EQMM 2008-03-04 by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

Author:Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine [Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Safe and Loft

by John Lutz

An Edgar Allan Poe Award winner, a multiple Shamus Award winner, and a recipient of the PWa’s Lifetime Achievement Award, John Lutz is one of the most esteemed writers in the field. He’s the author of dozens of novels and some two hundred published short stories. His latest thriller, In for the Kill, was published as a paperback original by Pinnacle Books in ’07.

Rose had mud on her nose.

Not a lot, but enough to arouse suspicion. Laker considered telling her about it, but that would be foolish. Instead he pretended to admire the green and yellow tie with the staring-eye pattern.

“Nice,” he said, fondling the tie.

Rose was alarmed. This customer was in his thirties, handsome, with blue eyes and wavy dark hair, and a sort of amused grin that was probably always on his face. His suit was okay, a kind of wrinkled gray blend with a fair amount of wool in it, that had never been touched by a tailor. What alarmed Rose was that he couldn’t really like the tie. And that he seemed so confident, as if he had some big secret.

Rose told herself, so what, everybody has a big secret. Rose was like that.

“Have I got it right,” asked the customer, “all you sell here are ties?”

Together, he and Rose glanced around the tiny downtown shop with its claustrophobically low ceiling and crowded racks of ties. “Not much room to sell anything else,” she said.

She waited, but he didn’t mention that they were the ugliest ties imaginable. Massed as they were, they were a visual assault. Some of them actually hurt the eye

“You want the tie?” Rose asked from behind the counter.

“Sure.”

He dug five ten-dollar bills from his wallet and paid her, watching her tuck the money into the register.

“No change?” he asked.

“Fifty even,” Rose said. “Tax included.”

“A bargain,” said the guy, through his amused smile.

Rose carefully folded the hideous thing and placed it in a bag.

“No receipt?”

“You’ve got the tie,” she told him with her own smile.

“Good point.” He thanked her before she could thank him, then went to the door and opened it, causing the tiny bell above it to tinkle as if sounding a faint alarm. “I’ll tell my friends,” he said, before going back out onto the busy sidewalk.

Rose said for him to be sure to do that, then went behind the curtain to the back room and down the crude wooden steps to where the digging was being done. “I sold a tie,” she said dejectedly.

Donna and Corrine stopped digging. Even dirty, Donna, with her lush, long red hair and big green eyes, looked like a beauty-pageant contestant. Corinne had blond hair, a heart-shaped face, and was attractive, but looked too delicate to be in any kind of contest. Her shovel was smaller than Donna’s. Somehow she hadn’t gotten dirty. All three women were the same age — twenty-one — and attended Pierpont University, but the semester had ended and they weren’t going to classes, so they were working on a summer project.

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