Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 1. Whole No. 767, July 2005

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Show business is often at the center of David Handler’s fiction: in his Berger and Mitry novels, which pair a film critic and a cop; in his Edgar-winning series starring ghost writer Stewart Hoag and former Broadway actress Merilee Nash; and in this new story. Mr. Handler lives in Old Lyme, Connecticut. His most recent book, the fourth in the Berger and Mitry series, is A Burnt Orange Sunrise (St. Martin’s).

This is the ugliest show-business story that I know.

It’s a story I’ve never told anyone. And it’s a true story. I know this because I was there when it happened thirty years ago. For reasons that will soon become clear, I haven’t been able to share it until now. Not that it gives me any great pleasure to do so. Believe me, I wish I could forget this. Only, I can’t.

You see, this is a story about somebody who got away with murder.

In those days, I was a very young writer trying to scratch out a living as a newspaperman in New York City. It was not a great time to be looking for work or for anything else in the Big Apple. The city was bankrupt, and President Ford had just told it in no uncertain terms to drop dead. Gangs roamed the parks. Drug dealers and prostitutes worked any corner they felt like. Homeless people slept in doorways and vestibules, wrapped in blankets and despair, babbling to themselves. The subways were dangerous. The garbage never got picked up. The hottest cultural rage of the day was disco. Let me put it this way: No one was mistaking this for one of New York’s golden ages.

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