Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 128, No. 5. Whole No. 783, November 2006

Evening Gold by William Dylan

The author of half a dozen non-fiction books, including Houston Then and Now and Austin Then and Now, William Dylan Powell works as an advertising copywriter in Houston, where more than 150,000 New Orleans evacuees were provided food, shelter, and jobs. This fiction debut was inspired by a visit to the French Quarter’s M.S. Rau Antiques one month before Katrina hit.

I once read that if you’re a shoe salesman and you don’t show up for work, people will miss you. But if you’re a writer, not a sole will care. That’s not entirely true. The original author of that maxim left out the unconditional love for writers found in all creditors and often many members of the law enforcement community — both of which were sorely disappointed to see me go the day I officially died.

The hour I remember most clearly that day was seven in the evening; I was in my brother’s bathtub, listening to the cicadas buzz through the window screen and trying to take my mind off having generated almost a million dollars’ worth of debt earlier that day. For some people, that’s not a lot of cabbage — maybe a bad hand at the MGM Grand. But for me, that’s almost a million dollars more than I had in the Des Moines Community Credit Union. And I don’t gamble.

The water scalded my skin, the air in the bathroom as wet and alive as the dank Louisiana air outside. I’d tricked my brain into temporarily forgetting the day’s events, the way we all do, if only for a split second, when something bad happens — like a torpedoed ship sealing off flooded compartments. My eyes had just closed, my hands folded across my chest. I was wondering if a man could drown in his sleep when I heard an explosion coming from the driveway that jolted a loofah brush off the towel rack above and squarely into the sweaty iced tea I’d been drinking.

Had I been in anyone else’s home, I would have been petrified. But my brother Bob — a mining-explosives specialist — ate, slept, and watched Matlock reruns amongst dozens of crates of explosives. Though he did use them for work, he didn’t really need them here; he just liked them here. They were part of the furniture — like milk crates in a college dorm. So when I heard the explosion, I assumed it was just another something of Bob’s that blew up. I was wrong.

Bob’s silky terrier, which had fallen intensely in love with my down jacket and insisted on dragging it all over the house since my arrival, had for once dropped its soggy orange sleeve and retreated into the bedroom closet. The motion-activated driveway light clicked on. From the bedroom window, I stood gaping at the unmistakable sight of money snowing from the sky, spiraling down like the helicopter seeds of a maple tree and occasionally scraping the window pane. I rubbed my eyes for a good three seconds — making sure I really hadn’t fallen asleep in the bathtub — but I was awake, all right. Money was literally falling from the sky; you’d have thought it would’ve been my best day on Earth — not my last.

But thinking back to the previous night’s conversation with my agent, when I was still in Des Moines, I should have known better.

“What does ‘shop it around’ mean, in terms of time, Phil?” I asked, flipping through a half-dozen utility and credit-card bills, most of which I planned to pay with the contract we were currently discussing.

“It just means that we need to find a house that shares our vision of another Detective Demitrez novel being successful in the marketplace. These last guys thought your latest work lacked a certain... humanity. We just need to get the formula right, that’s all — it takes time.”

“Time? Last time we talked, words like ‘series’ and ‘optioning’ and ‘obscene promotion budget’ kept coming up.”

“You’ve still got your teaching gig, right?”

“Yeah. But Des Moines Community College doesn’t pay enough for the twelve-hundred-calorie-a-day lifestyle to which I’ve grown accustomed.”

We talked for another ten minutes, but it boiled down to only an apology, more promises, and a one-way ticket to my brother’s house outside of New Orleans to let off some steam. While he and his wife were in Houston, I would turn his place into the Area 51 of self-pity (and his liquor cabinet into a dangerous crater).

New Orleans oozes literary inspiration, so as my plane touched down I’d had a sense that big, easy changes were afoot.

Next morning I’d breakfasted at Brennan’s, with mimosas and red wine; I’d gone to Faulkner House in Pirate’s Alley and bought a signed first edition of a Tim Gautreaux novel (all courtesy of Mastercard). Then I ducked into Pat O’Brien’s and spent the rest of the morning drinking, smoking cigarettes, and reading the Times Picayune and Le Monde. The stories all sounded the same. Kamikaze impersonators in the Middle East blowing it off the map. Police impersonators in New Orleans smuggling blow from offshore. Elvis impersonators in Vegas helping fat Americans blow their paychecks. All around me, people were pretending to be something else and, for the most part, achieving their personal goals in the process. I, on the other hand, was doing a lousy impersonation of a writer. My body of work was emaciated, and missing major organs.

Deep down, every writer knows they are playing a role; that they’re not the real deal — their big smarts and swagger mere threat displays of a jungle creature with small teeth and a lousy dental plan. They live in a world where accusers lurk under parked cars, on editorial boards, in mirrors, and threaten to leap at them any moment — exposing them for the fakes they really are. Every imposter I read about seemed like a distant relative.

None of this introspection darkened my mood, though, especially when reading Le Monde. I often savored a single issue for two Des Moines weeks, being proud of my French and apt to carry the paper around everywhere waiting for someone to comment on it so I could show off. Sitting in Pat O’Brien’s that morning, I was surprised at how much I still retained from my time in the Peace Corps at Burkina Faso.

Just west of Niger among the deforested flatlands of West Africa, Burkina Faso achieved independence from France in the ‘sixties, but retains its language. It’s a land whose sons and daughters inherit little more than dust and disease. There’s not much to see if you only look with your eyes; yet it’s also a world where the visceral human will to survive runs through the streets like mercury. And four dollars will get you a house.

Looking back, I sometimes think those were the happiest days of my life. Teaching English in mud-brick huts. Living on baguettes and Sovobra beer. Sleeping under the stars during the hot season. My writing might lack humanity, but at least I knew I wouldn’t lack lunch. Next month looked a bit shaky; but today food wasn’t a problem. That thought put my recent career setback into perspective, giving me a smile Huey Long himself couldn’t corrupt.

When I stepped out to the street from the blackened bar, the sun sent goosebumps up my arms and neck. The rays burned through my thinning brown hair and onto my scalp like an imaginary lover kissing the crown of my head. This was just what I needed to forget about the Detective Demitrez disappointment and get on with my writing; maybe even on to something bigger and better! I lit up another cigarette with a grin and began the hunt for what I now know was the last lunch of this life.

Passing an antiques shop, I saw a painting by Winston Churchill. “Is that cool, or what?” I asked a lady next to me as she frowned and walked away. It depicted a coastline, with placid waters imposed on an ominous wall of cliffs and rocks. Over half a million bucks! Whoa! We have antiques stores in Des Moines, but nothing like this. I went inside, walked past a half-dozen clerks fawning over a well-dressed Indian couple, and walked to the rear of the store. The room buzzed with financial appreciation. Never had I seen such a collection: a 1795 Swiss birdcage for a quarter-mil; an apropos pair of enormous globes once belonging to Napoleon; King Louis XV’s war plans for the Seven Years’ War, framed and mounted in 48-karat gold. But it was when I saw the bedroom suite that things went south: a mahogany and mercury-gilded seven-piece Empire-style bedroom suite once belonging to an Egyptian king. I was enthralled, and not exactly paying attention to what I was doing.

The security camera’s grainy black-and-white footage showed a trim man in a suit, formerly of Indian-couple fame, running at full speed, knocking over a Spanish suit of armor and jumping over a footstool once owned by the pirate Jean Lafitte, to hunt down the distinct smell of cigarette smoke. Across the store, it showed a frumpled, lanky pseudo-academic from Des Moines in a red Hawaiian shirt leaning against the painting-lined wall and staring at the Egyptian bed, then throwing his hands up like a night clerk being robbed after realizing what he’d done. Together, both men stared at the tragedy: a perfect circular, cigarette-shaped void on the canvas of Evening Gold by John Atkinson Grimshaw. The price tag, still blown by the displaced air of the flying proprietor, read $775,000.

Grimshaw was an English genius; a painter whose works were produced in counterfeit even before his death in 1893. But the one I branded was as real as a prison cell. Depicting the artist’s nineteenth-century Victorian home, it was painted in 1885 and preserved by dozens of galleries and private owners from Leeds to Louisiana until finally meeting its end at the hands of a half-drunken novelist from Des Moines.

Smelling the burnt canvas, I became like one of those mimes out at Jackson Square: limbs locked in an impossible position hoping some dentist from Chicago would put a dollar in my box so I could spring to life negotiating an invisible world. But it would take a lot of dentists to get me out of this mess. I shoved my way back to the street, where I vomited violently into the tall hair of a short housewife from Texas.

“Contrary to popular belief, jail doesn’t really give you time to think about what you’ve done, you know,” I told Big Winkie the bail bondsman a few hours later. Public intoxication. Destruction of private property with intent to split. Assault with potentially hazardous biological pathogens.

Mr. Winkie was a shaven-headed Creole with a chest like two oil drums and a Patek Philippe wrist watch. He and I were talking in French and, complemented by the international language of intimidation, he told me that if I skipped out on my bail he’d make in me another little black hole. This caused an uncomfortable pause in the conversation. “It’s actually pretty loud in there all the time,” I went on, out of nerves. “The yelling. The clanging. The bodily functions.” There’s an old Chinese saying that the emptiest containers make the most noise, and there’s a lot of emptiness going on in the slammer.

The events of earlier that day were all the more reason the greenbacks in Bob’s driveway had my attention. After it was evident that the explosion was over, and the money shower wasn’t, the terrier and I ran to investigate — orange jacket in tow. My sister-in-law’s Volvo was crushed as flat as a crêpe, an impossibly configured humanoid on its roof wearing a white helmet and half-deployed parachute. On the satellite dish hung a huge, ripped canvas satchel, more like a three-person tent, really — and the apparent source of the mysterious cashola. I started picking money from the ground so it wouldn’t blow away as I waited for the sirens, neighbors, and news crews. Then I ran and put on my good baseball cap and got my wallet so I could have ID handy for the police, like on TV. I picked up a copy of Scientific Explosives that had blown from the car and thumbed through it as I stood in the driveway and waited for what seemed like an hour.

But no one came. Bob’s nearest neighbors live miles away here in this little agrarian exurb far from the New Orleans city limits. No sign of any pursuer or official. No curious neighbors. No news crews’ talking hairdos. Just me and the money and a dead man on my sister-in-law’s flattened Volvo. Eventually I climbed up and got the satchel, went inside, and started counting. Having already been to jail once that day, I needed to think carefully about my next move; about how important money was in comparison to my integrity; and about what kind of man I really was. It didn’t take long.

You can stuff an amazing amount of cash into your sister-in-law’s duvet cover if you roll it just right. One thing I knew for sure, though. That Volvo, my only dependable wheels in the Big Easy, wasn’t rolling anywhere — and I was too old to lug a seven-foot-long cash-and-cotton enchilada a thousand miles back to Des Moines. I lit a cigarette and watched the terrier roll up on the giant money bag with my jacket and go to sleep, clawing and assembling a suitably comfortable nest the way dogs do. Like me, he didn’t think the money was going anywhere soon. I couldn’t drive it home. I couldn’t take a taxi. There was no room on my Mastercard to rent a car. And since Southwestern Airlines had been known to pick all the green M&m’s out of my checked baggage, much less refrain from stealing actual cash, flying it up there wasn’t an option, either.

I went back and spent a few minutes examining the distinctly non-Swedish aftermarket luggage rack in the driveway. Its face was a bruise, revealing nothing of its past but speaking volumes of his or her future. I set my wallet on the roof of the Volvo next to our unexpected houseguest, thinking that I wouldn’t need — or want — to show the police my ID right away after all. Then I wedged my hand under the roof just far enough to put the car in neutral and push it into the garage next to Bob’s antique Fiat, which, being both Italian and thirty years old, was wholly unsuitable for dependably moving corpses, mystery money, or itself. As I imagined my brother’s take on discovering a dead skydiver, most likely a drug smuggler, in his garage, the doorbell buzzed.

Looking through the peephole of the front door, I saw the brim of a state trooper’s hat and a black windbreaker.

“Good afternoon, sir,” said the trooper, looking past me into the house as I opened the door.

“Hi.”

“Have you seen or heard anything unusual this evening? There was a plane crash nearby and we’re trying to piece together what happened.” His Louisiana Highway Patrol windbreaker was cracked and faded, with bright yellow block letters. A .45-caliber pistol hung at his side. He mumbled something into a radio and started moving room to room, shining his flashlight in each one, even though every light in the house was on. I followed, watching an enormous snake tattoo peek from under his jacket with every jab of the flashlight.

“No, sir. This is actually my brother’s house. I’m just house-sitting. I’m a writer.”

“A writer, huh? You didn’t write The Da Vinci Code, did you? That was the best book ever! It was so... so... human.”

“No. But I did write a mystery novel: The Corn Killer of Council Bluffs. It’s part of the Detective Demitrez series. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?” Without knowing it, I lit the last cigarette of my existence.

“Uh, no.”

When he reached the bedroom, the sight of the duvet stopped him cold. He walked over to it and took out his nightstick, poking it. “Maid got the night off?” He grinned. Just then, the terrier came out of the closet and walked up to the stranger, grinning, tail wagging, and with a hundred dollar bill stuck to his foot.

“Well, lookie here.” He chuckled. “Is this a donation to the department?” He put his nightstick back in his holster, and my cigarette revved like a steamboat engine. The man held the bill up to the light and studied it carefully. I was forming a confession when a windbreaker-and-snake-wrapped elbow made my brain bounce against the inside of my coconut. Through the critical mass of pain radiating from my mouth, I remembered: Louisiana hadn’t had highway patrolmen since the ‘fifties. Today they’re called the Louisiana State Police, and they don’t wear hats like that. I tasted salt and was surprised to find the floor where it was, pressing my cheek into my nose. With my ear to the hardwood, the round he popped off with his .45 was that much louder.

The bullet lodged in the floor next to me as my cigarette landed squarely on the duvet and I smelled the unmistakable scent of burning feathers. I squinted so hard I could’ve cracked two pecans. With the gun pointed my way, the non-cop started trying to get a good bead on me, simultaneously unwrapping the duvet to pat out the flames. I was sort of rolling around, trying to make aiming that much harder, when I noticed the smoking corners of the duvet spreading out all over Bob’s makeshift bookcases. Then I remembered where I was. And what the bookcases really were. Without thinking and before he could react, I sprinted out of the room, hearing a shot and feeling the air near my left ear pulse. Once outside, I dove into the ditch in front of Bob’s house and did my best impersonation of a nesting crawfish.

Before I saw the explosion, I felt it — like a warm front jumping on my chest. The yard’s sprinkler system had been on earlier and the cold water in the ditch soaked my Hawaiian shirt, turning its cheery red into a dark burgundy. The cops were coming now, that was for sure. I figured it was just as well they find me in a ditch. And then I felt a wetness in my ear that was neither ditchwater nor the goodbye kiss of a killer. It was Bob’s silky terrier — a little singed around the edges but basically okay — dragging a singed orange jacket piled with hundred-dollar bills.

It wasn’t $775,000, but it was enough to pay off Big Winkie and get him to make me a fake passport to boot. With any luck, crime-scene investigators, coroners, creditors, editors, and antiques dealers wouldn’t know that I wasn’t Volvo Man for weeks — and by then it would be too late. I had a thirst for Sovobra, and the raw humanity of a good night’s sleep under the stars.

Copyright © 2006 William Dylan Powell