Free The Play of Light and Shadow & Writing by Barry Ergang

 

     
     
THE PLAY OF LIGHT AND SHADOW
    By Barry Ergang
     
    Smashwords Edition
    Copyright 2010 Barry Ergang
     
    Originally published in Futures Mysterious
Anthology Magazine ,
    Vol. VII, Issue XXXV, Autumn 2004
     
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    Cover photo from http://www.fontplay.com/freephotos/light.htm
     
     
    What follows is a work of fiction. All of the
people, incidents, institutions and places (save for Philadelphia
and Chester County, Pennsylvania) are products of the author’s
imagination. Any resemblance to real people, places or incidents is
strictly coincidental.
     
    To the memory of my mother, Frances
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