The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories

by Otto Penzler

  A younger reporter with thin, wet hair disagreed. “They all think Hollywood’s Babylon and she’s the whore. Hugh Doyle was the local prince, his daddy kept the mills open in the bad times, quote unquote half the rednecks in the county. They’ll fry her. For that hat if nothing else.”

  “Could go either way,” grinned the man with the pipe. “She was born in a shack six miles from here. Hat or no hat, that makes her one of them. So what if she did shoot the guy, he was dying of cancer anyhow, for Christ’s sake. Well, she never could act worth the price of a bag of popcorn, but Jesus damn she was something to look at!”

  Now that Stella Doyle was gone, people felt the heat again and went back to where they could sit still in the shade until the evening breeze and wait for the jury’s decision. Papa and I walked back down Main Street to our furniture store. Papa owned a butcher shop, too, but he didn’t like the meat business and wasn’t very good at it, so my oldest brother ran it while Papa sat among the mahogany bedroom suites and red maple dining-room sets in a big rocking chair and read, or talked to friends who dropped by. The rocker was actually for sale but he had sat in it for so long now that it was just Papa’s chair. Three ceiling fans stirred against the quiet, shady air while he answered my questions about Stella Doyle.

  He said that she grew up Stella Dora Hibble on Route 19, in a three-room, tin-roofed little house propped off the red clay by concrete blocks—the kind of saggy-porched, pinewood house whose owners leave on display in their dirt yard, like sculptures, the broken artifacts of their aspirations and the debris of their unmendable lives: the doorless refrigerator and the rusting car, the pyre of metal and plastic that tells drivers along the highway “Dreams don’t last.”

  Stella’s mother, Dora Hibble, had believed in dreams anyhow. Dora had been a pretty girl who’d married a farmer and worked harder than she had the health for, because hard work was necessary just to keep from going under. But in the evenings Mrs. Hibble had looked at movie magazines. She had believed the romance was out there and she wanted it, if not for her, for her children. At twenty-seven, Dora Hibble died during her fifth labor. Stella was eight when she watched from the door of the bedroom as they covered her mother’s face with a thin blanket. When Stella was fourteen, her father died when a machine jammed at Doyle Mills. When Stella was sixteen, Hugh Doyle, Jr., who was her age, my father’s age, fell in love with her.

  “Did you love her, too, Papa?”

  “Oh, yes. All us boys in town were crazy about Stella Dora, one time or another. I had my attack of it, same as the rest. We were sweethearts in seventh grade. I bought a big-size Whitman’s Sampler on Valentine’s. I remember it cost every cent I had.”

  “Why were y’all crazy about her?”

  “I guess you’d have to worry you’d missed out on being alive if you didn’t feel that way about Stella, one time or another.”

  I was feeling a terrible emotion I later defined as jealousy. “But didn’t you love Mama?”

  “Well, now, this was before it was my luck to meet your mama.”

  “And you met her coming to town along the railroad track and you told your friends ‘That’s the girl for me and I’m going to marry her,’ didn’t you?”

  “Yes, sir, and I was right on both counts.” Papa rocked back in the big chair, his hands peaceful on the armrests.

  “Was Stella Dora still crazy about you after you met Mama?”

  His face crinkled into the lines of his ready laughter. “No, sir, she wasn’t. She loved Hugh Doyle, minute she laid eyes on him, and he felt the same. But Stella had this notion about going off to get to be somebody in the movies. And Hugh couldn’t hold her back, and I guess she couldn’t get him to see what it was made her want to go off so bad either.”

  “What was it made her want to go?”

  Papa smiled at me. “Well, I don’t know, son. What makes you want to go off so bad? You’re always saying you’re going here, and there, ’cross the world, up to the moon. I reckon you’re more like Stella than I am.”

  “Do you think she was wrong to want to go be in the movies?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t think she killed him?”

  “No, sir, I don’t.”

  “Somebody killed him.”

  “Well, Buddy, sometimes people lose hope and heart, and feel like they can’t go on living.”

  “Yeah, I know. Suicide.”

  Papa’s shoes tapped the floor as the rocker creaked back and forth. “That’s right. Now you tell me, why’re you sitting in here? Why don’t you ride your bike on over to the ballpark and see who’s there?”

  “I want to hear about Stella Doyle.”

  “You want to hear. Well. Let’s go get us a Coca-Cola, then. I don’t guess somebody’s planning to show up in this heat to buy a chest of drawers they got to haul home.”

  “You ought to sell air conditioners, Papa. People would buy air conditioners.”

  “I guess so.”

  So Papa told me the story. Or at least his version of it. He said Hugh and Stella were meant for each other. From the beginning it seemed to the whole town a fact as natural as harvest that so much money and so much beauty belonged together, and only Hugh Doyle with his long, free, easy stride was rich enough to match the looks of Stella Dora. But even Hugh Doyle couldn’t hold her. He was only halfway through the state university, where his father had told him he’d have to go before he married Stella, if he wanted a home to bring her to, when she quit her job at Coldsteam’s beauty parlor and took the bus to California. She was out there for six years before Hugh broke down and went after her.

  By then every girl in the county was cutting Stella’s pictures out of the movie magazines and reading how she got her lucky break, how she married a big director, and divorced him, and married a big star, and how that marriage broke up even quicker. Photographers traveled all the way to Thermopylae to take pictures of where she was born. People tried to tell them her house was gone, had fallen down and been used for firewood, but they just took photographs of Reverend Ballister’s house instead and said Stella had grown up in it. Before long, even local girls would go stand in front of the Ballister house like a shrine, sometimes they’d steal flowers out of the yard. The year that Fever, her best movie, came to the Grand Theater on Main Street, Hugh Doyle flew out to Los Angeles and won her back. He took her down to Mexico to divorce the baseball player she’d married after the big star. Then Hugh married her himself and put her on an ocean liner and took her all over the world. For a whole two years, they didn’t come home to Thermopylae. Everybody in the county talked about this two-year honeymoon, and Hugh’s father confessed to some friends that he was disgusted by his son’s way of life.

  But when the couple did come home, Hugh walked right into the mills and turned a profit. His father confessed to the same friends that he was flabbergasted Hugh had it in him. But after the father died Hugh started drinking and Stella joined him. The parties got a little wild. The fights got loud. People talked. They said he had other women. They said Stella’d been locked up in a sanitorium. They said the Doyles were breaking up.

  And then one June day a maid at Red Hills, walking to work before the morning heat, fell over something that lay across a path to the stables. And it was Hugh Doyle in riding clothes with a hole torn in the side of his head. Not far from his gloved hand, the police found Stella’s pistol, already too hot from the sun to touch. The cook testified that the Doyles had been fighting like cats and dogs all night long the night before, and Hugh’s mother testified that he wanted to divorce Stella but she wouldn’t let him, and so Stella was arrested. She said she was innocent, but it was her gun, she was his heir, and she had no alibi. Her trial lasted almost as long as that August heat wave.

  A neighbor strolled past the porch, where we sat out the evening heat, waiting for the air to lift. “Jury’s still out,” he said. Mama waved her hand at him. She pushed herself and me in the big green wood swing that hung from two chains to the porch
roof, and answered my questions about Stella Doyle. She said, “Oh, yes, they all said Stella was specially pretty. I never knew her to talk to myself.”

  “But if Papa liked her so much, why didn’t y’all get invited out to their house and everything?”

  “Her and your papa just went to school together, that’s all. That was a long time back. The Doyles wouldn’t ask folks like us over to Red Hills.”

  “Why not? Papa’s family used to have a whole lot of money. That’s what you said. And Papa went right up to Mrs. Doyle at the courthouse today, right in front of everybody. He told her, You let us know if there’s anything we can do.”

  Mama chuckled the way she always did about Papa, a low ripple like a pigeon nesting, a little exasperated at having to sit still so long. “You know your papa’d offer to help out anybody he figured might be in trouble, white or black. That’s just him; that’s not any Stella Dora Doyle. Your papa’s just a good man. You remember that, Buddy.”

  Goodness was Papa’s stock-in-trade; it was what he had instead of money or ambition, and Mama often reminded us of it. In him she kept safe all the kindness she had never felt she could afford for herself. She, who could neither read nor write, who had stood all day in a cigarette factory from the age of nine until the morning Papa married her, was a fighter. She wanted her children to go farther than Papa had. Still, for years after he died, she would carry down from the attic the yellow mildewed ledgers where his value was recorded in more than $75,000 of out-of-date bills he had been unwilling to force people in trouble to pay. Running her sun-spotted finger down the brown wisps of names and the money they’d owed, she would sigh that proud, exasperated ripple, and shake her head over foolish, generous Papa.

  Through the front parlor window I could hear my sisters practicing the theme from The Apartment on the piano. Someone across the street turned on a light. Then we heard the sound of Papa’s shoes coming a little faster than usual down the sidewalk. He turned at the hedge carrying the package of shiny butcher’s paper in which he brought meat home every evening. “Verdict just came in!” he called out happily. “Not guilty! Jury came back about forty minutes ago. They already took her home.”

  Mama took the package and sat Papa down in the swing next to her. “Well, well,” she said. “They let her off.”

  “Never ought to have come up for trial in the first place, Ada, like I told everybody all along. It’s like her lawyers showed. Hugh went down to Atlanta, saw that doctor, found out he had cancer, and he took his own life. Stella never even knew he was sick.”

  Mama patted his knee. “Not guilty; well, well.”

  Papa made a noise of disgust. “Can you believe some folks out on Main Street tonight are all fired up because Stella got off! Adele Simpson acted downright indignant!”

  Mama said, “And you’re surprised?” And she shook her head with me at Papa’s innocence.

  Talking of the trial, my parents made one shadow along the wood floor of the porch, while inside my sisters played endless variations of “Chopsticks,” the notes handed down by ghostly creators long passed away.

  A few weeks later, Papa was invited to Red Hills, and he let me come along; we brought a basket of sausage biscuits Mama had made for Mrs. Doyle.

  As soon as Papa drove past the wide white gate, I learned how money could change even weather. It was cooler at Red Hills, and the grass was the greenest grass in the county. A black man in a black suit let us into the house, then led us down a wide hallway of pale yellow wood into a big room shuttered against the heat. She was there in an armchair almost the color of her eyes. She wore loose-legged pants and was pouring whiskey from a bottle into a glass.

  “Clayton, thanks for coming. Hello there, little Buddy. Look, I hope I didn’t drag you from business.”

  Papa laughed. “Stella, I could stay gone a week and never miss a customer.” It embarrassed me to hear him admit such failure to her.

  She said she could tell I liked books, so maybe I wouldn’t mind if they left me there to read while she borrowed my daddy for a little bit. There were white shelves in the room, full of books. I said I didn’t mind but I did; I wanted to keep on seeing her. Even with the loose shirt soiled and rumpled over a waist she tried to hide, even with her face swollen from heat and drink and grief, she was something you wanted to look at as long as possible.

  They left me alone. On the white piano were dozens of photographs of Stella Doyle in silver frames. From a big painting over the mantelpiece her remarkable eyes followed me around the room. I looked at that painting as sun deepened across it, until finally she and Papa came back. She had a tissue to her nose, a new drink in her hand. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said to me. “Your daddy’s been sweet letting me run on. I just needed somebody to talk to for a while about what happened to me.” She kissed the top of my head and I could feel her warm lips at the part in my hair.

  We followed her down the wide hall out onto the porch. “Clayton, you’ll forgive a fat old souse talking your ear off and bawling like a jackass.”

  “No such thing, Stella.”

  “And you never thought I killed him, even when you first heard. My God, thank you.”

  Papa took her hand again. “You take care now,” he said.

  Then suddenly she was hugging herself, rocking from side to side. Words burst from her like a door flung open by wind. “I could kick him in the ass, that bastard! Why didn’t he tell me? To quit, to quit, and use my gun, and just about get me strapped in the gas chamber, that goddamn bastard, and never say a word!” Her profanity must have shocked Papa as much as it did me. He never used it, much less ever heard it from a woman.

  But he nodded and said, “Well, good-bye, I guess, Stella. Probably won’t be seeing you again.”

  “Oh, Lord, Clayton, I’ll be back. The world’s so goddamn little.”

  She stood at the top of the porch, tears wet in those violet eyes that the movie magazines had loved to talk about. On her cheek a mosquito bite flamed like a slap. Holding to the big white column, she waved as we drove off into the dusty heat. Ice flew from the glass in her hand like diamonds.

  Papa was right; they never met again. Papa lost his legs from diabetes, but he’d never gone much of anywhere even before that. And afterward, he was one of two places—home or the store. He’d sit in his big wood wheelchair in the furniture store, with his hands peaceful on the armrests, talking with whoever came by.

  I did see Stella Doyle again; the first time in Belgium, twelve years later. I went farther than Papa.

  In Bruges there are small restaurants that lean like elegant elbows on the canals and glance down at passing pleasure boats. Stella Doyle was sitting, one evening, at a table in the crook of the elbow of one of them, against an iron railing that curved its reflection in the water. She was alone there when I saw her. She stood, leaned over the rail, and slipped the ice cubes from her glass into the canal. I was in a motor launch full of tourists passing below. She waved with a smile at us and we waved back. It had been a lot of years since her last picture, but probably she waved out of habit. For the tourists motoring past, Stella in white against the dark restaurant was another snapshot of Bruges. For me, she was home and memory. I craned to look back as long as I could, and leapt from the boat at the next possible stop.

  When I found the restaurant, she was yelling at a well-dressed young man who was leaning across the table, trying to soothe her in French. They appeared to be quarreling over his late arrival. All at once she hit him, her diamond flashing into his face. He filled the air with angry gestures, then turned and left, a white napkin to his cheek. I was made very shy by what I’d seen—the young man was scarcely older than I was. I stood unable to speak until her staring at me jarred me forward. I said, “Mrs. Doyle? I’m Buddy Hayes. I came out to see you at Red Hills with my father Clayton Hayes one time. You let me look at your books.”

  She sat back down and poured herself a glass of wine. “You’re that little boy? God Almighty, how old am I? A
m I a hundred yet?” Her laugh had been loosened by the wine. “Well, a Red Clay rambler, like me. How ’bout that. Sit down. What are you doing over here?”

  I told her, as nonchalantly as I could manage, that I was traveling on college prize money, a journalism award. I wrote a prize essay about a murder trial.

  “Mine?” she asked, and laughed.

  A waiter, plump and flushed in his neat black suit, trotted to her side. He shook his head at the untouched plates of food. “Madame, your friend has left, then?”

  Stella said, “Mister, I helped him along. And turns out, he was no friend.”

  The waiter then turned his eyes, sad and reproachful, to the trout on the plate.

  “How about another bottle of that wine and a great big bucket of ice?” Stella asked.

  The waiter kept flapping his fat quick hands around his head, entreating us to come inside. “Les moustiques, madame!”

  “I just let them bite,” she said. He went away grieved.

  She was slender now, and elegantly dressed. And while her hands and throat were older, the eyes hadn’t changed, nor the red-gold hair. She was still the most beautiful woman God had made in my lifetime, the woman of whom my father had said that any man who had not desired her had missed out on being alive, the one for whose honor my father had turned his back on the whole town of Thermopylae. Because of Papa, I had entered my adolescence daydreaming about fighting for Stella Doyle’s honor; we had starred together in a dozen of her movies: I dazzled her jury; I cured Hugh Doyle while hiding my own noble love for his wife. And now here I sat drinking wine with her on a veranda in Bruges; me, the first Hayes ever to win a college prize, ever to get to college. Here I sat with a movie star.

  She finished her cigarette, dropped it spinning down into the black canal. “You look like him,” she said. “Your papa. I’m sorry to hear that about the diabetes.”