot sky, no longer flashing on the shrink’s glasses. The woman was a still-frame in the windless afternoon, a frozen enigma, new flocks of pigeons sauntering by her on their eternal scavenger hunt for food.

“Kids’ balloons,” Craig said after a long period of silence. He was stretched out on the barcalounger, hands laced behind his head, the glass of tequila squeezed in the V of his crotch.

Mickey sat on the window ledge, eyes fixed on the jumper, seeing her but not seeing her, a pinprick of headache puncturing the base of his skull. Why had he allowed himself to get trapped into this? Why hadn’t he given the kid an ultimatum and split? He could have been right now at that poker game on Park Avenue with that old Broadway composer who was born a loser. Craig’s words reverberated behind his headache: “Kids’ balloons?” he repeated.

“Yeah,” Craig said. “You always see these little kids with their mothers walking around with these balloons on a string. But they lose them and they float away.”

“So?” Maybe he should have let Craig keep his joint. He was beginning to sound dopey on his tequila high.

“What I’m asking,” Craig continued, “is where these balloons go. They go up but they never come down. Where have you ever seen a busted balloon on the ground? Condoms yes, balloons no.”

Mickey strained to keep the sarcasm from his voice. “You know, I never really thought about that — where do the balloons go?”

“Up, up, and away,” Craig said dreamily. “I once thought of calling the science editor of the Times. Maybe he would know.” The phone was ringing again.

The man with the glasses was replaced by a balding, middle-aged guy in what looked like a blue-striped summer suit. He called something out to the woman, who jerked out of her immobility, startled by the new voice and its volume.

The phone stopped just as the doorbell rang. It was the pizza delivery, a curly-haired kid in a baseball cap with the bill turned around.

Craig checked out the pizza while the kid stared out the window at the spectacle across the way. Craig said, “Carlo — you think she’s gonna jump?”

Carlo shrugged his thin shoulders. “Dunno.”

Craig was smelling the hot pie. “We’ll bet. You put up the pizza.”

Carlo’s mouth twisted into a painful smile; he was wearing braces. “No, man. I don’t bet with you.”

Craig winked at Mickey. “But you know she won’t jump, Carlo. My friend Mickey doesn’t think so either.”

“Leave the kid alone,” Mickey said.

The kid held out a receipt and a rollerball pen. “No bets.”

Craig laughed, hugged him, digging a bill from his pocket. “Here. You’re getting smart, Carlo. Buy la tua amica some pizza.”

He signed the receipt. Carlo started for the door, then turned back, hesitantly. “There was two men downstairs, Mr. Detweiler. They ask for you.”

Craig’s glances ricocheted off Mickey back to the delivery boy. “What did they want?”

“Want to come up. The doorman, Eddie — he say you was out.”

“Good. That’s what I told him to say.” His expression tightened. “Did they see you with the pizza?”

“I say it was for Mrs. Gramiak in two-eight-two-nine.” He looked at Craig expectantly, batting his dark sensuous eyes, and Mickey doubted if he had a tua amica.

Craig palmed him another bill. “Very good, Carlo. I told you were getting smart.”

After he let the boy out Craig clapped his hands, energized, bounced back to his shot of tequila.

“Who were the men, Craig? Why were they looking for you?”

“IRS. They’ve been giving me a lot of grief. Living in digs like this and next to no reported income. You never had trouble from them?”

“Now and then. But you can’t keep putting them off. Sooner or later they’ll nail you and it’ll be even worse.”

“By then I’ll be rich,” Craig laughed.

“Sure thing, right? Mom’s going to buy the farm.”

“Well, I won’t go as far as pulling out the plug on her life-support system, if that’s what you mean.” His mood shifted, serious again. “We both know — don’t we? — there’s no such thing as a sure thing.”

Their eyes drifted back to the window. Status quo on the ledge. Now there were people hanging out other windows, probably the woman’s office coworkers, trying to persuade her not to jump. The sky had darkened; everything seemed wrapped in a muggy haze. Even a few early lights had been turned on in the office building.

“Might rain,” Craig observed. He was pulling off slices from the wheel of pizza, dumping them on plates from the kitchen cabinet. Mickey sat uncomfortably on a bar stool. The booze had become a co-conspirator with his headache, putting a damper on his appetite, and he regarded the gummy pizza with a growing distaste.

“If it does rain,” Craig ruminated, “and she slips and falls—”

“I’m ahead of you.”

“Like in the insurance policies — an act of God. I win.”

As if to underline his words, a long peal of thunder shook the sky, rattling the windows. Heat lightning flared like a giant flashbulb. The woman, for the first time, looked up as if the massed density of clouds presented some impossible salvation for her.

“You’re not eating,” Craig observed, surprised.

“Lost my appetite.”

Craig smiled maliciously. “Something I said?”

Mickey slid off the stool and went to the window. The telephone was ringing again, its stridency subsumed by another threatening roll of thunder.

He stared out across the abyss, across the sickening drop of space, as raindrops stung the window. Almost at that exact moment the young woman stared back at him, their eyes meeting with an inaudible click like a key going into a lock. The phone was still making its assaultive din — and Mickey saw the whole thing clearly, like a lightning flash, revealed for the first time. The jumper, the men asking for Craig, the inexorable ringing of the phone...

Before Craig could move from behind the bar, Mickey had reached out a long arm, snatched up the receiver—

A gruff male voice said, “Is this Mr. Detweiler, Craig Detweiler? We’ve been trying to contact you—”

Craig’s hand hammered down, breaking the connection. Mickey could read the suppressed fear just behind the violence in his eyes. Craig had the presence of mind to take the receiver off the hook so they couldn’t call back.

“You know that woman over there,” Mickey said. “The way I see it, she was probably one of your girlfriends. You dumped her and she got suicidal. Does she work in that building right across from here? — that’s how you met her, in one of the lunch places in the nabe, or even at your pizzeria?”

Craig was silent. A few more raindrops splattered the window as Mickey looked out again. It was eerie: It looked now as if the young woman was watching both of them.

“That wasn’t your bookie calling all the time — that was the cops trying to reach her boyfriend because she or one of her coworkers told them you were the problem and maybe the only one who could save her. Am I right?”

Craig turned abruptly from the window, preferring to face Mickey’s accusatory eyes, not the woman’s.

“You bastard,” Mickey said, no longer hiding his disgust. “You made a bet — and by not answering the phone, not talking to her, you practically insured that sooner or later she’d jump. The eleven K meant more to you than that poor broad’s life.”

He angrily slammed the receiver back on its hook, and Craig lunged for him, but he fought the young man away, silently, both breathing heavily.

“They came over here before and now they’ll come back,” Mickey panted, pushing Craig away, “because I answered the phone and they know somebody’s here. For God’s sake, Craig, talk to her, get her off that ledge!”

Craig sank down on the sofa, still breathing like a miler. He looked near tears. “My mother,” he said in a choked voice, “the old bag, she cut me out of the will — she’s sick to death of the gambling, the drugs—”

The phone began to ring.

“Answer it, Craig!”

His voice broke. “I–I owe ev’rybody — not just you. It’s a freaking nightmare. I’m at the end of my rope, Mickey—!”

“Get on the phone and save her goddamn life!”

Craig’s hand circled the phone, still hesitating...

Mickey sighed, the headache pounding him, looking one last time at the solitary figure of the young abandoned woman on the ledge. “Forget the eleven K,” he said wearily. “You don’t owe me.”

Craig’s startled eyes looked at him, saw him nod affirmatively, and then he snatched up the phone.

As Mickey let himself out of the apartment, slumping, suddenly dead beat, he heard Craig’s low voice on the phone. But a few seconds later, as he walked to the elevator, he was beginning to maybe catch his second wind. He wondered if he wasn’t too late to get over to that composer’s place on Park Avenue; maybe if the guy was as big a loser as they said he could make up the eleven K...