A Rare & Deadly Issue by Marlena Thompson
Excerpt
Prologue
If a coroner could slice open a mind as easily as he could membranes and probe the remains of reason as efficiently as he could the residual contents of a stomach, such a psychical postmortem on one Wallace “Wally” Harbolick would have revealed thoughts scarcely digested during the final moments of life. Through a morbid quirk of fate, though his own unnatural death took him utterly by surprise, that night Wally’s mind had fed on thoughts of murder.
Yet the evening had not been conducive to reflections on sudden death. There was no thunder, no lightning, no howling wind to evoke fanciful thoughts of moon-crazed mastiffs or death-divining banshees. In fact, the night was more than usually fine. At 9 p.m., the air was warm, dry, and, for Los Angeles, clear. Soaking in a cedar hot tub that almost filled his yard, sipping a gin and tonic, Wally spotted a few stars that on a murkier evening would have been shrouded with smog.
It wasn’t unusual for Wally to ponder death on this or any other night. During the course of his work as a criminal lawyer, he encountered violent death in all its ugly incarnations. He routinely defended drug dealers, drunk drivers, arsonists, wife batterers, pedophiles, and others who dispense misery as readily as a missionary distributes copies of the Bible.
On this night, Wally’s reflections on murder were prompted by a news bulletin flashing across the screen of the TV he’d perched on a chair and plugged into an indoor socket with a twenty-foot extension cord. Wally grumbled because the news broadcast had interrupted a rerun of an episode of The X-Files, but the report soon caught his attention. He watched as a young TV journalist nervously whispered he was “live on the scene” of a hostage situation involving a television superstar of yester-season and the ex-star’s wife and brother-in-law.
Two shots rang out suddenly and the reporter cried, “Oh my God!” over the shouts and screams of the actual participants in the real-life TV drama. Wally saw a man’s body plummet from a fourth-floor window straight to the ground. As the body hit the pavement, the man’s head cracked open, spilling its contents on the warm concrete as though it were an egg in a skillet.
“He’s dead,” breathed the reporter.
“Du-uh,” sneered Wally from his hot tub. He glanced down at his watch, which was accurate to the split second, and noted that the body of the unlucky man had hit the sidewalk at exactly 9:07. He said aloud (he often talked to himself), “So that means some other sorry jerk is going to get it at 9:30.”
A collector of crime minutiae, Wally had once read that in the United States, someone commits murder about every twenty-three minutes, give or take a minute depending on annual fluctuations. He often offered that statistic as a mitigating factor in his summations for the defense, as if the frequency of murder made it just another fact of modern life hardly more shocking than gridlock.
Wally assumed the man thrown from the window was the killer’s brother-in-law. He mused that while most people fear sudden death at the hands of a stranger—a psychopath who comes slashing through shower curtains, a mugger who kills for a quarter, or a maniac who opens fire in a fast-food restaurant—more than half of all murders are committed by someone known to the victim.
When Wally heard the soundtrack of The X-Files resume, he turned his attention back to the television screen. Despite an exciting show featuring alien brothers who decapitate their victims telepathically, Wally’s thoughts wandered to his other oft-contemplated subject: money, or rather, his chronic lack of it.
Financial success had eluded Wally over the years. He’d seen former law-school cronies move to up-market locales while he continued to work out of a grubby office over a tattoo parlor established decades before tattoos became cool. Wally didn’t begrudge others their successes. He knew, when he cared to think about it, that his own lack of gut-busting ambition kept him from acquiring clients other than impecunious social pariahs.
Still, he would refute any charge of laziness. Hadn’t he just clinched a deal with someone right here on his own property, way past his regular working hours? True, it was more his brother Alex’s business than his, but so what? Wally had conducted the transaction and managed to save his brother a few nickels in the bargain. But, hey, that’s what big brothers are for, right? Reveling in the recollection of his earlier accomplishment, he thought, “No, indeed. No one can call me lazy, even if I’m not the overachiever in the family.” He’d readily hand that distinction to Alex.
Wally was fifteen years older than Alex. Because he had practically raised his brother, Wally viewed his younger sibling’s professional accomplishments with pride and satisfaction. The evening’s events prompted him to think about other business he had with Alex, a sizable investment he’d recently made in his brother’s book business, at Alex’s rather persuasive prompting. Wally had hesitated at first. It was a lot of money, not the kind he usually had at the ready. In order to get it, he’d had to increase his caseload and travel the shadier side of the judicial highway even more than usual. But Alex had said the investment would be lucrative, and Wally trusted his brother’s business know-how.
Besides, Wally couldn’t refuse Alex. Not after Alex had given Wally’s only son, Lenny, an excellent position in his prominent bookshop specializing in rare and expensive volumes. Wally knew Alex disliked Lenny intensely. But Alex idolized his older brother and Wally wasn’t above exploiting that hero worship for the sake of his only son. So Lenny was a little on the lackadaisical side, so what? Wally still didn’t regret using Alex to help Lenny. Why should he? Parents have a duty to their kids, right? Perhaps to acquit a conscience pinched slightly by fraternal contrition, Wally said aloud, “Hey, I always did right by Alex, now he can do right by my boy. Nothing wrong with that.”
Leaning back in the tub to gaze at the stars, Wally reflected on how he’d manipulated Alex into taking Lenny into his business with the promise of a full partnership someday. The memory made Wally laugh.
“Brother Alex pulled a few good ones, too, in his day,” he said. “We’re two of a kind. Blood tells. Blood tells.”
His laughter was interrupted by the sultry voice of a woman who challenged, “Do I look forty-four? Come on, tell me, do I?”
“Damned loud commercials,” griped Wally. He sat up, intending to stretch to reach the remote and switch off the set. Then he discovered the reason the TV sounded so loud. It hovered almost directly above his head—and ominously over the water in the hot tub.
“You!” sputtered Wally. That was his final word. A split second later, the TV hit the water. With neither bang nor whimper and barely a “hssss,” Wally Harbolick was gone.
If he had managed a last glance at his watch, he might have felt a smug, if ironic, justification in his faith in crime statistics—for the time of his death was 9:30 p.m., precisely twenty-three minutes after the hapless brother-in-law of an out-of-work actor met his fate on a slab of unyielding pavement.
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