5432852385743

It was still a few minutes shy of six-thirty, but I found Al in the phone book and punched in his
number without hesitation. I didn’t wake him up, either. He answered on the first ring, his voice
more like a dog’s bark than human speech.
“Hey, buddy, ain’t you the early bird?”
“I’ve got something to show you. A student theme. You even know who wrote it. You ought to;
you’ve got his picture on your Celebrity Wall.”
He coughed, then said: “I’ve got a lot of pictures on the Celebrity Wall, buddy. I think there
might even be one of Frank Anicetti, back around the time of the first Moxie Festival. Help me out a
little here.”
“I’d rather show you. Can I come over?”
“If you can take me in my bathrobe, you can come over. But I got to ask you straight up, now that
you’ve had a night to sleep on it. Have you decided?”
“I think I have to make another trip back first.”
I hung up before he could ask any more questions.
6
He looked worse than ever in the early light flooding in through his living room window. His white
terrycloth robe hung around him like a deflated parachute. Passing up the chemo had allowed him to
keep his hair, but it was thinning and baby-fine. His eyes appeared to have retreated even farther into
their sockets. He read Harry Dunning’s theme twice, started to put it down, then read it again. At last
he looked up at me and said, “Jesus H. Christ on a chariot-driven crutch.”
“The first time I read it, I cried.”
“I don’t blame you. The part about the Daisy air rifle is what really gets me. Back in the fifties,
there was an ad for Daisy air rifles on the back of just about every goddam comic book that hit the
stands. Every kid on my block—every boy, anyway—wanted just two things: a Daisy air rifle and a
Davy Crockett coonskin cap. He’s right, there were no bullets, even pretend ones, but we used to tip a
little Johnson’s Baby Oil down the barrel. Then when you pumped air into it and pulled the trigger,
you got a puff of blue smoke.” He looked down at the photocopied pages again. “Son of a bitch killed
his wife and three of his kids with a hammer? Jee-zus.”
He just start laying on with it, Harry had written. I run back into the living room and there was blood all
over the walls and white stuff on the couch. That was my mother’s brains. Ellen, she was laying on the floor
with the rocker-chair on top of her legs and blood coming out of her ears and hair. The TV was still on, it was
this show my mom liked about Elerie Queen, who solve crimes.
The crime that night had been nothing like the bloodlessly elegant problems Ellery Queen
unraveled; it had been a slaughter. The ten-year-old boy who stopped to pee before going out trick-ortreating
came back from the bathroom in time to see his drunken, roaring father split the head of
Arthur “Tugga” Dunning as Tugga tried to crawl into the kitchen. Then he turned and saw Harry,
who raised the Daisy air rifle and said, “Leave me alone, Daddy, or I’ll shoot you.”
Dunning rushed at the boy, swinging the bloody hammer. Harry fired the air rifle at him (I could
hear the ka-chow sound it must have made, even if I had never fired one myself), then dropped it and
ran for the bedroom he shared with the now-deceased Tugga. His father had neglected to shut the
front door when he came in, and somewhere—“it sounded 1000 miles away,” the janitor had written
—neighbors were shouting and trick-or-treating kids were screaming.
Dunning would almost certainly have killed the remaining son as well, if he hadn’t tripped on the
overturned “rocker-chair.” He went sprawling, got up, and ran down to his younger sons’ room. Harry