Sample Sunday: Excerpt from the locked room mystery "The Play Of Light And Shadow" by Barry Ergang

 This week Barry shares an excerpt from his locked room mystery The Play Of Light And Shadow. The book has gained very positive reviews including this one here on the blog “At The Scene Of The Crime.”

THE PLAY OF LIGHT AND SHADOW

by Barry Ergang

            On quiet nights Darnell came into Culhane’s and sat at a table or in a booth.  On busy nights he sat at the end of the bar, as far away from the traffic as possible.  He always had a book with him, and wherever he sat he’d read, sip Scotch, and smoke.  Sometimes he ordered dinner.

            Tonight he sat at the bar.  After pouring his drink, I glanced at the book and asked: “What is it this week?”

            He turned it over so I could see the cover: The Sound and the Fury.

            “Rereading an old favorite,” he said.

            I raised an eyebrow.  “Faulkner.  Pretty unconventional for a private detective.”

            He chuckled dryly.  “You’re calling me unconventional, Professor?”          

            “Good point,” I admitted. 

            A few months earlier, at the end of the semester, I had begun a year’s sabbatical from teaching literature at City University of Philadelphia and taken a job as a bartender at Culhane’s Pub.  The alternative profession, which I had practiced as a graduate student, gained me unwanted notoriety among the administration, faculty, and student body, but it got me away from departmental politics and the hermetic insularity of academia and back into the “real” world among people with everyday concerns.

            Darnell was a regular customer; literature was our common ground.  He wasn’t inclined to small talk, but discussions about books pierced his reserve and evoked a veiled passion.

            A little over six feet tall, with an athletic build that could run to fat if he weren’t careful, he was in his mid-forties, with dark, gray-streaked hair and gray-blue eyes in a face of hard-won stoicism.  Deep brackets etched the corners of his mouth, marking him, you sensed, as witness for half a lifetime to tragedy and human darkness.     

            “How’s business?” I asked.

            He tapped his book.  “Let’s just say I have lots of time to read.”

            “Well, I got a call today from someone who could use a detective.”

            “If it’s divorce work, I’m not interested.”

            “It’s more of a security matter.”

            He lit a cigarette.  “Talk to me, Professor.”

            My explanation was fragmented by customers and waitresses who needed orders filled.  Darnell’s prospective client was one of my university colleagues, Dr. Barton Gaines, Chairman of the Art History Department.  He’d phoned to invite my wife and me to a party he was throwing the following Saturday afternoon to celebrate an auction he’d won for a painting by Charles Riveau.  My wife works for a large corporation and would be out of town, but I said I’d be happy to attend.  Gaines then voiced his brooding and abiding concern for the painting’s safety.  That was when I first heard allusions to the shadowy Paul Marchand, Riveau’s nemesis and Gaines’s hobgoblin—the catalyst for everything that happened later.

            Gaines wanted to hire a high-priced security agency but his wife Marjorie refused.  Hearing this, I said I knew a lone operative whose rates might be more reasonable and who might agree to the job if he weren’t already engaged by another client.  Gaines had welcomed the notion.

            “Babysitting a painting,” Darnell said, then shrugged.  “Sounds like paid reading time.  Go ahead, set something up.”

Barry Ergang ©2014 The Play Of Light And Shadow is one of a number of Barry Ergang's books available at Amazon and Smashwords.