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

The Collusionists by Scott Mackay

The 1998 Arthur Ellis Award winner in the best short mystery story category, Scott Mackay also has a flair for science fiction writing and has recently concluded a deal with Penguin-Roc for two new SF novels. When writing mysteries, Mr. Mackay often builds his plots around series detective Barry Gilbert. Occasionally, as in his new tale for us, he produces a nonseries piece that is a reflection on crime and morality.

Neil Fuller sat in his Greenwich Village studio, a delicate October I light spilling like cream across his latest watercolor, his Kolinksy sable number 12 poised in his hand, a fresh dab of cadmium yellow on his pallet. His brother, Craig, sat in the old recliner across from him, calm, reflective, self-assured, every bit the old Craig he knew and loved, but now different, now changed, now a man who had just exhaled into the studio the brief and baleful soliloquy of his own confession. Now a man with minder on his lips.

“I thought Barbara killed him,” said Neil. “I thought it was all settled.”

He wasn’t used to visitors this early in the morning. Manhattan sulked outside his window.

“Someone has to know the truth,” said Craig. He glanced at Neil’s latest painting. “The marsh looks low,” he said. “Is it?”

Neil stared at his brother, eleven years his junior, a manager, well-schooled in the world of systems, data links, and networks, responsible, respected, career-minded, in a suit with a gold pen in his pocket, a tie clip to match, a signet fraternity ring from his undergraduate years at MIT.

“It hasn’t rained much in the last two years,” said Neil. His face felt red. He had that tightness in his throat again, the discomfort he got whenever his blood rushed too quickly — too much red meat, too many fine potables, a connoisseur’s eye for exotic flans, cakes, and trifles. And now this. His brother’s confession. “The heron’s gone,” he said. “Did I tell you? She’s been gone three years now.”

The air felt thick between them.

“But you have the mallards?” said Craig, nodding at his painting.

“No,” said Neil. “The mallards are mine. That corner needed fussing.”

Why deliver to him, like an old piece of family furniture nobody wanted, this somber revelation? Not Barbara, but his brother, Craig. Bright, sunny Craig, the man with a smile for everyone. Why tell him about the Wiltshire Staysharp deftly piercing Paul’s back?

Craig, looking as if he sensed Neil’s perplexity, risked some explanation. “I couldn’t let him run off with Christine, could I?” he said.

Neil tried to understand, but he couldn’t. He understood the life of the marsh, where the rhythms were gentle, predictable, soothing. He understood the life of his studio, where the north light always stroked a fresh piece of heavy French bond with potential. But he couldn’t understand how the courts could possibly indict Barbara Gatt when his brother now told him he had been the one with the Wiltshire Staysharp in his hand, or how Barbara Gatt, knowing the truth, would so amicably stand trial for a crime she hadn’t committed.

“Was it really four times?” he asked.

“Sorry?”

“The anchorfools say she stabbed him four times.”

“I can’t remember,” said Craig. “I wasn’t counting.”

“Her injury,” he said, remembering the evidence they had against Barbara Gatt. “The gash on her hand. The blood. The footprints.” As if these pitiful tokens might shrink the enormity of Craig’s confession.

Craig shook his head. “Paul was a bull,” he insisted. “I had to stop him.”

Neil felt a beguiling sadness over the death of Paul Gatt. They were, he and Paul, on certain occasions, a pair. Fellow gastronomists. Three hundred pounds apiece. Dressed by the same tailor, with standing reservations at the finest restaurants in Manhattan, a sight to set any waiter’s eye twinkling with the anticipation of a generous gratuity. He would miss Paul’s artistic acumen, how he so easily understood why Neil had devoted himself with such earnestness to the life of the easel. He would miss how Paul could be so magnanimous with his praise when he saw an exacting bit of brushwork, how, with the insight of an expert, he could say why a practiced line of blue or a quick skim of yellow had captured the raison d’être of any particular fish, fowl, or fauna, the epitome of its unseen message, with only a deft stroke or two.

“But you’re not the one in handcuffs,” said Neil. “How does Barbara feel?”

“Barbara loves me.”

As if love, with all its sacrificial impulses, its dangerous, inexplicable, and destructive urges, could excuse everything, even minder.

He lived in a carefully decorated showpiece of a residence, a Bohemian sanctuary he rented by the square foot from a pair of elderly stockbrokers. He could easily afford it. No self-respecting collector could be without at least one small Fuller. Second and third floors, loft on the third, apartment on the second. A place of fresh roses every day and a Polish cleaning lady twice a week; filled with Chippendale originals and his own modest collection of Constable landscapes; a cultural preserve where the emotions of love, hate, and doubt held no sway. A hermitage where his own inner life of paint, easel, and brush sustained him with a soul-enriching satisfaction. Now rocked like a ship in a gale, the prevailing mood as discordant as one of Schonberg’s twelve-tone string quartets, the uncertain outlook as perplexing as any of the single-color canvases of Mark Rothko.

He didn’t like to leave his Bohemian sanctuary unless he absolutely had to. Unless it was for an evening out at any of his favorite restaurants, or an afternoon in the galleries, or, if need be, a business meeting with his agent, Valerie Bintcliff. And when circumstance forced him to venture beyond the reach of its golden hardwood floors and handwoven Persian carpets, he never took a taxi, always hired a long dark sedan from a car service. He lived, as his brother once remarked, a cocooned life. And certainly a women’s detention center was the last place he ever expected to find himself, especially one as far-flung as the remote hinterland of the Bronx.

But here he was, in a facility as architecturally stimulating as a septic tank, dating from the days of Theodore Roosevelt’s bumptious reign in the White House, a cage smelling of ammonia and cream com, and the fulsome muskiness of too many unwashed women crammed together in a small space.

He sat in the visitors’ room and stared through the glass at Barbara Gatt, erstwhile tablemate at Cafe des Artistes, the Rainbow Room, and Da Umberto’s, here in the hope that Barbara might tell him Craig’s confession was so much bosh. Here to find not only absolution for his brother, but also contradiction. To rediscover in the hoped-for contradiction his own peace of mind, a way to get on with “Mallards on the Marsh,” a way to finally bring the confounded fowls alive.

“He had the two sides, didn’t he?” said Barbara, speaking of her late husband. She was a wisp, with the tawny color of a woman predisposed to melanoma. Inherited. Her mother was end-stage in Ohio. A bad time for Barbara. “You knew him as a curator. As an authenticator of fifteenth-century religious art. I knew him as a husband. As a brute. As a man who wanted to take my child away from me.”

Neil admitted familiarity with the theme, the sad leitmotif of divorce in modern times, with the melancholy refrains of custody disputes and restraining orders.

“A persistent man,” he said, hoping that would be diplomatic enough. “He took hold of Christine?” he asked.

He dared not enter the forbidden zone of her own culpability.

“Hoisted her like a hundred-pound sack of wheat,” Barbara clarified.

“And Craig took the knife to him?”

Her tawny eyes gazed at him as if he were a specimen. “Anthony’s advised me against casual disclosure,” she said.

Anthony, of course, was her lawyer, a phlegmatic dome-headed man with the complexion of a ghoul and eyes as dark as pitch, the Fuller family lawyer, presented in pinstripes and wingtips to Barbara, by Craig, as the great shining way, the savior who would set her free.

“Craig was a kind boy,” he said, feeling he had to defend his brother. “A gentle boy. Always fooling with gadgets. Helped me with my car when I still had the gall to own one.”

He hoped these words might coax from her the peace of mind he so ardently wished for. But she smiled fondly in that wispy way of hers, like the Queen of the Fairies.

“He’s good with Christine,” she said. “He’s the only one who knows how to calm her down. He soothes her. He doesn’t antagonize her the way Paul did.”

And not long after, the guard came and got him. The doubt remained. Who killed Paul Gatt? His brother’s confession, now twenty-four hours old, struck him as nothing more than a bad dream, something that couldn’t have actually happened, the result of too much jerk sauce on his chicken last night. His brother was made of finer fabric. His brother might argue with Paul Gatt, even lay a diffident hand on Paul’s shoulder, but the visceral outcome of Paul’s three-hundred-pound corpse exsanguinated on the terra cotta tiles, his hound’s-tooth alpaca a ruin, his beard glued and coagulated with blood, struck Neil as so much faulty joinery. The crime didn’t fit Craig, and Craig didn’t fit the crime.

As he eased his own three-hundred-pound figure into the backseat of his hire car, he desperately tried to convince himself of Craig’s finer moral impulses. But doubt made him queasy, and for the first time in years he found he had no appetite.

He sat at one of the back tables in Le Grenouille, his lamb-in-a-mushroom-and-wine-sauce untouched, his Bordeaux unsipped, and his parboiled new potatoes tested only twice. He was an unlikely sleuth. A miserable sleuth. Yet compelled. Desperate for his brother’s exoneration. Anthony Brooks, the Fuller family lawyer, Barbara Gatt’s defense attorney, sat across from him in his usual pinstripes, nibbling an endive-and-olive salad.

“He’s made the same confession to me,” said Brooks, looking up with dark eyes from under the dome of his bald head.

“And do you think it’s true?” asked Neil, unable to hide his apprehension.

Brooks stopped nibbling and considered the question. He put his fork down, dabbed his small bloodless lips with his linen napkin, and stared at his wine, as if hoping to divine from its ruby depths an answer he could decode.

“I’m puzzled,” he said. “We have the blood, the footprints, the gash on Barbara’s hand. We have her daughter’s retrograde amnesia. We have the discord, the acrimonious divorce, and Paul’s latest custody appeal. We even have Paul attempting to kidnap his own daughter.”

This blueprint for murder encouraged Neil. With so much to push Barbara towards that knife, could there be any doubt of her guilt? Why was Brooks so puzzled? Brooks rolled a black olive with his fork, looked underneath it as if he expected to find something there, and put it back in the exact same spot.

“Paul can be exasperating,” said Neil.

“Yes, but exasperating enough to murder?”

“Paul can be infuriating,” offered Neil.

Brooks looked up, his eyes focusing as if through cross hairs. “Can he?” he asked.

“He expects to be obeyed.”

“And he takes what he wants?” suggested Brooks.

Neil nodded. “I’m afraid he does.”

“So he hoists the girl over his shoulder, and Barbara resorts to murder. A sober, university-educated woman with no history of violence, no criminal record, a steward of five years’ standing with the local Pentecostal, a corporate VP who makes dozens of clear cool-headed decisions every day, and she resorts to murder? And not just the murder of anybody, but the murder of her husband, a man she has loved and respected for the last fifteen years? Just because he’s exasperating?”

He was, of course, her defense attorney.

On behalf of Craig, Neil felt compelled to damn Barbara any way he could. “You forget the element of her unfortunate liaison with my brother,” he said. He took a distracted sip of his wine, hoping to rehabilitate his usual craving for lamb. “One iniquity might lead to another. I can’t see Craig lifting a hand against anybody.”

“No, of course not,” Brooks said quickly, as if to placate Neil. “Craig’s not the type. But I find he tried too hard with his confession. I think he might be hoping to protect Barbara with his confession. Or at least attempting to confuse me with it.”

This notion, that Craig might be trying to protect Barbara with his confession, tempted Neil. Yet Craig wasn’t a particularly adroit dissimulator, always told the truth, always spoke honestly, had never fashioned, so far as Neil could recall, the larger falsehoods necessary for something like his dogged and over-rehearsed confession.

“Someone killed Paul,” said Neil, as if that, in itself, were enough to exonerate Craig.

“Barbara’s never confessed,” said Brooks, as if that, in itself, were enough to exonerate Barbara.

“Yes, but Barbara’s a mother,” insisted Neil. “She had to protect her child.”

Wasn’t that motive enough? Might they not consider the unequivocal instinct of a mother, how that instinct might blind a sober, savvy, university-educated woman, how it might let loose the savage impulses that could ultimately lead to a quick grab for the Wiltshire Staysharp?

He conveyed this theory in a jumble of awkward phrases to Brooks, caught himself stuttering a number of times, the old impediment coming back with disquieting suddenness, the bane of his schoolboy years.

“A mother’s instinct,” mused Brooks, drumming his fingers against the linen tablecloth, still looking doubtful.

“But does that explain the strength?”

Neil pondered this new theme. Strength? Yes, of course, strength.

“Barbara’s small, isn’t she?” said Brooks.

“A flyweight,” agreed Neil.

Brooks lifted his butter knife and positioned the serrated edge upward. “Ever heard of a Turkish thrust?” he asked.

A Turkish bath, Turkish delight, and Turkish tobacco, but never a Turkish thrust. “Enlighten me,” he said.

“In a knife fight, the blade is positioned thus,” he said, demonstrating with his butter knife. “You plunge the knife point underhanded into your victim’s abdomen and yank the blade upward, toward his heart. In this case, the stab wounds in Mr. Gatt’s back suggest such a thrust. You have to be strong to make it work. Especially through the back.”

He saw Brooks’s point. “And Barbara isn’t that strong,” he admitted.

A waiter walked by with a dish full of sugared plums and candied figs.

“Have you seen your brother’s backhand lately?” asked Brooks.

Craig the athlete. On the pole-vaulting team in high school. Skiing in Colorado every winter. A compulsive jogger. Season tickets to the Knicks. His dresser drawer full of jockstraps. And, of course, tennis. His obsessive quest for the perfect backhand. His Holy Grail.

“I haven’t played tennis with Craig in twenty years,” he said.

“He has a strong backhand,” said Brooks. “His serve is strong. Everything he does with that hand is strong.” Neil didn’t understand. In one breath, Brooks swore Craig wasn’t the type. In the next, he talked of Craig’s strong backhand. “I’m not sure my esteemed colleague at the district attorney’s office needs to know about Craig’s backhand.” How was this supposed to settle Neil’s doubt? “It’s not exactly up to us to tell the D.A. how much Craig’s game has improved over the last year, is it?”

Neil looked disconsolately at his lamb, knowing he would never eat it now.

“No,” he said. “I suppose it isn’t.”

He felt hopelessly mired in the ambiguity of the thing. How was he ever going to decide between Barbara’s maternal instinct and his brother’s strong backhand?

He drew the line at Runamok.

“I’ll take Christine for a few days,” he said, “but you’ll have to kennel the collie.”

Craig stood before him, small and well-muscled, with the physique of a GI fresh from boot camp, ready to fly to Ohio, still a pioneer state as far as Neil was concerned, off to make funeral arrangements for Barbara’s mother, who’d finally succumbed to her malignant melanoma.

“Christine loves that dog,” said Craig.

“And I love my furniture,” insisted Neil.

Craig kenneled Runamok. Craig canceled Christine’s cello lesson, elocution lesson, swimming lesson, and jazz-dance lesson. He deposited Christine in Neil’s teak and marble foyer three days before Neil was to testify as a character witness at Barbara Gatt’s trial.

Christine Gatt was tall for a twelve-year-old, rangy and uncoordinated, her dark coarse hair sheared in a pageboy cut. She had big hands, big feet, peach-fuzz on her upper lip, a pimple on her nose. Here was the girl who suffered from retrograde amnesia, who couldn’t remember a thing about her father’s murder, who couldn’t be called upon to testify, who had been ruled an unreliable witness by a court psychiatrist, a ruling currently under appeal by Brooks’s esteemed colleague at the district attorney’s office.

Christine wired a game system to Neil’s TV. He sat on his eighteenth-century Georgian loveseat and watched her connect and test with nervous fascination. When the system was ready, she snapped the game disk into the console, grabbed the controls, and sat on the couch. She engaged the game. Something called Jersey Devil. Skipped the animated short at the beginning. Went right to Level One.

A purple imp with rabbit ears, Jersey Devil, walked through the darkened grounds of a museum at night, turning this way and that, prompted by Christine’s skilled thumbs, gathering bright pumpkins, popping them like soap bubbles, accruing points.

“So you don’t remember a thing,” Neil lamely ventured from his perch on the loveseat.

She raised her hand peremptorily. “Don’t interrupt,” she said. “I’ve got a mad bomber.”

She was right. One of the pumpkins transformed with startling quickness into a caped figure — a mad bomber — and hurled bombs at Jersey Devil. Jersey Devil, with an adroit flicking of Christine’s thumbs, fought back, punched the mad bomber once, twice, three times, made the mad bomber explode.

With her opponent destroyed, an odd smile came to Christine’s face, one of triumph, her jaw hard, her lips tight, the smile of a girl who believed she was unconquerable. A smile full of vigorous gloating. Full of ego. Much like her father’s smile. The smile of a girl who thought she was the center of the universe and would challenge anybody who believed otherwise. She turned to Neil.

“No,” she said. “I don’t remember a thing.”

He let it go. He was a timid man, even with twelve-year-old girls. She deserved to play Jersey Devil without the meddlesome interruptions of an overweight, middle-aged watercolorist, a heartsick man who wished only to see his brother restored to honor.

Like the mad bomber, he preferred a cape. A cape provided enough protection from the elements and ample ventilation for his corpulent frame. He wore a cape to court.

A character witness. He owed Barbara this much. He removed his glasses on purpose when he climbed into the witness box. He didn’t want to see the people. Crowds frightened him. The clerk approached, came into focus, held a Bible in front of him. Owed Barbara this much because she and Craig had become a pair, a couple, a fait accompli through his own unfortunate but well-intentioned suggestion that the four of them should dine together. Neil mumbled the necessary oath, watched the clerk recede, grow blurry, disappear. He remembered that night. Neil, Craig, Barbara, and Paul at a place called Mythos. A forgettable Greek-restaurant-cum-sports-bar in the Flatiron District. Craig ordered shooters: B-52s, Slippery Nipples, and Beam-Me-Up-Scottys. He remembered how the inclinations of Barbara and Craig, one toward the other, had grown like an exotic bloom in the steamy atmosphere of their own covert flirtations; how, in that same dangerous atmosphere, Paul Gatt had been abandoned, or at least sidelined, on the doorstep of his own marriage.

Another figure coalesced in front of him: Anthony Brooks, in his usual pinstripes, the usual bloodless grin on his face.

“Mr. Fuller, can you describe your relationship with Mrs. Gatt?” he said.

He was, after all, a notable artist, a man whose opinion might be worth serious consideration. He cranked out the necessary words. Amicable. Warm. Respectful.

“And the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Gatt?”

At which point Brooks’s esteemed colleague from the district attorney’s office launched a vociferous objection.

Justice Nash called the two lawyers to the bench. The three cooed like a nest full of doves at dawn. Neil slipped on his glasses and peered around the courtroom. Barbara sat in a simple blue dress at the defense table, looking windblown, all her hair tossed in the same direction, her face red, her tawny eyes again gazing at him as if he were a rare specimen. He couldn’t face her. He took off his glasses. Everything grew consolingly blurry. Was she a killer? He couldn’t decide. His sad role in these events gnawed. He was the instigator. The doves stopped cooing at the bench.

“Go ahead, Mr. Fuller,” said Justice Nash. “Answer the question.”

What could he say about the relationship between Paul and Barbara Gatt? He knew how Paul could at times be insufferable. Brilliant but pompous. Generous but conceited. The center of the universe, like his daughter, ready to challenge anybody who threatened the Aristotelian configuration of his own personal cosmos.

“They were good for each other,” he mumbled. “They pooled their strengths. They grew with each other.”

And then the litany. Loving mother, faithful wife, steward of five years’ standing at the local Pentecostal, corporate VP knocking on the glass ceiling, et cetera, et cetera, until Brooks asked a question Neil didn’t expect, a puzzling and nerve-jangling question.

“And she’s had an affair with your brother how long?”

He tried to hide, to shelter, to disappear into the warm fuzzy ball of his own myopia, but he knew he couldn’t. Nor could he fudge the facts, not with Justice Nash staring at him like a kindly old grandfather. He couldn’t understand the tactic, why Brooks should paint a portrait of Barbara as Our Fair American Every-woman only to slash that portrait with the courtroom equivalent of a Turkish thrust.

“I should think a year,” stuttered Neil.

“And considering the nature of what they are to each other, is it not possible your brother might have killed Paul Gatt? Has Craig ever suggested to you or to anybody else that he might have killed Paul Gatt?”

Neil stared. Hadn’t they agreed not to talk about Craig’s strong backhand? Before he could even begin to formulate a response, the esteemed colleague from the district attorney’s office rocketed to the bench. The three conferred again, cooed again, more obstreperously this time, an arcane examination, so far as Neil could interpret, of the difference between a character witness and a hostile witness. The cooing went on for some time. Neil again slipped on his glasses. Glanced at Barbara. She looked happy. How could she be happy? Neil wanted to go home. He perspired, and whenever he perspired he feared people might make remarks about his weight.

“Go ahead, Mr. Fuller,” said Justice Nash. “Answer the question.”

Neil stared straight ahead. He had an odd taste in his mouth, like camphor, only worse. He had a dizzying sensation in the middle of his head. He remembered the marsh, how, at the age of twenty-two, his third year at art college, he had taken Craig, a boy of eleven, already the best sprinter in school, to see the bulrushes, the beaver hutch, and the great blue heron. Now the water in the marsh was low. Disappearing. The beavers had abandoned their hutch. And the great blue heron was gone. That made him sad. The same way Brooks’s question made him sad.

“He told me he killed Paul,” said Neil.

Rough words, unpoetic words, but true words. His tongue tripped over the miserably hard consonant four times, sounding like four Turkish thrusts, damning his brother once and for all, letting the world know that Craig had indeed delivered the said quartet of stab wounds with the perfect backhand he was so famous for.

Later, with the girl in her bed and the dishwasher humming in the kitchen, and the anchorfool on the late local news telling the good burghers of Manhattan that the jury would deliberate on Barbara Gatt’s guilt or innocence tomorrow, Neil pondered the nature of truth. He wasn’t a man predisposed to dyspepsia, yet now he suffered from it constantly. Wondered about his compulsion to tell the truth no matter what the cost. Even a bit of low-cal cottage cheese and caraway seed could rankle his stomach. He questioned the sagacity of his own moral code. He was perplexed by the nature of truth. He lifted the TV remote and zapped the anchorfool. Was the truth inviolate, never to be shaped or softened according to need? He wondered how he could so easily savage Barbara’s character in front of all those people, then, with a single stuttered sentence, turn his brother into a murderer. Though no longer a practicing Catholic, lapsed in early youth like so many other casualties of the Sexual Revolution, he felt, at least in this case, that he must define himself by one of the New Testament’s more famous mythological contexts, that of Judas.

He got up and ambled down the hall toward the loft stairs. He checked the girl.

He was surprised to see her sitting up in bed, the glow from the theater sign across the street lighting her face, her hands clutching her blankets to her collarbones, her dark eyes staring at a wayward maple leaf stuck to the rain-soaked window pane. He had never seen such a woeful child.

“You’re not tired?” he asked.

She turned to him, her intelligent but plain face quickly crumbling into an agonized visage of hopelessness, her thick dark eyebrows pinching toward the bridge of her big nose, her lower lip curling toward her chin in a rictus of grief. She began to cry. The bleak and piteous sobs of a twelve-year-old child who had no father, who might lose her mother, whose grandmother had succumbed to malignant melanoma in Ohio. Neil didn’t know what to do. What new territory was this? He approached the bed cautiously, keeping his eyes on the sobbing child, afraid she might behave with the unpredictability of a wild animal. What was a temporary parent to do in an emergency like this? He sat on the edge of her bed. He put his hand on her shoulder. He was surprised, even alarmed, when she clung to him. Her sobbing intensified, as miserable and desperate a sound as Neil had ever heard.

“You should try to sleep,” he said, not knowing what else to say, putting his arm around her, rocking her. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”

“I’ll never feel better,” she said.

Then she cried some more. She pressed her head against his chest. He stared at his Second Empire armoire with carved ivory handles against the wall, wondering what he could say to make her feel better, but finally thought, as the rain came down outside, that he shouldn’t say anything at all. No one had ever clung to him like this before. Her girlish muscles squeezed him with bitter strength.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

He stopped rocking her. Stopped because it was as if, with this unexpected apology to her father, Christine had given him a magic looking glass; and in that looking glass he at last saw the truth, understood, with a startling and even frightening clarity, who, exactly, had killed Paul Gatt. By peering into this looking glass he knew how a young girl like Christine might feel if she were hoisted over her father’s shoulder and told she would never see her mother again. He understood her outrage, and the indomitable will of her ego, an ego as strong as her father’s. He could easily understand how, carried over Paul’s shoulder like that, she might make a grab for the Wiltshire Staysharp on the counter, and how she could readily muster the strength, especially in her terror, to swing low and deep, like Jersey Devil at the mad bomber. Was she not, like her father, a force, with a personality as compelling as a thunderstorm? Was she not, like her father, the center of the universe, and willing to challenge anyone — including her father — who threatened the equilibrium of her own personal cosmos? Not a Turkish thrust at all. In the looking glass, Neil saw overhead thrusts, but overhead thrusts from a girl hanging upside down over her father’s capacious back.

In the looking glass, Neil saw a sad little episode of patricide.

Christine’s bag sat packed by the door. She waited in Craig’s car with Runamok, the dog she loved so much. She was happy because the suppertime anchorfool had told the good burghers of Manhattan in his best anchorfool voice that her mother would be acquitted; the jury couldn’t in good conscience hand down a guilty verdict when new evidence, namely Craig’s confession, pointed toward another possible suspect. Any doubt was reasonable as far as an American jury was concerned.

Neil and Craig stood in the living room. Neil’s TV was just a TV again, not the nocturnal battleground for Jersey Devil and the mad bomber. The bed in the spare room was just a bed again, not the stage for a young girl’s remorse. And Craig was just his brother again, kind, affable, sensitive, but still changed, still afflicted, transformed forever by the violent death of another human being.

“And will they go after you?” asked Neil, because he saw this, too, in the looking glass: the reason for Craig’s confession, the logic behind Anthony Brooks’s court performance, his own surprising role as unwitting collusionist. Saw all the careful but necessary card-stacking Craig, Barbara, and Brooks had craftily undertaken in order to protect Christine.

“All they have is your testimony,” said Craig. “And they can’t convict me on that. Not when there’s so much conflicting evidence. Thanks for looking after Christine. She really likes you.”

“She does?”

Craig looked away. “We did it for Christine,” he said. “You understand that, don’t you?”

Yes, he did. What he didn’t understand was how he could have been so obtuse. How he could have been duped.

“What about the jurisprudence of the thing?” asked Neil, still uncomfortable.

Craig shrugged apologetically. “Christine’s going to have her life,” he said. “Isn’t that jurisprudence enough?”

The calm returned. But it wasn’t like the old calm. Neil sat in his studio trying to find that deft stroke or two, the elusive brushwork that would render his family of mallards with the color and form his collectors had come to expect from him. Not like the old calm, because Paul Gatt was dead. He tried a dab of cobalt blue to darken the green, but that just made the drake look like a gander. And never had he seen a gander in the marsh. Putting mallards in the marsh had been a stretch in the first place. He shook his head, his brush poised, and thought of Paul. Nothing would change the terrible but commonplace sequence: he and Craig out with the Gatts, those vulgar shooters, and the simmering inclinations of Craig toward Barbara. Nothing would stop those deadly dominoes from falling: Paul like a bull, his daughter like a Jersey Devil, and the Wiltshire Staysharp like a Turkish thrust.

He put his brush down. He stared at his picture. And he knew he was going to have to start over. He liked the marsh. But the mallards didn’t go. He unclamped the watercolor from his easel. He would do the marsh again. But this time he would do it in darker tones. Tones that would capture the hidden meaning of... of all this. He pinned a fresh sheet to his easel, the best, Arches 300-lb. hot-press, knowing that doubt would remain an unwelcome guest in his Bohemian sanctuary from now on. He lightly penciled a sketch of the marsh. He raised the water level. But the problem of the empty space in the lower left corner remained. He quickly sketched in the great blue heron. And took solace in knowing that he had at last solved the problem.

The great blue heron, she of the Payne’s gray and cerulean blue, had come home to the reeds, lilies, and shallows of the marsh. And in his rendering of the bird, he again found the soul-sustaining satisfaction of a pure and simple labor. Christine Gatt was a killer, Paul Gatt was dead, and Craig would remain forever changed. But at least in his own inner world, the world of the studio, where the rhythms of life were slow, measured, and certain, and potential found its form in the soft illumination of the north light, he could weather any gale, sweeten discord to harmony, and carry his new doubt not as a personal sorrow but as a way to better understand his own personal cosmos.