Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 137, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 835 & 836, March/April 2011

Shelf-Cocked by Erika Jahneke

Erika Jahneke is an author and blogger whose subjects (for publications such as Smile, Hon) range from how the city of Baltimore is depicted in pop culture to women’s reproductive health. Her fiction has appeared in several e-zines, but this is her first paid print short story. The Phoenix resident says her writing almost makes up for the physical power she lost when she developed a brain injury at birth and became a life-long wheelchair user.

It was the most perfect copy of The Maltese Falcon any of the antiques-shop owners of downtown Glendale had ever seen, and it was in my dad’s store. I missed not having to care about things like that, but the recession had brought such tough times to writers that nowadays I had to try to convince myself there were worse fates than feeling twelve years old every time someone’s old book was pronounced “shelf-cocked” and therefore too bent and damaged to sell. I had only worked there a short time, but I was feeling shelf-cocked myself.

I tried to feel lucky. The old man had thought of me, for once, rare books being a big part of his trade; just the fact that he’d pitched me the job at all could represent a real turning point from our past: criticism on his side, rebellion on mine. Although, in view of what eventually happened, I suppose I should say that my father neither touched me inappropriately nor locked me in a closet for whole nights at a time. Does it count as inappropriate touching if you remember the one time he rubbed eucalyptus on your congested chest more clearly than when the space shuttle blew up? Because I still do, along with the little jingle that may have kept me from joining my friends in college in fierce denunciations of television commercials. I think it’s inappropriate that I can count the times he hugged me on one hand. I use all the fingers, but just barely. I suppose if he didn’t spend his days and nights pricing snuff boxes and thimbles it would be easier to think of him as the strong, silent type, but at least my mother’s post-divorce nickname for him, Claude Rains, made sense now. Once in a while, though, he had a sentimental craving to be on Mom’s good side, and she probably told him that my term-paper editing business had gotten slow and my articles weren’t selling like they used to. For too much of my life, he’d been invisible. While it was probably too late for him to save the day with soft words and circus tickets, I admit that I came into the job very determined to get something at last. The role of model employee was definitely out, as he and Lola spent most of every work day together, laughing at private jokes and poring over eBay on her pink laptop. I tried hard to impress for a few weeks, though, as the something I wanted started out recession-modest and as naked as a good girl’s need for gold stars. At least you have a job, I told myself. And I did get to take a book with me and read in the back sometimes, which was good — if I could edit out the way Lola treated me as if I left Pig-Pen stink-lines as I walked away.

It was hard to have much faith in my good fortune, though, with demented old duffers attempting to grope me while I bent to show their wives something from our bulky display cases. But even I was psyched by the discovery of the Falcon, though I was mostly a Chandler girl at heart. I was also one of the few people to come in here who saw books as more than investment opportunities or something to match the couch.

I was not among my people.

And that was before I thought about Lola, the other sales assistant, who’d been an eighth-grade classmate, although not a friend, and who only seemed to come to life to accept my father’s compliments about her “good eye” for glassware and thirties brooches. She wasn’t pretty when we were in school together, and I had to admit she had ripened a lot, but this knowledge hadn’t made her calmly confident of anything but wrapping men around her little finger. She whiled away her mornings watching me work. If you’ve never worked retail, you’d be surprised at how little time selling stuff to people actually takes up. When I worked in a gift store during college, we were expected to vacuum, dust, and fill any holes in the display cases on a regular basis. Lola never felt such pressure, so between that and my drive to be worthwhile, that old carpet had never seen so much attention.

“I was about to vacuum... I hope it doesn’t interrupt your reading or anything.” I was more tart than I expected after holding my tongue for weeks.

If you can mouse with attitude, Lola did, and completely missed the point of my sarcasm. “Oh, it’s no big deal,” she said, after a desultory keystroke.

“In case it’s not clear, I doubt my dad is paying you to sit around and read TMZ and Go Fug Yourself all day. But I’ve only been here doing all your cleaning and dusting for four weeks so I could be wrong.” When I thought about it later, I wondered how much of my subsequent pain could have been avoided if I, a grown woman with publications and everything, hadn’t been so childish as to talk about my dad like that at work.

“If I got that fat,” she remarked, pointing to a photo of a comedy actress from the eighties who seemed to like to overeat, “I think I would kill myself. You know?”

Even though I hated Lola, it would have been anti-feminist to point out the way her thighs strained against the tight jeans she insisted on wearing. I can point it out to you now, though, since she’s dead.

“I found the Falcon, Natalie,” she said.

“Yes, you got lucky, accepting a box full of books from a widow who didn’t know what she had. Forgive me, your Highness.” I fumbled with the vacuum, which, like everything else in this place, was ancient, and, as I used the hoses, I fantasized that my hands were around Lola’s neck. It was a surprisingly vivid fantasy; hard to shake. It was unusual that we found a first edition so unattended yet so pristine, but I could just as easily have accepted the box, if I hadn’t been wrangling stock in the back while Lola practiced simpering in all the chandeliers.

I didn’t know why I even cared; my worst nightmare would be developing a talent for this sort of thing, but it was hard to walk past the Falcon every day (even without the helpful lecture about the rare Falcon imprints on the back cover, specific to the 1930 edition) without seeing a pile of greenbacks arranged in a case. It was the down payment on a house, or maybe my creative-writing masters... More to the point, it could get me the hell out of the store, if I could hold out till something else shiny distracted the collectible-crazed masses and eBay it out of state. It could be the perfect crime, if, once I got it out of the store, I could somehow manage to turn my untidy office into something resembling a bank vault. Even too much sunlight coming through the windows could render all my sneaking around almost moot, as perfect condition was paramount. It amused me to think of a Communist bruiser like Hammett coming down to Earth to find his most famous creation, written about the fears of working men, being coveted by nerdy people who gardened and had special cotton book-fancying gloves to protect the murder and mayhem from the acidic oils in their hands. I don’t really know if Dash would need a drink to cope with that, but there were times when I did, and I found myself emptying Chardonnay bottles with alarming frequency as I bided my time and told myself I’d get up early and write. Tomorrow.

Put more crudely, my fantasies about the first edition filled me with the deepest lust I’d ever felt in my life. I craved that book, and woke from dreams feeling its binding under my fingers... I’d stop short of saying that it made my panties wet, but I did occasionally fantasize about filling my apartment with its mint value, all in fives, and rolling around in it naked. I thought I finally caught a break when I was asked to close the store following “Glendale Glitters,” the holiday street festival that kept all the stores downtown open late. Dad liked for two people to be there at night, so Lola pursed her lips in a pout she’d been taught someone found fetching. I swallowed my gorge behind a team-player smile. “I can handle it myself... don’t worry about it. Lola, you just go and enjoy your Friday night.”

I was a little too hearty about the last part, so suspicion fought it out with relief. “You sure? Because I don’t mind staying...” But her eyes flicked to the door as if in anticipation a day in advance.

“Yeah, sure,” I said, “And if it gets slow, I’ve got some poems I could work on.” I thought this was a nice sop to the old man, the image of his eldest girl plugging away in a dusty store like the forbidden love child of Abe Lincoln and Emily Dickinson, but I wondered if I’d oversold it. He looked satisfied, though, as if in that one moment we’d come to understand each other.

Sometimes I still feel guilty about that. That night, though, I practiced feeling nothing. Unlike movie cons, however, I couldn’t get a break. Five minutes before ten, some European tourists came in, and I couldn’t make them understand “We’re closing soon” in my broken German, but they bought a lot, without even looking twice at my black book-robbing outfit. I was just about to take my literary spoils and disarm the alarm (Dad’s birthday, 8-25-51, which he only changed from 1-2-3-4 at my pre-criminal insistence. I was grateful for his predictable habits of mind) when the lock rattled again and Lola came in, vastly overdressed for a shift of work and showing copious cleavage. “What are you wearing?” she asked. “That goth thing is so over. And you suck at it anyways... Goths always wear skulls and dangly shit. Just black is a more emo, check-out-my-pain kind of trip.”

“I could ask you the same question. But for right now, I have to deal with the fact that you interrupted me during my cutting ritual... I may have to do both wrists now.”

She looked at me with distaste. I don’t think she cared that I was joking. My plan ruined, I watched as the shadows lengthened and removed the tiny bit of charm from our town square.

We both froze as the lock rattled again. Maybe my father had forgotten something. It took everything I had not to go over to the case with the Falcon in it and stare moonily at its dust jacket. I was about to invent one last task to enable this, when an unfamiliar voice cut through the silence.

“Hello, ladies.” The figure before us was slight, five-nine at the absolute tops, with a twangy accent. “I’m going to need the contents of your safe, if you don’t mind.”

It was the Gentleman Bandit, named by police and local news for his courtly and polite robberies of west-side minimarts and car washes. The local press loved how this guy had made area businesses part with so much coin without cursing once. The suggestion that some of the clerks he had robbed had seen a gun was much less gentlemanly. “If you could lie on the floor for me, that would be fantastic. Thank you.” Something in his waistband clicked, and I hit the dusty floor, all the while wondering if I’d been taken in by a water gun, but not enough to stand my ground. “Do let me know if this is uncomfortably tight, won’t you?” he almost purred as he tied us back to back with the bungee cords we usually used to tie furniture to the tops of people’s cars.

“Is it true that you can get everything in twenty minutes?” Lola asked, as languid as if she’d just woken up in his passion-tossed bed. I couldn’t believe she was flirting with him as he robbed us, but Lola flirted with everything. In the darkness, my cheeks burned.

“This looks a little light,” he remarked of his haul.

“Business is down... times are hard all over. The owner” (nothing would induce me to say “my dad” at work again) “tries to make it up on eBay, but, you know...” I made a sweeping yet helpless gesture that I hoped conveyed the vast economic machinery that kept me in the store and stuck on page 100 in Paul Krugman’s book.

“Shut the hell up.” I made a sceptical sound and he added, “Please.”

I had to smile. In the YouTube era, everyone was worried about his press.

The bandit licked his lips, which I had been trained by thousands of third-rate crime thrillers to view as the behavior of a drug-crazed psychopath, and my heart seemed to skip a beat.

“There’s water in the fridge in the back.” I don’t know why I said it. Maybe I just wanted one thing I could control, or maybe I was beginning to relate to the stranger who broke into this dust-scented stillness. He just wanted to get something out of being here, too. For a moment, I almost asked him his secret and offered to put him up in Mexico. A flicker of headlights made us all tense up. He was methodical as he searched the place for the glitter of gold and the sheen of silver and cleaned us out.

He left my corner, and my attempted haul, alone. I don’t suppose he would know what he had, nor how important it was to shield it from the elements. The flicker of headlights returned and, in the glare from the faux-old-fashioned streetlight, I saw that the vehicle in question had a tiny dent.

“Get rid of them,” the bandit said, after viewing a piece of jewelry in the glow of his flashlight. “Please.” He loosened my restraints, and though he made no overt threat, the way he flicked the loose skin at my elbow delivered a potent promise of pain deferred, and he squeezed my arm in an ungentlemanly way. Tears stung my eyes and I was profoundly conscious that he was watching me.

I swallowed and said, as if I had free will left, “Yes, it’s probably better. We used to... date.” I suppose buying takeout tacos and leaving panties in someone’s Suburban counted as dating, but the word was ridiculous. He never bought me flowers, or introduced me to anyone, and he was miles away from the kind of guy I’d like in my “real” life, even though real life was becoming as misty and distant as my memories of childhood summer camp. I held on to it; in the wake of my failed life of crime, it could be all I had.

I plastered some semblance of an expression on my face and actually ran my fingers through my hair. Habit, more than anything.

“Hey, saw that there was a light still on.” What Jon lacked in conversation, he made up for in attention to rent-a-cop detail. It had its advantages, but I said, “You noticed that from across the street?” and felt my voice quiver.

“Oh, no,” he said, and smiled my favorite goofy smile, as if I were a prom queen with whom he was hoping to score. “I was in the neighborhood. Empanadas.” And he held up a white bakery bag on which I was forced to imagine lashings of grease.

Speaking of imaginings, I wanted Jon to be more William Douglas, less Barney Fife. I took the bag, because not doing it would have gotten his attention instantly. I stepped in close, willing him to be a television detective and smell my fear.

I settled on one last red flag that the bandit wouldn’t spot as a red flag. I cooed, “You’re terrible,” and kissed Jon hard, in a way I wouldn’t when we both had our clothes on. It might have raised my antennae if I were in his place, but I’d forgotten how much men’s lessons about life were different from mine. He probably thought this was more a sign of order retained than disrupted. I bitched him out (girlishly) for not waiting for my call and, in a shocky, dispassionate way, wondered if he would be the last person to talk to me alive. I found some fake cheer, told Jon inventory had run long, and he left, tasting my desperation-fueled kiss on his lips along with the starchy pastry. He was sweet, but he wasn’t a hero.

The bandit led us back to the storeroom and tied us back to back. Unless it was my imagination, it seemed there was more slack this time; it had probably been a long night for him as well. “I’m going for it,” Lola whispered.

“Don’t flatter yourself. He’d probably do anything to stay out of prison.”

“Not like that. God. What do you think I am?”

Here’s an elementary etiquette fact: The moment when a coworker offers to do something crazy-dangerous to disarm a robber is not the moment to reveal you think of her as a lazy whore. Even if I hadn’t left some high-road on the floor mats of a certain Suburban. “I’m getting out, or getting the gun. Or something.”

“Can I help?” I asked, moved. I had been so wrong about Lola... maybe there was really a giving soul in there, with a higher purpose. My eyes were wet.

“Don’t take this wrong, but you’re, like, better at talking than fighting.”

She wasn’t sweet, but she was a hero. She sprang to life faster than I might have predicted, if I’d been laying bets instead of sitting around with my heart in my mouth. She was no Michelle Yeoh, but the bandit did grunt as she kneed him in the groin. The struggle took a brief turn for the hand-to-hand and ancient atlases hit the floor with explosive bangs. I tried to tell myself that’s what the smaller, more automotive pop was, too, but I knew it wasn’t.

The bandit held his head in his hands. “What have I done?” he moaned, as Lola’s dressy outfit became spattered with blood. By the time he let me see to Lola, or think of 911, it was too late. I knew that much from my big high-school “Be a writing doctor” phase. It never amounted to anything because I suck at math in an epic fashion, but I could figure out one equation: Bleeding + time away from doctors = death. I did what I could, but first-aid class seemed far away and the bandit seemed to have folded in upon himself. We both turned from her body without saying anything. I cleaned myself up and took the Falcon, at last. He seemed to head for the men’s room, but I can’t be sure. I went to the back to play victim, my spoils in my sweater.

I picture the bandit slipping out the unscreened window like fate, but I never found out for sure, and my paper-white complexion and unwillingness to speak for a week discouraged many questions. If it hadn’t been so traumatic, being close to death could have been the best thing that ever happened to me. My brief encounter with death had suddenly made my articles and stories worth reading, so I told my father the truth when I said that a “new opportunity” would mean that I wouldn’t be at the store for much longer. “Besides,” I moaned, playing the girlie card I’d resisted and squeezing out a snuffle, “anything might have happened to me in there.” Which of course, it had. My work nemesis was now dead after saving my life. But usually, when I mentioned anything happening, it involved body parts my father wasn’t comfortable with below my neck.

True to form, he patted my shoulder awkwardly and offered me a napkin to dry my fake tears on. We walked through the place, both determined not to mention the imperfectly lifted stains. “I was always planning to replace that carpet anyway,” he told me and I nodded, trying hard to focus on something in the store so I didn’t see the flecks of blood from my futile and ill-informed attempts to save Lola’s life. Everything left in the store now was too heavy for a bandit to make off with, like heavy oak furniture, or kitsch, like a first-edition Operation game from 1965. As we walked through the section Dad still gamely called mine, I felt almost as if I could lock eyes with the red-nosed Operation character in a “Can you believe this shit?” eye-roll.

We approached “my” bookshelves. Joy of Cooking was still there, as were Bennett Cerf and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. “He didn’t take much out of here.” My father sounded half relieved, half rueful. “Except the obvious... God, that newspaper feature on the Falcon was a big mistake.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” I assured him. “It will give you proof with the insurance company. Besides, criminals don’t read.”

I couldn’t read his face for a moment and almost feared my jig was up. “Is that more hippie stuff they taught you at college?”

I sighed and acted like I had to let the archaic insult roll off my back and nodded. “You’d be shocked how many felons didn’t learn how to read by third grade.”

I knew I was safe when he said, “Huh,” the same one-syllable grunt he used for sad inner-city documentaries and foreign food. It said, “I don’t want to absorb this. Change the channel.”

I never thought that sound would protect me, but it has. My last day at the store is Friday... it’ll be awhile longer until I can sell my literary treasure, but until then, there’s always Go Fug Yourself.

Copyright © 2011 by Erika Jahneke