Eric B. Ruark's Blog

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MURDER BEYOND THE MILKY WAY is the product of several divergent ideas that merged into one. The first one was simple. I’m a mystery writer and I wanted to write a mystery. But what kind of mystery. I thought a murder mystery would be nice… a simple, straight forward someone lying in a pool of blood kind of mystery.

Okay step one: if’ I was going to write a murder mystery, I needed a victim and not just any victim. I had to kill someone whom the people in the story would care enough about to do something about it and thereby bring the reader along on their quest for answers.

To me, in its basic form, a murder mystery is a “QUEST” story, like the Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail in a murder mystery is to not only find the killer but also to understand why the killer took that particular life in the first place. So, I needed a knight, a hero… someone who cared enough about the situation of the murder to put out the effort to find the answer.

You see, if no one cared about the murdered man or what the murdered man stood for, or why he was killed then no one would be motivated enough to find the answers to the unsolved questions. It’s not just the murderer who needs a motive. The protagonist also needs a motive to motivate him to solve the crime.

In the classic MALTESE FALCON, Sam Spade doesn’t care for his partner who is killed in the beginning of the book. But Archer was his partner and whether he liked him or not, Spade was honor bound to do something about it. Spade was a private detective. It would be bad for business if he let the killer get away with the crime. Spade cared about how he would be perceived by other people. He was motivated by self-interest rather than a sense of justice.

Step two: I am a great fan of General Hospital. I got hooked on it back in the early 1990s when I was in the hospital with a ruptured pancreas. (Another story for another time.) During the months I spent flat on my back, the only thing I could do was watch TV. This was in the days before cable and the hospital only had four stations: the hospital station and the ABC, CBS and NBC affiliates. The TV was mounted on the wall and set to the ABC channel and I was too doped up to change it so I became addicted to the ABC soaps. The Sonny/Jason dynamic has always intrigued me. So when it came time to construct MURDER, I wondered what Jason would have done if Sonny had been killed? (For you non GH fans, Sonny is a Godfather-like character and Jason is his chief enforcer.)

That gave me my first plot point: Steve Summerset is killed and Matt Quincey is angry enough to do something about it. (The why is a spoiler, I don’t want to reveal here.)

As Sherlock Holmes said, “Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot…” But where were their feet going to tread? Which brings me to the third idea that was floating around in my head: Communism. Marx got it wrong… well, sort of. He took a Biblical idea and missed the point in creating an economic system centered on the worker.

In the Bible in Acts 2:44-46 it is written And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need. And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart… and then in Acts 4:34-35 it is written: Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, And laid them down at the apostles’ feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need…

In these two examples, the first experiment in Communism was not centered on the worker, but on the workers’ devotion to God. In the next chapter, Ananias and Sapphira bring a portion of the what they sold their property for and GOD killed them for claiming that they had brought it all. Their eyes were obviously not on the prize. Marx took religion out of the equation and made the state God. Big mistake. The state is merely a human construct that people may or may not develop devotion to. A state can be over thrown, God cannot.

Therefore, if a community is going to function communistically, the individuals in that community must have their eyes set on something higher than the concept of a “State” or they have to be so personally invested in whatever they have they eyes set on that to over throw it is to over throw themselves.

Since no place like that can exist on the Earth, I created Magnum-4, a planet in an isolated portion of space. The planet is made up of the most sought after commodity in the known universe, red ore. The people on Magnum-4 are there for one reason and one reason only: they intend to mine the planet to extinction and leave with more wealth than a human could hope to spend in several lifetimes (which is good since Youth Treatments have extended the normal human span out to close to a millennia if anyone had the money to pay for it.) The inhabitants of Magnum-4 have the money and more. Greed is their god and self-interest is the motivator. To go against the system is in every respect to go against themselves. Very few people will go out of the way to shoot themselves in the foot. It hurts and most people will do anything to avoid pain.

So… by necessity, in order to have fun with my idea of communism, I had to take my players into the realm of space opera. I consider MURDER more a space opera than a science fiction piece. A reader may disagree. One of my beta-readers has suggested that my Quincey character owes more to Kurosawa than to General Hospital since with Steve’s death, Quincey acts very much like the Ronin in YOJIMBO. I won’t deny it. I’ve seen Kurosawa’s films dozens of times and could easily have absorbed some of his ideas. In MURDER, Quincey is so angry that the Vigilance Committee, itself a star chamber with the power of life and death over everyone on Magnum-4, literally does not want to get in his way. They know that when he catches the killer, his justice will be as swift as theirs. It suits their purpose to give him carte blanche and back off. (Why is another spoiler.)

Okay. So I have a murder taking place on the edge of explored space. Who or what controls “explored” space? And here, I owe a lot to William Harrison’s ROLLERBALL. Corporations run things in the future, just as they do now, only there is no need to hide behind pseudo-governments. The corporations have divided the arm of the galaxy between themselves. They missed Magnum-4 because it was literally off their radar and by the time they realized it was there, the miners were already in place and producing. Think of the Kimberly diamond mines and you’ll pretty much have my prototype for the operation out in space and the effect that they would have should they flood the market with their product.

I have the crime. I have the place. Now all I needed to do was populate my fictional world with a planet load of fictional characters. (Who said that writing isn’t fun.) I had two problems, here, I had to overcome. The first, there were going to be no persons of color in the story. There didn’t need to be since by this time in man’s future, the human race had become homogenized. Periodically, you have recessive genes re-emerging giving people like Alyson Lehman her striking black hair and almond shaped eyes. The second problem dealt with aliens, or the lack thereof.

Way back in college, I read a book by a mathematician called THE BLIND WATCHMAKER. In it he postulated that it would take an infinite universe with an infinite number galaxies with an infinite number of planets just to reduce the probability of life occurring on one of them to zero. In other words, there are no aliens. We are alone. Using his theory, I can send anyone anywhere and not worry about stepping one someone’s squiggly toes.

I also chose to avoid the metric system measurements. By definition a meter is one-ten-millionth the distance from the equator to the pole measured on a meridian on Earth. To me that meant that unless the non-earth planet were the exact same size as Earth itself, a meter on one planet would be different than a meter on another planet. However, an inch on Earth is an inch on Mars and so on.

Once I had the who and the where, I had to create a timeline into which I had to weave the what, when and why of the story.

While Lydia is at a meeting with the planet’s mine owners, Steve is murdered. A blade-like shard of sharp silicon rock is shoved into his chest. I know by whom and why they did it. I know it, but Quincey doesn’t; neither does Lydia, Steve’s lover and member of the all-powerful Directorate that controls their particular parsec of space; nor Jane, Steve’s daughter; nor Harry Salem, the poor son-of-a-bitch who has been sent to the farthest reaches known to man to convince Lydia to return to Earth Prime and resume her duties as part of the Directorate. This allowed me to make Harry the unwilling Watson to Quincey’s Holmes.

Harry is literally dragged kicking and screaming into a mystery abut which he could care less. However, over the course of the novel he comes to care about it and the people who are affected by it. Add to this core of central characters a list of subsidiary ones who populate, live on and work on Magnum-4 and who frequently get in each other’s way. And there you have it, how I came up with my novel

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When I read, I sometimes listen to music. Sometimes I listen to one of my Pandora stations. Sometimes, especially when I’m on my boat, I have my TV tuned to one of the cable music channels. The other day I was listening to the BLUES station when “Caldonia” pulled me out of THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF DIXIE.

It was one of those moments when my senses conspired against me and took me back to a moment in time that I hadn’t thought about in years. One moment I’m sitting on the quarter-berth in the main cabin of my Grampian-26 reading a book and the next, I’m sitting in a dark, cave-like room listening to Memphis Slim. I’m not 64. I’m 17 and sitting with two friends in the basement of a Paris nightclub listening to one of the icons of American music playing the piano and entertaining an eclectic group of international music lovers.

My parents had a habit of getting rid of me for the summers. Not that I’m complaining. I didn’t then; I’m not now. I actually enjoyed the places they sent me. There were six years of summer camp on Cape Cod; school in Pully, Switzerland and a summer school session in Paris, France. As an only child, it gave me a chance to be me… or, at least, be someone other than the kid I was in Middlebury, CT.

In Paris an elderly woman put some of us up in her apartment in Neuilly-Sur-Seine. She supplemented her income by hosting students from other countries. There were a couple of guys from our group and a couple of stunning young ladies from Yugoslavia. Somewhere I have photographs of a wedding procession that I took from her balcony. I remember the trumpets and the horse drawn carriage with support vehicles. It was like something out of another century.

For some reason, the boys from my group were reassigned to other families. I moved from Neuilly to live with a family on Avenue Neil. I remember that I was just down the street from the Metro stop Place Pierre and not that long a walk from the Arc de Triumph. I did a lot of walking that summer (tripping from cafe to cabaret thank you Joni Mitchell) and spent a lot of time on the Metro or on a bus. Our school was located over near the Sorbonne and it was our responsibility to get to class on time. After class, our time was our own. I spent a lot of time walking the Champs-Elyées and hitting all the typical tourist spots. I climbed the Eiffel Tower, spent hours in the Louvre, toured Notre Dame and saw Napoleon’s tomb at the Invalids. And that was just during the day.

Paris’ nights are something you never forget. There was onion soup in Les Halles, all kinds of little restaurants in all kinds of nooks and crannies. I remember walking down the street with Pug and Harvey and a good looking young prostitute grabbing Pug by the coat and trying to entice him into the brothel. I remember his embarrassed look and the way he said, “No thank you” in that southern drawl of his. (Apparently the touch of a good looking young woman who was willing to have sex for money made him forget all of his French.)

Pug (I don’t remember his real name) was a short fellow. I’m just shy of 6-feet and Pug only came up to the tip of my chin. We called him ‘Pug’ because of his nose. This was in the days before plastic surgery was something everyone turned to and Pug’s nose had come up against someone’s knee playing sports and, on the whole, as nick-names go, Pug really wasn’t all that bad. Pug, Harvey and me hung out that summer. Yeah, we broke a few rules, like the time we were in the Louvre and took pictures of us standing behind headless statues giving the ancient cold marble current human heads. Apparently taking pictures was a no-no as several guards pointed out. They didn’t confiscate out cameras so somewhere in the world is a photo or two of the Prince of Lagash with my head and some armless statue with Harvey’s hairy arms.

The three of us went everywhere. We even took the train and went to the 24-hours of Le Mans. But one night, Pug called me up and said he had found a great club with an American playing. I called Harvey and the three of us met up and hoofed and Metroed it over to Les Trois Mallietz where someone named “Memphis Slim” was playing.

I had never heard of Memphis Slim. This was in the late 1960s. Equal rights was still being fought for and some artists and musicians left America for Europe where a black man would be recognized for his talent and not his skin color. In America black songs were still being covered by white singers because many radio stations would not play “black” music.

Slim had moved to Europe in 1962 eventually setting up shop in 1965 at Les Trois Mailletz in the heart of the Golden Triangle in Saint-Michel. I have no idea how Pug found this place. But it was great. The place has a front entrance, but I don’t remember using it. I remember having to go down a dark alley and an even darker set of stairs and through a door and into what seemed to be an ancient cellar with a cold stone vaulted ceiling that if you weren’t careful, you’d bump you head on. And Slim had to be careful. He was a tall black man. As I said, I’m close to 6-feet and I remember looking up at a tall black man with a white streak in his well pomaded hair. He sang songs (and I later learned that he had also written them) like AIN’T NOBODY’S BUSINESS, BORN WITH THE BLUES, COLD BLOODED WOMAN, HARLEM BOUND, PIGALLEY LOVE and 500 others. After his death, he would be elected to the Blues Hall of Fame, but that was still 20-years in the future.

I found a picture of the piano bar at Les Trois Mailletz. In it everyone except one young man is looking at the performer. The young man is looking directly at the camera. He’s sitting in my seat. The piano-bar was in the basement. The basement was a long rectangular room. Think of a wine cellar in a old monastery. There were no windows. There were tables down the center of the room and tables in the alcoves made by the ancient stone arches. There was a small stage at one end of the room and the bar was at the other.

That first night, we were all mesmerized by Slim, his singing and his story telling. During one of his breaks, Pug got the courage to go and talk to him. I’m sure that the rum and coke had fortified his courage a little.

That’s right… rum and coke… Cuba Libre. The three of us were only 16 or 17 years old and we were sitting in a night club drinking and listening to one of the icon’s of music performing. It was Paris. There was no drinking age. We paid the cover. We paid for our drinks and that’s all the management seemed to care about. We also did not act like three kids on a weekend binge because their parents were out of town. Our parents were thousands of miles away and we thought we were so sophisticated. (Damn those were good days.)

Slim was standing at the bar. Pug walked up to him. Slim had to have been at least 6’4” and Pug was all of 5’6”. Slim was a tall black man. Pug was a short white guy. Pug stuck his hand out.

“Hi, Slim. I’m from Memphis.”

Slim smiled a big, toothy smile. “Good for you, boy. I’m from Chicago.” His voice was deep and rich and melodic. The two of them shook hands.

From then on, all summer long until we had to head back to the states, every night that Slim played, we were there. We were regulars. We were so regular that one night we showed up and our drinks were already waiting for us at our table by the arch.

But Slim wasn’t the only person playing. There was a German band, not an oompa band, but one that played contemporary cocktail kind of music. Slim was obviously the headliner and the German band filled in during his breaks.

I began to notice that we were not the only regulars who showed up for Slim’s performances, either. There was a very beautiful (exotic) woman with dark hair and blue eyes who always sat center front when Slim was playing. And there was a slim Englishman who always wore a suit and stood at the bar when Slim played. However after a couple of weeks, something unusual happened. The Englishman and the woman began changing seats during the German band’s performances. They would sit at the table next to us and make out like two teenagers in the balcony of a dark theater. It happened over and over again. Whenever Slim played, they would be at their places front center and at the bar. When the German band played, they would be by us kissing up a storm.

One night, curiosity got the better of me. When Slim started playing, and the Englishman headed back to the bar, I walked up next to him and offered to buy him a drink.

“Why, thank you,” he said. “You must be friends of Mr. Slim. I see you here practically every night.”

“I see you too,” I said. “But one thing has been driving me crazy and I hope you aren’t offended, but I’ve noticed that you only make out with the pretty brunette when the German band is playing.”

“Oh, you’ve caught that,” he said.

“I couldn’t help but wonder… why?”

“Oh, that’s easy enough to explain. I’m having an affair with the young lady and her husband is the band leader.”

Okay, too much information, but then it was my fault for asking. “You’re making out with a man’s wife directly in front of him?”

“Almost,” he said. “You see, when he’s on stage, he can’t see through the stage lights. He can’t see us sitting by you. When his set is almost over, he always plays the same break song. It let’s Mr. Slim know that he has to get ready and it let’s us know that we have to separate before the song ends otherwise he would see us.”

“Isn’t it kind of dangerous?” I asked.

“But that’s the most exciting part,” he answered.

They were still at it when our summer semester ended and we had to head back to the states. I never told my parents this story. I doubted they would appreciate it. I did tell it to Russell, my hippie/druggie friend. He knew who Memphis Slim was and for a while held me high in his esteem. Eventually, I started hanging with my old neighborhood friends and went back to being a typical American teenager.

(If you liked this post, you might also like my SciFi/Mystery novel, MURDER BEYOND THE MILKY WAY http://www.amazon.com/Murder-Beyond-M... )

My maternal grandfather, Mike Boiko, was a bona fide war hero (World War I). He was awarded the Silver Star, the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star, the Croix de Guerre with Palm, and several other medals since lost when my father (then a teacher) took them to school to show one of his classes and they disappeared from his briefcase. Among the medals lost was my grandfather’s Distinguished Service Cross. The citation preserved at Arlington National Cemetery where he is buried reads as follows: When the advance of his company was temporarily halted by machine-gun fire from an enemy nest, Sergeant Boiko volunteered to flank the nest and put the guns out of action. Although under intense fire, Sergeant Boiko, utterly disregarding his own personal danger, crawled out from the lines and worked his way to a favorable position where enfilade fire could be delivered and with his pistol silenced the guns, capturing them and a portion of the enemy gun crews, thus enabling his company to make a further advance.

Mike wasn’t his real name. His real name was ЕВГЄНИЙ (pronounced Yev-gen-yay) only when he reached the shores of America from his native Kiev, the processing clerk had trouble getting his mouth around my grandfather’s first name. So he became “Mike”. Behind closed doors, my grandmother hinted at some dark secret such as a duel or murder (righteous, no doubt) that forced my grandfather to flee from his beloved Tsarist Russia. While playing in my grandmother’s attic, I discovered a trunk that contained my grandfather’s old uniform, his old gas mask (which I remember putting on and tasting the brittle dustiness of the snorkel-like mouthpiece), the plates of a banned book describing the excesses of the Russian Orthodox Church, his military citations and several letters from the Lenin/Trotsky Communist government asking him to return to Mother Russia to take his place as a hero of the Revolution.

I was only 7 or 8 at the time and none of these things made any sense to me. I never knew my grandfather. He died 13 years before I was born. He came to America sometime around 1911 or 1912. The Russian Revolution wasn’t until 1917. So what could the Communist government have wanted him for? Years later, I began to wonder what would have happened if he had gone back? Would he have survived the Stalinist Purges? Would my grandmother? Would my mother? Would any portion of “me” have survived? The truth is: had he gone back, there would have been no “me”. My mother would have been born in the Soviet Union and not Waterbury, Connecticut. She would never have met or married my Maryland Eastern Shore father and who’s to say that any portion of what would have been “me” would have survived Stalin’s mass murder in the Ukraine or Hitler’s devastation in World War II?

But Mike was as White a Russian as you could find. He despised anything “red”. He wouldn’t even allow that color in his house. (Many years after he died, my grandmother had the whole house covered in red siding. To this day, I wonder if she were making some kind of political statement or just thumbing her nose at her dead husband?)
My grandfather suffered from what we now know as Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. It drove him to drink. From what I’ve heard, he wasn’t a mean drunk. He was just a drunk. He was one of those men who find themselves so much alive when their lives are in danger that peace is not an option for them. Like Sherlock Holmes’ 7% solution, my grandfather needed to anesthetize himself from the lack of physical danger. Sometimes, when he reached a certain level of flushness, he and a couple of his old buddies would hop the trolley to New Haven in order to catch the train to New York City. His goal was the French Consulate. It seems he had a standing invitation from the French Foreign Legion to enlist at an officer’s rank as a reward for the services and honors he had already won in the trenches on the Muse, the Argonne and at Verdun. However, he never made it further than Ansonia. Apparently, he would announce with a great flourish to anyone who was listening that he was off to join the French Foreign Legion. Right after he left, one of his other friends would call my grandmother and she would call the police in Ansonia and they would board the trolley and give Mike and the boys a ride back to Waterbury.

I have often questioned my grandfather’s sincerity about joining the French Foreign Legion. Why would he have taken the trolley when he could have taken the train? Waterbury, CT had (and still does) a beautiful and distinctive train station. Built in 1909, the building was designed by McKim, Meade & White, renown architects from New York City. Its focal point was a Seth Thomas clock tower modeled after the 14th century Torre del Mangia in Sienna, Italy. As many a 66 passenger trains a day serviced Waterbury and, from all reports, the ride to New York City was rather enjoyable. If Mike really wanted to join the French Foreign Legion, the train would have been the fastest and safest way to go. But did he really want to?

Was he bluffing when he got tanked up and announced to one and all that he was off to join the French Foreign Legion? The train was quick and direct… Waterbury to Bridgeport to New York City. The trolley was slow and stopped in every town along the Naugatuck river, plenty of time for my grandmother to make a couple of phone calls. It was easier to be taken off the trolley than it was the train. Was he counting on her “interference”? From all the photographs I’ve seen, Mike would have looked very dashing wearing le kepi blanc.

However, in all the stories I heard about my grandfather, there was always something of the “bluff” about the man. Mike bluffed his way to his Distinguished Service Cross. He used the old BEAU GESTE trick. When working his way to enfilade the German machine-gun nest, he out flanked the enemy by using his own dead. He spread them around and positioned them with their rifles to make it look like they were aiming at the enemy. Then he moved back and forth behind the dead men, firing at the Germans. When the Germans looked up, they thought they had been outflanked and ambushed by a squad of men. They surrendered and the rest is history… well almost.

I said before that Mike used the “old BEAU GESTE trick”. Only, at the time, it wasn’t old. In fact, it hadn’t been thought up, yet. P.C. Wren wrote BEAU GESTE in 1924. In it, as the Arabs are attacking the fort, Sgt. Markov comes up with the idea of propping the corpses of his men at their posts with their rifles to convince the Arabs that the fort is still manned. Six years EARLIER my grandfather had actually used the dead to convince the Germans to surrender.

In 1918, Wren was supposed to be kicking around Morocco and Algeria. Who knows whether or not in those six years he heard the story of the soldier who got a machine-gun nest to surrender by using the dead bodies as his support troops? It would be fun to think while watching the old Gary Cooper movie that Brian Donlevy is actually performing the feat that was inspired by my grandfather.

And who’s to say that he wasn’t. P.C. Wren had a mad “Russian” Sergeant perform a trick to fool the enemy that a desperate Russian (Ukrainian) Sergeant used to fool the enemy in real life.
Even back then, people knew that Mike’s behavior had something to do with the War. My mother and grandmother used to say that my grandfather acted the way he did because he had been gassed.

According to them, Mike would periodically check himself into the VA hospital to dry out. But every time he dried out, he’d get wet again. Eventually his drinking would make him suicidal. Not that he ever attempted to kill himself, he would just get drunk and threaten to. I suppose my mother and grandmother were enablers in their own ways. They allowed or inadvertently encouraged his actions. But even enablers get tired, and the problem with bluffing is that, eventually, someone always calls your bluff.

One afternoon in 1936, Mike was drunk and morose. My mother, who was 13 at the time, walked by him. She was dressed to go out. “Where are you going?” Mike asked. “To the movies,” she answered. She was never clear on what was said, only that Mike didn’t want her to go and she didn’t want to stay because he was drunk. Eventually, he played his trump card. “If you go, I’ll kill myself.” Every other time, she had taken off her coat and stayed. But not that day. “No. You’re drunk,” she said. And she went to the movies.

I’ve often wondered what movie she went to see. 1935/36 was a great year for films. You had Clark Gable in MUTNEY ON THE BOUNTY; Errol Flynn in CAPTAIN BLOOD; Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers in TOP HAT; William Powell and Myrna Loy in AFTER THE THIN MAN; and Janette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in ROSE MARIE, just to name a few. But it was not the kind of question I could ask. Mom went to the movies. My grandmother was probably in the store. (She ran a little grocery store during the Depression and, by the time of my birth, a liquor store at the same location.)

Being ignored by the two women who meant the most to him, Mike walked across the street to sit and be morose with Mr. Greenberg. But Mr. Greenberg wasn’t the enabler that Mike’s two women were and he had had just about all he could stand from this old war hero.

Whenever I think of my grandfather, I also think of Bruce Springsteen’s song “GLORY DAYS”. How often can you hear the same old stories or bask in the aging sun of youthful heroics? For Mr. Greenberg, it was this far and no farther. At some point in my grandfather’s mantra about killing himself, Mr. Greenberg finally snapped. “Well, stop talking about it and do it or just shut up and get on with your life.” At that point, Mr. Greenberg reached under the sink and pulled out a bottle of bleach and slammed it down on the table in front of Mike.

When I was 18, I was invited to Spain by José Greco, the world famous Flamenco dancer. José introduced me to Andres Vasquez, one of the country’s top matadors. (The next year he would be featured in James A. Michener’s book, IBERIA.) Andres often talked to me about the mystique of bull fighting. “When you do it right,” he said, “you can feel the Angel of Death’s wings enfold you and the bull.
Everything else disappears. It’s just you and the bull and the Angel suspended in time and space.” At St. Michel, Chateau Thierry and the 2nd Battle of the Marne, Mike must have heard the Angel of Death’s wings flapping like a veritable gaggle of geese as the men he knew were blown apart and mowed down around him. For a man who had charged over ground that was more human flesh than dirt, what was a bottle of bleach?
His bluff called, Mike drank it. It took him five days to die.

My mother learned that her father was in the hospital while she was walking home from the movie. The bus driver on the Long Hill run saw her and stopped the bus to tell her. I often wondered how she felt. Was Fred Astair or Errol Flynn worth it? What if she had stayed home? Or would that have just been postponing the inevitable? No one knew how to handle Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder back then, and my grandfather’s self-medication turned out to be as destructive as any German machine-gun nest on the Marne. What if she had stayed home? What if my grandfather hadn’t drunk to death? What if I had gotten to know him? Would my life have been any different? Would knowing him as opposed to knowing about him have helped me in any way? Since Mr. Greenberg didn’t force the bleach down Mike’s throat, and since my mother and grandmother didn’t press the issue, the police ruled it a suicide.

My mother waited until I was 20-years old before she told me the whole story about my grandfather’s death. The next year, Mr. Greenberg was killed walking home from the grocery store. He was frail and in his 90s. It was winter and night and the Long Hill Bus was struggling to make it up the hill. The bus driver figured that the old man must have slipped on the ice in the dark and slid into the vehicle’s path. Since no one saw it happen, the police ruled it an accident.

For the most part, not knowing my grandfather on my mother’s side never bothered me. My grandfather on my father’s side died when I was so young that I barely remember him. What I do remember is a Norman Rockwell-like individual, slender with salt and pepper closed cropped hair (more salt that pepper). In my memory, he is standing… immobile like an old photograph. Perhaps I am remembering a photograph. I also remember crying when I heard he died.

(If you liked this post, you might also like my SciFi/Mystery novel MURDER BEYOND THE MILKY WAY. http://www.amazon.com/Murder-Beyond-M... )

To understand the events of 1967, I have to take you back to 1966. Lyndon Johnson was President and I was 17 years old and attending Taft, a New England all-boys boarding school located in Watertown, Connecticut.

Back in the day, New England boarding schools were strict places with a whole range of rules and regulations that regulated a students life from the time he got up in the morning until the time he went to bed at night. Notice I said “he”. At that time, the boarding schools were not co-educational. That revolution was still a handful of years in the future. If you want an idea of what went on at an all-boys boarding school, read A Separate Peace or watch The Dead Poets Society or for a UK version check out any of the Good-by Mr. Chips movies. American prep-schools were modeled after their British Eton-like counterparts.

But this isn’t a reflection about prep-schools. It only starts there. Actually, it started back in the late 1930s early ‘40s when my father learned to play the trombone and got a job playing with a swing band in a roadhouse down in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. In the summer of ’66, I found my father’s old trombone and decided to take lessons. Prep-schools being pre-schools, my wish to emulate my father was immediately embraced by the faculty and Mr. Young was assigned as my trombone teacher.

Phil Young was a great guy. Well over 6-feet tall with close-cropped blonde hair, he taught music, coached football and was the associated conductor of the Waterbury Symphony Orchestra in Waterbury, CT just a few towns over from us (a short car ride of no more than 15-minutes). I liked the man. He put up with my limited musical talent and let me come to my own realization that playing the trombone was not in my blood. In fact, I like the man enough that I took a “Permission” to go and see him conduct the second half of a Symphony presentation one pleasant fall evening.

At that time, when you were “in” a boarding school you were literally IN that school. To leave the school for any reason (except for walking to the designated shopping areas along the main street of Watertown, CT) you needed a signed “permission” slip. Every student was allowed three one-day Permissions and one over night Permission each month. They were something you guarded with religious devotion. A Day-Permission could get you as far as New York City. Trains left the Waterbury train station on a very convenient schedule. With an over-night Permission, you could leave school on Saturday after classes (yes… we had classes Monday through Saturday) and not have to be back until bed-check on Sunday night.

My parents were supporters of the Waterbury Symphony Orchestra and good friends with the Musical Director, Sayard Stone. On this particular evening, the Symphony was going to be performing with José Greco, the world renown Flamenco dancer. For those of you too young to remember José Greco, at that time he was the most requested performer on the Ed Sullivan Show. For those of you too young to remember the Ed Sullivan Show, it was the premiere venue for variety artist on TV during the Golden Age of TV. When the Fab-Four (the Beatles) made their first US appearance, it was on the Ed Sullivan Show. When Elvis Presley (the King) made his world debut, it was on the Ed Sullivan Show. Ed Sullivan could make or break you as a performer and when people wrote to him requesting to see someone, José Greco was the first one on their lists. Gayle offered to introduce my parents to José and they wondered if I’d be interested in going along with them. With Phil conducting the second half of the program, I figured why not. It would be killing two birds with one stone. I would get to meet a famous person and make brownie points with one of the school’s masters.

Back in 1956, José made AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS for Michael Todd. Michael Todd was married to Elizabeth Taylor and the two of them were Hollywood’s premiere power couple. After shooting the movie, Mike Todd gave everyone a parting gift. José’s gift was a blue terrycloth bathrobe with the AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS logo stitched on to the breast pocket. José carried that robe with him on tour everywhere. Once, he left it behind and he literally got off the plane to go back and get it. Fortunately for him he did, because that plane crashed killing everyone on board.

For José, that blue terrycloth robe was his good luck talisman. Superstitiously, he never got into make-up unless that robe was draped across his shoulders. But on that night in Waterbury, CT with a green full of people (the performance was outside on the main green in the center of town with a special stage set up to accommodate the symphony orchestra and José’s dance troupe), José lost it. Really… he lost it… in more ways than one. He lost his bathrobe and because of that, he had a classic deva hissy-fit and refused to perform.

The green was mobbed. The only two other times in my life that I have ever seen that many people on the green in Waterbury, CT was one for John Fitzgerald Kennedy when he made a campaign stop before his election and two for President Ronald Regan when he gave a speech there. So with this throng of humanity milling about, I separated myself from my parents and went backstage to wish Phil luck with his portion of the show.

Backstage was in an uproar. José had locked himself in his dressing room and was refusing to come out. I found Phil and asked him what was wrong. He told me that José had lost his good luck bathrobe and was refusing to perform. I asked him what the robe looked like. Phil had never seen it but was told that it was some kind of a blue terrycloth thing.

On my way to the backstage I had passed a row of garbage cans. I remembered seeing the corner of something blue sticking out of one of them. So I went back to check. Sure enough, it was a ratty old, beat up, terrycloth bathrobe. I brought it back inside and gave it to the first stage hand I saw. He immediately ran off with it and I went to find Phil, again. Only, I hadn’t taken more that a few steps when I heard a voice shouting, “That young man there. Bring him to me!”

Before I knew what was happening, I was swept along and ushered into a small dressing room. When the door closed behind me, I found myself standing in front of a gaunt, pale-skinned man with receding hairline, hawk-like nose and dressed only in a white tank-top t-shirt, green boxer shorts, black socks with garters and lovingly cradling that old bathrobe as if it were his favorite kitten.

He started talking about Mike Todd and Elizabeth Taylor and the trouble they had getting the sound of his boots striking the table on which he was dancing. It was José Greco… THE José Greco standing in front of me in his underwear. I honestly couldn’t tell you which shocked me more that he wore boxers or that he wore garters. But then he did something that totally fascinated me. He whipped the blue terrycloth bathrobe around his shoulders, turned to the mirror and began to make up.

While he told me the story of the bathrobe, he picked up a tin of clown white and whited out his whole face from his hair line to where his neck met his torso. Once he was Kabuki white, he drew in a hair line and painted his scalp black. Then he took that same black and with a brush drew in the lines around his mouth, and nose and cheek bones. He also lined the sides of his throat. Then he began to apply layers of flesh-tone colors until within a few minutes of my having entered the room, he had transformed himself from a skinny little Italian guy from Brooklyn, NY into the living poster of José Greco complete with the tight Andalusian pants and vest and castanet’s.

“Well, how do I look?” he asked.

“Ready when you are, Mr. DeMille,” I said hoping that he would catch the movie reference. He did and laughed. “You know, I’m supposed to meet you after the show,” I said. I told him of Mr. Stone’s offer.

“Great, see you then,” he said.

I hurried back to my folks but never got the chance to tell them what had just happened. Because of the delay for the lost bathrobe, once Jose was ready, the show immediately went on and I took my seat. José performed. Sayard Stone conducted Mozart’s overture to “Don Giovanni” and Bethoven’s 7th in A Minor. Intermission came and went and I still hadn’t said a word. Phil conducted some works by Shubert and then the show was over.

My parents, myself and several other Symphony supporters went backstage and waited in an inconspicuous area for Sayard to take us to meet Mr. Greco. When it was time, he came back and escorted us to José’s dressing room. We entered. José was still in make up, but he had taken off his costume and was wearing the blue terrycloth bathrobe that I had rescued from the trash bin. Sayard started to make the introduction. I don’t think he got more than two or three words out of his mouth before José burst in…

“Hey, Eric, how did you like the show?”

“I thought it was great, especially that move you made with your lead dancer…”

“… her name is Nana…” He went to the door. “Hey, Nana. Ven aqui pronto. Quero que conozcas a un amigo mio…”

Nana came from the dressing room next door. She was even more beautiful up close. José rattled off something that my high school Spanish did not pick up. Nana gave me a big smile, a big laugh and a big hug and I immediately fell in love with everything Spanish.

When I turned around, I discovered a half a dozen or more adults standing there like abandoned marionettes with their hands at their sides and their mouths wide open.

“Oh, I met him earlier,” I said as if that were going to satisfy everyone’s curiosity.

José came to my rescue. He told them the story of the bathrobe. I told them how I found it. Case closed… right? Not exactly. José was hungry. Because his costumes were so tight, he never ate before a performance. He didn’t want a distended stomach to ruin the line of his poses or the symmetry of his moves. However, Waterbury being Waterbury, at this time of night, the only place open was the White Tower Grille, a good spot for a great tasting, greasy hamburger, but not exactly the spot that anyone want to see José end up at.

Then my father said, “Why don’t you come out to our house? We only live about 5-minutes out of town. Eric and I would be glad to cook you something.” I loved my old man. If I hadn’t, I would have at that moment. José agreed and from midnight until 6 a.m. dad and I cooked bacon and eggs and whatever else we had in the kitchen and fed José and Nana and the rest of his troupe. José regaled us with his ‘on the road’ stories. Nana played with my mother’s collie. The others sat around the table. Everyone talked. I understood one word in ten. It was an absolutely memorable night. So memorable that I kept my mouth shut about it when I got back to school. Why bother to tell them something they weren’t going to believe anyway.

Life went on. Perhaps the only change for me was that I applied myself in Spanish class with a new vigor that surprised my Spanish teacher. Then, about two weeks later at lunch, my name echoed across the dining room loud speaker… “Mr. Ruark report to the Dean’s office immediately!” Okay… now I was sweating. You don’t get called to Mr. Oscarson’s office at lunch unless you are in serious trouble. How could I be in trouble you ask? Well let me count the ways… no I’d better not. Let’s just say that I was not the perfect preppie and maintained a cache of embargoed commodities that would get me and other people suspended or expelled if the powers-that-be found them. (Basically cigarettes and beer.)

So, putting on the bravest face I could, I stepped away from the lunch table and walked down to Mr. Oscarson’s office and knocked on the door.

“Come in, Mr. Ruark,” he said. “How many weekend permissions do you still have?”

“None,” I answered. “Used the last one a couple of weeks ago.”

“Well, you do now,” he said.

“You’ve lost me, Sir.”

“I just got a call from José Greco. Apparently he wants to see you tonight in Springfield, Mass. He was most insistent. I told him you were out of permissions, but he asked me to make a special exception for you. Lord knows why, but I agreed. I called your parents. They are picking you up at 4. Enjoy yourself.”

Oskie and I got along. We understood each other. Ever since the car incident. You see, at prep-school, students weren’t allowed to have cars on campus. I was a spoiled child. I make no bones about it. It was the way I was raised. In my own defense, I will say that I very rarely asked for anything. I didn’t need to. My parents gave me things before I could open my mouth.

When I turned 16 my parents bought me a car. It was 1953 MGTD. It was old. But it ran well. Dad repainted it red. Top speed was only about 65 mph., but damn it was a sweet little car. I kept it until 1975 when I put it in storage to take my honeymoon and when I got back, rats had gotten into the storage area and had eaten the wooden frame, the leather seats and wooden steering wheel. They started on the battery and the rubber hoses, but the battery acid killed them. The car was nothing more than a pile of red metal in the middle of the concrete floor. Yes, it was insured, but…

Anyway, Oskie drove a green Jaguar sedan. I had been home for a weekend and for some reason, which I no longer member, my parents couldn’t take me back to school. So I hopped into the MG and drove it back to Watertown. When I got to the Taft campus, I parked my red MG directly behind Oskie’s green Jag. It took him a week to notice it. And I wasn’t ever the worst offender. Impala Al was legendary. I didn’t even get a nick-name out of it.

José performed in Springfield and took my parents and me out to dinner afterwards. The same thing happened when he performed in New Haven. He called the school, I got a ‘get out of jail’ card free and had a great time. Then came New York City and the Carlisle.

Whenever José was in NYC he stayed at the Carlisle. Once again, we were invited to dinner. Only, on this occasion, there was a real crowd around José. Several people had come over from Spain and José was showing them a good time in the big city. He had me sitting next to a fellow named Andrés. The man’s whole face and body was a study in angles. Andrés was thin, muscular, and his naturally dark skin was made even darker by a deep, deep tan. I was having trouble understanding him. He was speaking Spanish, but a Spanish I had never heard before. It was throaty and guttural. It was as if he were swallowing vowels and putting more emphasis on the consonants. I later learned that he was Andalusian. Anyway, we were getting along pretty well, when Andrés suddenly turned to José and rattled off something. José nodded. “Buena idea.” Then he turned to my father. “Is it okay if I take Eric to Spain with me this summer?”

My father thought for a moment. “I don’t know. Eric, do you want to go to Spain?”

“Sure,” I said. Yes… it was that easy.

Not long after graduation, I found myself in Madrid. It was June. I was 18 years old. I had my passport, some American Express checks which I quickly converted to pesetas and I was pretty much on my own. José had been delayed in the States. I had an introduction to his wife, Lola (she was his lead dancer in AROUND THE WORLD IN 80-DAYS), and her Madrid phone number. I called. She was expecting me. The first thing she did was take me to rent a car. We had a short journey to make to a small town to the north. Andrés wanted to see me.

Oh… didn’t I mention it… Andrés Vázquez, that ruggedly handsome man who came up with the idea of my going to Spain in the first place, was the number three ranked Matador in Spain at that time. Only El Cordobes and Paco Camino were ahead of him in the number of ears awarded.

Andrés was a major celebrity. There was a movie about him playing in theaters across the Iberian peninsula and James A. Mitchener had devoted a whole chapter about him in the book, IBERIA. Andrés was fighting in a small venue in a little town an hour or so outside of Madrid. It was a rehab fight. He had been gored recently and had taken this little corrida to test the strength of the stitches holding his chest together.

With matadors there was no such thing as a “disabled” list. If they got injured, they did not get any time off. They were contracted to perform at a certain place and time and once the posters had been printed, they performed whether they felt like it or not or they had to forfeit their fee. Matadors, like the A-listers of today, had a posse of people to support. They were called a Quadrilla. They included Picadors, Doublers, a Doctor, and a whole slew of other people.

Andrés had been injured performing a stunt. As he explained it to me, when a bull charges, he charges with his feet under the center of his body. It’s actually a position that pinches off his breathing a little bit, so that after a series of hard charges, when the bull wants a breather he stops and stands with his feet slightly farther apart to open up his chest cavity for deep breathing. The bull won’t charge again until he brings his feet closer together. The movement is so subtle that most people in the arena don’t notice it. It’s when the bull is standing with his feet slightly apart that the matadors do all those tricks that excite the crowd.

Andrés was on his knees taunting the bull. His cape was behind him stretched out on the sand. He had been watching the bull’s movements and figured that he had the animal’s timing down. The bull would charge several times hard, then rest with his feet apart. He’d bring them back together, pause a beat, then charge again. Andrés planned to take the bull on his knees. As the bull brought his feet together, Andrés would start to swing the cape. Andrés figured the cape would distract the bull at the last moment allowing the horns to pass just under his chin. With the bull’s attention fixed on the cape, the animal would duck its head around the matador’s kneeling body and follow the cape as it passed behind the matador’s head. That was the plan.

Everything would have been perfect if the bull had pulled his feet together and charged. Only he didn’t. He charged from the wide stance throwing Andrés’ timing off. If he stood up, the bull would charge him and not the cape. (Franco Cardeno had half his face ripped off when he stood up in front of a charging bull when trying this stunt in Sevilla in April 1997.) When the bull hit Andrés, the horn raked across the front of his chest, ripping the costume from shoulder to shoulder and tearing into my friend’s flesh like a chainsaw through soft wood. Several hundred stitches later, the wound was closed. Only he had another fight coming up and needed to know if his damaged pectorals could stand the strain of the cape, the muleta and the centrifugal forces necessary to keep the fabric between him and an angry 1500 pound animal.

This was a little local corrida with smaller, younger bulls. Andrés dedicated one to me and gave me the blood coated bandoleras as a souvenir. The little bull proved to be a real test. Andrés’ damaged pecs were not healed enough to anchor the matador’s movements. Andrés let me sit in while his doctor re-stitched some of the ones that had pulled out. Afterwards, I suggested an ace bandage to hold his arm closer to his chest to take the strain off the damaged muscles and allow his biceps to do all the work. It would be risky. It meant that he would have to keep his arm closer to his body and that would move the bull in closer, too. At the next full corrida, with suit of lights and the whole panoramic shebang, with his left arm secretly pinned to his side, Andrés kept the bull so close, that the animal’s horns took nicks out of his shins. With the bull’s blood on his abdomen from the animal’s body rubbing against his, and with his own blood flowing down his legs, Andrés had the crowd on its collective feet cheering for him to be awarded two ears or more.

I spent that summer as part of José’s extended family. He had three children with Lola: Pepe, Carmella, and Lolita. Through Lola, I met Juan Bandera, a well-respected artist who had a son my age, Juan, Jr., who took me clubbing, a young teenage daughter (way too young for an 18-year old like myself to be interested in) and a prodigy, Nono Bandera, who at the tender age of 10 had already recorded his first record and was fighting full-sized bulls with the men. (The matadors had to kill the animal for him, because he was too small to reach over the bull’s horns with the sword. In fact, the sword was bigger than he was. )

When I wasn’t clubbing with Juan, Jr., I was drinking scotch with his father. After a hard day’s painting, Juan, Sr. would like to head over to any number of little Flamenco clubs that dotted Madrid, and sit at a small table, drink scotch and water, smoke and just let the music wash over him. There was something special about just sitting there with a bottle of White Horse and a pitcher of water between us and the performers just a few feet away. In the lulls, Juan, Sr. and I would talk about art, life, and he would correct my Spanish when I said something wrong. It was a great way to learn.

At the end of June, Lola and the family moved down to the Torre del Greco just outside of Marbella in the little town of San Pedro de Alcantara. I tagged along with them.

The Torre was a wonderful hacienda-like complex with a servant’s quarters, guestroom, large back yard surrounded by an 8-foot hedge. There was a gate in the middle of the hedge. When you opened the gate and took one step forward, you were standing on the sands of the Costa del Sol. The Mediterranean was only twenty or thirty yards straight ahead. To the left in the distance you could see the Marbella Club pool. To the right, jutting up over the horizon like a small stone in the middle of a blue sea, was the Rock of Gibraltar. From the Torre’s back gate, the Rock looked about half the size of my little finger’s nail.

Life was tough. I spent my days either perfecting my tan staring out at the incredible blueness of the Mediterranean or traveling from Malaga to La Linea following the matadors whom Andrés had introduced me to. Nights, when I wasn’t escorting Lola to the various Flamenco clubs that dotted the region, I divided my time between Mercedes’ place in San Pedro (a little go-go club where Tina danced), the British bar near the Plaza de Torros (where Victoria tended bar), the bar run by the big Irishman on the main street, and Pepe Moreno’s discotheque located on the main road across the street from the Don Pepe and Skøl hotels.

Marbella, at this time, was a not-so-sleepy little city located about half way between Malaga and Gibraltar. It had not yet been “discovered”. They hadn’t dredged the harbor so the big multi-million dollar yachts were still parking themselves up the coast at Torremolinos. But that didn’t stop a lot of well-known personalities from hitting the surrounding beaches.

The hottest place in Marbella was Pepe Moreno’s discotheque, bar, restaurant. Unlike the other bars, Pepe’s was open all night and anyone who was anyone usually showed up there. (Except for the night Brian Jones, the Rolling Stone who committed suicide in 1969, partied at Mercedes’ and needed a ride back up to Malaga. I gave him one and heard all about Mick Jagger’s marijuana problems back up in London.)

Pepe’s was THE place to hang after all the other clubs had closed. On this one particular evening, I had just seen a corrida featuring Jaime Ostos who I personally considered the best bull fighter in all Spain. (Andrés may have been my mentor, but there was something electric about the way Jaime Ostos handled the cape and muleta.) After the corrida, I headed over to the British bar to flirt with Victoria. Did I mention she was blonde and beautiful and had the most exotic British accent I had ever heard? Okay, she was blonde and beautiful and I was momentarily infatuated.

When the bar closed, I took Vicky to Pepe’s to meet with the rest of the gang. There was a large group of us who hung out together on a regular basis: Mercedes and Paquito who were bar owners and had their own posses, then there was Tina, Juan, Vicky and me. I dropped Vicky off at the table with the rest of the crew and went to the bar to get us both a drink. While I was waiting for my order, George Hamilton stepped up beside me.

This was 1967. There was no mistaking George Hamilton. He was 28-years old and a world-famous actor who was dating Lynda Bird Johnson, the daughter of the President of the United States. There wasn’t a newspaper or a tabloid that he hadn’t appeared in. He was dressed all in black: black shirt, black pants, black belt, black socks, black shoes and his hair was perfect. I was impressed. For the lack of anything better to do, I nodded to him. He nodded back.

“That is one incredibly beautiful woman you came in with,” he said. (Did I mention that Victoria was incredibly beautiful?)

George Hamilton was talking to me. I had just spent the summer hanging with some of the most famous people on the Iberian peninsula and now I was standing at the bar in Pepe Moreno’s with one of the most recognizable men in the world talking to me. I took a sip of my drink and tried to be James-Bond-cool about it. “Yeah, she is, isn’t she,” I said.

“Are you two an item?” he asked.

“Nah. Just friends. She’s English and runs the bar over by the Plaza de Toros.”

“Then you wouldn’t mind if I asked her to dance?” he asked.

Okay, what would you have done? I mean, I was no slouch. I considered myself good looking. I had just come off a season of playing lacrosse at my prep-school, and I could fit into Harry Belefonte’s clothes. (Harry had recently stayed at the Torre as José’s guest and left a trunk of his calypso clothes behind and Praise God, he and I were the same size.) I knew I looked buff. But I was no George Hamilton.

I caved. “Hell, no. I’ll introduce you,” I said picking up our drinks. But then I stopped. I turned to George and said, “Aren’t you supposed to be seeing someone kind of on the serious side?” I was referring to Lynda Bird Johnson.

George looked at me and smiled. “I gave up bird watching a couple of weeks ago,” he said is a slightly conspiratorial tone.

At that moment, I was an incredibly rich man. I was sitting on the scoop of the century (well, decade, at least). This was a story of mega proportions. The National Enquirer was offering $40,000 1967 dollars for something of this magnitude. George Hamilton had just told me that he had broken up the President of the United States daughter. This was front page headline tabloid material in every country in the world. If I had a cell phone, I could have been driving a Porche by noon.

But cell phones were still 40 years in the future and I wasn’t interested in the money. However, I was interested in something. I turned to George and said, “I’ll be happy to introduce you, just do me one favor.”

“Sure. What?”

“Pretend you know me.”

“No problem. What’s your name….”

George and I walked back over to the table. I put the drink down in front of Victoria and said, “Hey, Vicki, just ran into a friend of mine at the bar and he wants to dance with you.”

Everyone looked up and froze. I had seen that look before back in Waterbury, CT. Everyone was sitting there with their mouths open.

George put on a Golden Globe winning performance. We’d been old friends for God know how long and he was surprised as Hell to run into me here at Pepe’s of all places. When we had them hook, line and sinker, he asked Victoria to dance and that was the last I saw of them. Really. It was the tail end of August and I had to get back to America to do my freshman year at Rutgers University. I was long gone before Vicki ever got back from wherever George and she disappeared to.

Back home when I told everyone what happened, no one believed me. I didn’t think they would. Then the story broke in the National Enquirer. I’ve often wondered who got the $40,000 for my scoop?

Fate, time and death have scattered everyone to the four winds. José died in the early ‘90s. When I last checked, Andrés was in his 80s and breeding fighting bulls somewhere in Spain. I have no idea what happened to Mercedes, Paquito and their crews or Tina or Victoria. Every now and again, I see George Hamilton on TV or in the movies.

I do have a fantasy, though. One day, I would like to attend something that George Hamilton is performing in and stand outside for an autograph. As he is signing my playbill, I want to lean in and ask, “Where in the Hell did you take Vicki? I never got a final drink at that little club she ran.” … just to see what his reaction will be.


(If you liked this post, you might also like my SciFi/Mystery novel, MURDER BEYOND THE MILKY WAY http://www.amazon.com/Murder-Beyond-M... )