Criminal Shorts (1992) Anthology by Eric Wright; Howard Engel

Author:Eric Wright; Howard Engel [Engel, Eric Wright; Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Peter Sellers

Whistling Past the Graveyard

WHEN MACDONALD WOKE UP in the morning the tune was already running through his head. He couldn’t think of what it was called, he had no idea why it was there, and he couldn’t make it go away. He found himself whistling it, loudly and off-key, and that just made his hangover worse.

He rolled slowly out of bed. Melanie must have left while he was still asleep. He’d got home from the airport about eight o’clock the night before and she’d met him a couple of hours later at his house. Their house, he corrected himself with a smile. The wedding was still two months off but he’d insisted on putting it in both their names as soon as the engagement was announced. He’d asked her to move in with him, too, but she didn’t want to do that until the wedding. They’d celebrated his return from Vancouver with a bottle of Scotch, but it hit him hard and he’d faded early.

“Damn,” he said to himself as he shuffled around the kitchen with a glass of juice in one hand and a coffee in the other. He tried to concentrate on something other than the song, but as the hangover began to fade, the tune grew stronger. This thing is going to bug me all day, he thought as he climbed whistling into the shower.

He whistled the tune as he read the paper and dressed. Never the whole thing, just a few bars of it here and there. Random snatches of the verses and the chorus all jumbled up together.

Before leaving his house for work, he searched quickly through his small collection of albums hoping something would twig, but that didn’t help. What little he had was jazz and classical.

Driving downtown he flipped from station to station, from Top Forty to country to MOR, hoping to discover that it was a current hit he’d overheard somewhere, maybe something he’d heard through the headphones on the plane the night before. But nothing turned up.

After a while he just tried listening to himself to figure out what kind of tune it was, as if that might provide a clue. For a while, he was convinced it was a show tune. Something by Sondheim, he was almost certain. Then it began to feel more like a swing number with lots of horns, and then a bluesier thing. That’s when he realized he was extemporizing, making up his own arrangements as he went along. Changing the tune, stretching it out, seeing where he could take it.

Jeez, he thought, this thing’s turning me into a regular Nelson Riddle. He decided the best thing was just to try to forget about it and eventually the answer would come.

MacDonald worked in a high-rise downtown. His office was on the eighth floor with a view south to the lake. He whistled in the elevator, through the reception area, and into his office. He slipped off his jacket and hung it on the back of the door and was just settling in behind his desk when his secretary popped her head in the door.

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