Halloween is Murder(2)

Nor was he a guy you could offer advice to. Even Barry, who was prone to offering unsolicited words of wisdom, knew better than to try to tell Mike what to do. For one thing, Mike was older than Barry. Not so much in years. Mike had been with the Marines on Iwo Jima. He didn’t talk much about it, but that first night he’d admitted to Barry that he’d enlisted when he was only fourteen years old. Because he was tall, had a muscular build, and even back then weighed 180 pounds, he’d managed to convince the Marine Corps Reserve at Norfolk he was seventeen. He’d forged his mother’s consent and was sent to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina, where he qualified as a sharpshooter.

Barry was a little jealous of Mike’s military service. It would never have occurred to him to try and lie his way into any branch of the service, and he’d been too small and skinny to have succeeded anyway. He’d been with the Army National Guard, the “Sunshine Division” when Korea started, and had been deployed to Japan for training. But his tour of duty had ended before his division shipped out to Korea. He’d come home safe and sound and enrolled in college while a lot of his friends had ended up dying at Heartbreak Ridge.

College had not worked out for Barry. He didn’t miss the army, but civilian life was a little too tame. He’d quit school to become an “apprentice” to Sam Bell at Bell, Book and Cannon Investigations. Cannon was long dead by then, there had never been any partner named Book—Sam just thought it sounded classy. Anyway, Sam died two years later leaving the business to Barry.

Barry had been working overtime to keep things afloat ever since, but still, he’d have taken time off for Mike, if Mike had come up with a good reason—or any reason—why they should suddenly leave town.

“It seems kind of sudden,” Barry had said, when Mike proposed a three-day weekend trout fishing at Crowley Lake. “We’re still in the middle of the Rothman case. And the Ciciarelli case.”

Mike had shrugged.

“Any special reason it’s got to be this weekend?”

“It’s a good time to get out of town,” Mike said.

“Sure. But the Rothman dame will be at that Halloween party Saturday night, and we’ll get the goods on her then.”

Mike made a face. He did not like adultery cases. Well, who did? But beggars couldn’t be choosers. He liked getting a paycheck, didn’t he? He sure as hell liked eating.

The expression of haughty distaste on Mike’s rough-hewn features should have been funny, but it stung Barry.

“Wouldn’t it make more sense to clear the decks here first and then take off? The fish aren’t going anywhere, are they?”

Mike said grimly (which didn’t mean anything, because he said everything grimly), “This is not a healthy time of year. Not for me. Not for you.”

“What does that mean?” Mike was being even more cryptic than usual.

Mike shrugged.

Barry wanted to go with him. It was the first time Mike had ever asked him to come along on one of his fishing trips, and Barry couldn’t help thinking—hoping—that maybe it signaled a kind of turning point in their friendship. Over the past few months he had started thinking of Mike differently—he wasn’t even sure when or how that unsettling change in feelings had crept over him—but he wanted to believe it was something to do with sensing a change in Mike. Because with Mike…well, everything would be probably okay. At least, that’s how he’d been thinking lately.

“Do you have something in mind?” Barry asked. “Something specific?”

Mike looked at him like he was trying to make his mind up.

Barry said tentatively, feeling kind of silly putting it into words, “Is it to do with what happened…that other Halloween?”

Right then he’d seen Mike’s face close up like a slammed door.

Mike rose. “I’m taking some time. You’re welcome to come,” he said. “Or not.”

The take-it-or-leave-it tone naturally put Barry’s back up.

“So you said. And like I said, I can’t just flit. I’ve got responsibilities. Clients. Cases.” Few enough of ‘em that he couldn’t walk out on the handful he still had.

“It’s your funeral,” Mike said, which seemed a little somber given they were only talking about fishing.

Weren’t they?

The door had closed softly after Mike.

That was how Barry Fitzgerald (that’s right, wise guy, his mam had a fondness for “the flickers”) came to be sitting in his office at Bell, Book and Cannon Investigations the Saturday night before Halloween. He was drinking bourbon and feeling a little sorry for himself when Margaret Mary O’ Flaherty showed up.

The wrong place at the wrong time.

Miss O’Flaherty said she was looking for a shamus.

Maybe she meant shaman.




“You don’t remember me, do you?” Miss O’ Flaherty asked after Barry ushered her into the battered chair in front of his battered desk. The same chair Mike had abandoned several hours earlier.

Barry threw her a quick look. No. He did not remember her. He was quite sure they’d never met before. He’d have remembered a dame that looked like Miss O’ Flaherty. She was nearly as tall as he was, slender and milky-skinned. Her eyes were such a pale shade of green they almost looked silver. Her platinum hair was sleek and straight, skimming her shoulders like molten silver.