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  “It was an interesting chain of events,” he agreed.

  “It was a tissue of lies,” she said, “and it started to unravel when someone called Channel 7’s investigative reporter, pointing out that Bo was at a hockey game when the Milf Murder took place. How could he be in two places at the same time?”

  “How indeed?”

  “And then there was the damning physical evidence, the lacrosse shirt with Bo’s DNA. They found a receipt among the boy’s effects for a bag of clothes donated to Goodwill Industries, and among the several items mentioned was one Nichols School lacrosse jersey. How Millard knew about the donation and got his hands on the shirt—”

  “We may never know, Alicia. And it may not have been Millard himself who found the shirt.”

  “It was probably Bainbridge. But we won’t know that, either, now that he’s dead.”

  “Suicide is a terrible thing,” Ehrengraf said. “And sometimes it seems to ask as many questions as it answers. Though this particular act did answer quite a few.”

  “Walter Bainbridge was Millard’s closest friend in the police department, and I thought it was awfully convenient the way he came up with all the evidence against Bo. But I guess Channel 7’s investigation convinced him he’d gone too far, and when the truth about the lacrosse shirt came to light, he could see the walls closing in. How desperate he must have been to put his service revolver in his mouth and blow his brains out.”

  “It was more than the evidence he faked. The note he left suggests he himself may have committed the Milf Murder. You see, it’s almost certain he committed a similar rape and murder in Kenmore just days before he took his own life.”

  “The nurse,” she remembered. “There was no physical evidence at the crime scene, but his note alluded to ‘other bad things I’ve done,’ and didn’t they find something of hers in Bainbridge’s desk at police headquarters?”

  “A pair of soiled panties.”

  “The pervert. So he had ample reason to pin the Milf Murder on Bo. To help Millard, and to divert any possible suspicion from himself. This really is superb coffee.”

  “May I bring you a fresh cup?”

  “Not quite yet, Martin. Those notebooks of Bo’s, with the crude drawings and the fantasies? They seemed so unlikely to me, so much at variance with the Tegrum Bogue I knew.”

  “They’ve turned out to be forgeries.”

  “Rather skillful forgeries,” she said, “but forgeries all the same. Bainbridge had imitated Bo’s handwriting, and he’d left behind a notebook in which he’d written out drafts of the material in his own hand, then practiced copying them in Bo’s. And do you know what else they found?”

  “Something of your husband’s, I believe.”

  “Millard supplied those fantasies for Bainbridge. He wrote them out in his own cramped hand, and gave them to Bainbridge to save his policeman friend the necessity of using his imagination. But before he did this he made photocopies, which he kept. They turned up in a strongbox in his closet, and they were a perfect match for the originals that had been among Bainbridge’s effects.”

  “Desperate men do desperate things. I’m sure he denies everything.”

  “Of course. It won’t do him any good. The police came out of this looking very bad, and it’s no help to blame Walter Bainbridge, as he’s beyond their punishment. So they blame Millard for everything Bainbridge did, and for tempting Bainbridge in the first place. They were quite rough with him when they arrested him. You know how on television they always put a hand on a perpetrator’s head when they’re helping him get into the backseat of the squad car?”

  “So that he won’t bump his head.”

  “Well, this police detective put his hand on Millard’s head,” she said, “and then slammed it into the roof.”

  “I’ve often wondered if that ever happens.”

  “I saw it happen, Martin. The policeman said he was sorry.”

  “It must have been an accident.”

  “Then he did it again.”

  “Oh.”

  “I wish I had a tape of it,” she said. “I’d watch it over and over.”

  The woman had heart, Ehrengraf marveled. Her beauty was exceptional, but ultimately it was merely a component of a truly remarkable spirit. He could think of things to say, but he was content for now to leave them unsaid, content merely to bask in the glow of her presence.

  And Alicia seemed comfortable with the silence. Their eyes met, and it seemed to Ehrengraf that their breathing took on the same cadence, deepening their wordless intimacy.

  “You don’t want more coffee,” he said at length.

  She shook her head.

  “The last time you were here—”

  “You gave me a Drambuie.”

  “Would you like one now?”

  “Not just now. Do you know what I almost suggested last time?”

  He did not.

  “It was after you’d brought me the Drambuie, but before I’d tasted it. The thought came to me that we should go to your bedroom and make love, and afterward we could drink the Drambuie.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No. I knew you wanted me, I could tell by the way you looked at me.”

  “I didn’t mean to stare.”

  “I didn’t find it objectionable, Martin. It wasn’t a coarse or lecherous look. It was admiring. I found it exciting.”

  “I see.”

  “Add in the fact that you’re a very attractive man, Martin, and one in whose presence I feel safe and secure, and, well, I found myself overcome by a very strong desire to go to bed with you.”

  “My dear lady.”

  “But the timing was wrong,” she said. “And how would you take it? Might it seem like a harlot’s trick to bind you more strongly to my service? So the moment came and went, and we drained our little snifters of Drambuie, and I went home to Nottingham Terrace.”

  Ehrengraf waited.

  “Now everything’s resolved,” she said. “I wanted to give you the check first thing, so that would be out of the way. And we’ve said what we needed to say about my awful husband and that wretched policeman. And I find I want you more than ever. And you still want me, don’t you, Martin?”

  “More than ever.”

  “Afterward,” she said, “we’ll have the Drambuie.”

  The Bubble Man of Allentown

  BY DIMITRI ANASTASOPOULOS

  Black Rock

  The Bubble Man sat by his open window on the fourth floor of a town house on the corner of Allen and Elmwood. As he settled an aluminum hoop the size of a Frisbee into a tray of soapy water with one hand, he drank from a cup of lemonade with the other, then lifted the hoop in front of a fan. Bubbles floated onto the street below, much to the delight of passersby and children. Day after day he sat by his window blowing bubbles, as soap water bleached the pine floor beneath his flip-flops.

  Across the street, Andre Tippett sipped green tea at a café. He had spent the afternoon in a haze, just watching the bubbles. Nowhere to go, nothing to do. A couple weeks ago, he’d been suspended from his work as a crime scene investigator for the county sheriff’s office, thanks to a prank he had played with some neighborhood kids. He chose not to fight his suspension. Instead he whiled away the days and waited.

  Setting down his cup, he looked up at the fourth-floor window. He had lived in the neighborhood for a little more than nine years, and the Bubble Man had been at it since at least the time Tippett had arrived. He thought of the Bubble Man as a presence who gave Allentown its vibe. Whatever happened in the neighborhood, the Bubble Man was always there.

  Although he liked the idea of the Bubble Man, Tippett was also wary. Once he even searched for him on the sex offender registries. Any man who spends his entire day blowing bubbles into the street is an object of deep and abiding suspicion.

  This was the second face of Buffalo, the envious one, the paranoid profile, the side opposite the one everyone liked to project. Opposite the civil and the
polite, the one that buried secrets and reveled in the misery of others. The one that waited for the Bubble Man to transgress.

  * * *

  Earlier that week, two Buffalo police detectives from the Delaware substation had canvassed the streets after the disappearance of a neighborhood woman, Lora Gastineau. Tippett knew both detectives personally from crime scenes. Gastineau had last been seen walking to a hardware store on Allen, wearing only a slip and sneakers. She told her husband that she’d only be gone a minute, but she never returned. The two detectives knocked on Tippett’s door, and when he opened it, they looked past him into his living room and beyond to the kitchen. They were all business, even with colleagues, Tippett thought. When they were on a case, they treated that person as though he had something to hide, even Tippett. Their gaze was bearable only if regarded from a distance, as in a court of law, or else while standing in line at the bank, or picking lettuce out at the grocery.

  Of course, they had come to Tippett’s door specifically looking for his housemate Steve. Tall Steve with the bleached mohawk, Steve who returned home from the bars each evening and cackled his trademark “Holy hell!” as he slammed the front door, Steve who called in falsetto—“Anybody home?”—as he plodded up the stairs, stumbling two-thirds of the way up before finding his bed and collapsing onto the mattress. The detectives had come because of Steve’s prior history: three years ago he’d been charged with kidnapping an underage girl to a Fort Erie casino. Steve and the girl had stayed in Canada overnight, and the girl, to save herself from her parent’s anger, swore she had been forced to go. Eventually she revealed that on prior occasions—though not this time because Steve had been so drunk—they had sex.

  Eighteen at the time to the girl’s sixteen years of age, Steve spent half a year in lockup for statutory rape (the kidnapping charge was dropped). That’s where Tippett got to know him. The county sheriff’s prison cells were in the same wing as the county forensics lab, and Tippett occasionally encountered Steve in the prison library (a security breach, to say the least), where they discussed their love for old underground comic books. The talks never revolved around plots or characters but rather around R. Crumb vs. S. Clay Wilson, or the influence of Spain Rodriguez. Though Tippett was in his midsixties and Steve in his early twenties, they became fast friends, and after Steve’s release, he moved to Tippett’s apartment where he read comics for much of the day and drank beer, while waiting to hear back about jobs he’d eventually get fired from.

  Tippett yelled for his housemate to show his face. Though it was only noon, Steve shuffled down the stairs drunkenly, shirt full of bloodstains. “Oh God,” Tippett moaned. And with that, the detectives took Steve to their precinct and began pumping him with questions.

  “Tell us about Lora Gastineau.” But Steve said he knew nothing about the woman. He swore that the blood on his shirt was from a fracas at Fisty’s Saloon. The detectives didn’t buy it. Fisty Carroll, the one-armed owner, a man of ill repute, had apparently and very suddenly attacked Tommy Callahan, the catcher for Buffalo’s Triple-A baseball team. According to Steve, Callahan had been sitting at a table along with two girlfriends, one of whom invited Steve to sit with them for a drink. Everything was fine, and then in the middle of a sentence, Callahan tipped right over in his seat and passed out, spilling beer everywhere. It was eleven in the morning, and he was very drunk. The mess had sent the usually calm Fisty over the top. He grabbed hold of Callahan’s neck and tried to chew off the man’s ear. He bit it, pulling so forcefully that the catcher’s ear stretched like rubber, until the eardrum burst, then disintegrated altogether as though Fisty had sucked it out of the canal.

  Steve’s story amused the two detectives. They were responsible enough, however, to at least check it out with the officers in uniform down the hall. After three hours of interrogation, they received word: Officer Blackmon verified Steve’s story. Every detail was true. Fisty was already out on bail after appearing before Judge Adams. And with the awareness that a colorful bar fight out of an old Hollywood wrestling film really did take place in the city of Buffalo—a scene replete with violence, descriptive nicknames, and even war wounds—the detectives released Steve, who didn’t waste the afternoon. He walked right back to Fisty’s.

  When Steve later recounted the whole story, Tippett fixed on one detail that had been contested—whether or not Fisty had sucked out Callahan’s eardrum. As baseball fans later found out, the drum had in fact disappeared and Callahan’s catching career suffered: he couldn’t hear the umpire call balls and strikes, and he often lost balance, keeling over backward when he squatted behind the plate. All that was left in his canal was a knot of withering nerves exposed to the whistling wind.

  * * *

  A week after Lora Gastineau’s disappearance, Tippett agreed to meet the detectives at Betty’s on Virginia Street. From the outdoor table where they sat, they viewed the backside of buildings on Elmwood. Many were in bad shape. Dark ivy-covered walls, broken roofs. Above the buildings in the distance loomed Bass Pro Tower, one of the city’s few skyscrapers, now abandoned. A brown hulk erected in the 1970s, it broke with the city’s boldly elegant turn-of-the-twentieth-century facades, its dark tinted windows concealing its empty floors.

  Tippett hardly touched his coffee: he’d only ordered one because he wanted the detectives to know Steve had nothing to hide, that though Steve excelled at finding trouble, he was actually a good kid.

  Barry, the shorter of the two, shuffled in his seat, as Maurice reached down into his briefcase, gently laid a pen on the table with the other hand, then abruptly pulled out a plain blue notebook with a picture of Gastineau paperclipped to the cover. Tippett recognized her from the news, but he had rarely seen her around the neighborhood. She was married to an optometrist who practiced downtown. Tippett struggled to imagine how Steve might have known her.

  She looked very young in the photograph, maybe twenty-five. Why were the detectives using an old photo? The woman was at least forty.

  As they ran through the case, the detectives explained what they had learned so far. They then described some of the sketchier characters around Allentown, asking Tippett if he had anything to add.

  “Maybe she’ll come back,” Tippett said. “Maybe she’s bored.”

  A long silence. Barry twirled his pen around his fingers like a baton. “You know about the others,” he said. “The ones that haven’t been publicized.” He asked Tippett about the last time he’d seen Ms. Gastineau, and whether he’d ever seen her with Steve.

  Tippett hadn’t been hiding anything. But he remembered seeing the optometrist awhile back through the big street-level glass windows of Cantina Loco. Mr. Gastineau had been talking to a young girl at the bar, and Tippett noted it. “Harmless flirting,” he said. “Maybe his wife didn’t mind.”

  Tippett was speculating—he knew practically nothing about the couple. The two detectives didn’t say anything.

  * * *

  On the next Monday night, Tippett received a call from Gary Yepremian who told him that a body had been discovered in Black Rock. This was the first call from his boss in a couple weeks: Tippett, it seemed, was back on the job. Time to prove himself. In minutes, he made it to Black Rock and found the building, an auto collision shop a stone’s throw away from the International Railway Bridge. Since the area was surrounded by barbed-wire fence, he needed to cross over the canal in back of the shack in order to access the body. He thought nothing of commandeering one of the skiffs he found beached on a bike path below the Niagara Thruway; he paddled across the canal to a little ramshackle house crumbling on a tiny beach next to the auto collision shop. Bottles floated by, dead fish, broken planks, tree limbs. His boss had said that the corpse had already been identified as Dora Sanford, wife of Lucky, who had recently opened a new business in Black Rock. They had a child last year.

  While paddling, Tippett thought of the day when Yepremian suspended him for coloring in an outline of a county councilman’s run-over mastiff as c
hildren from the neighborhood gathered around. One told Tippett that he hoped to become a crime scene investigator himself. None of them, however, had seen the car that hit the dog. It was a cloudless day. And the children cajoled Tippett until he removed a chalk stick from his bag and began to color in the mastiff’s outline, making a real show of his skills. He was simply humoring them—he knew a good forensic scientist should never draw an outline, as it contaminates the crime scene. When Councilman Bert Jones arrived, he was angry, not only that his dog had been killed, but that the artistic representation of its death had brought cheer to others.

  Crossing the canal, Tippett was glad for another chance to collect evidence. A few decades ago, he’d been trained to draw outlines when a body had to be moved quickly. But crime scene procedures had changed over the years. For instance, his colleagues began to use miniature triangle placards numbered according to body parts instead. This was common practice for a few years until Tippett pointed out to his bosses that the triangles were reused at other crime scenes, thereby contaminating blood samples from one scene to the next. After that, the investigators used index cards, which they disposed of afterward. Occasionally, when no one else was around, Tippett broke out his chalk and drew for old time’s sake. He’d later blame his chalk outlines on rookie cops who arrived at the scene prior to him. “Chalk Fairies,” he called them: they’d draw and disappear. Secretly, he took special pride in etching the most telling lines around a body. In the early 1970s his lines were severe and exact, the best around. He accounted for even the slightest fold in a pant leg, a skill appreciated especially by the families of the deceased who scrutinized photographs of Tippett’s outlines for a hint of their loved one’s final moments. They recomposed and reenacted entire scenes from an outline of parted lips and heaving tongue that may have formed, Tippett liked to think, the shape of dying words.