The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories

by Otto Penzler

  Billy said, “We’ll have a few thousand drinks at the Cadillac Bar to wash the taste of Coyle out of our mouths.”

  He sweetened the pot, said how about spending some quality time in the cat houses of Boys Town, all on him? I said my old root’ll still do the job with the right inspiration, so did Dee-Cee. But he said his back was paining him bad since the deal with Coyle, and that he had to go on over Houston where he had this Cuban Santería woman. She had some kind of mystic rubjuice made with rooster blood he said was the only thing what’d cure him.

  Dee-Cee said, “I hate to miss the trip with y’all, but I got to see my Cuban.”

  I told Billy he might as well ride with me in my Jimmy down to Nuevo Laredo. See, it’s on the border some three hours south of San Antonia. I had a transmission I been wanting to deliver to my cousin Royal in Dilley, which is some seventy-eighty miles down from San Antonia on Highway 35 right on out way. Billy said he had stuff to do in the morning, but that he’d meet me at the Cadillac Bar at six o’clock next day. That left just me heading south alone and feeling busted up inside for doing the right thing by a skunk.

  I left early so’s I could listen to Royal lie, and level out with some of his Jack Daniel’s. When I pulled up in front of the Cadillac Bar at ten of six, I saw Billy’s bugged-up Town Car parked out front. He was inside, a big smile on him. With my new hat and boots, I felt fifty again, and screw Kenny Coyle and the BMW he rode in on. We was laughing like Coyle didn’t matter to us, but underneath, we knew he did.

  Billy got us nice rooms in a brand-new motel once we had quail and Dos Equis for dinner, and finished off with fried ice cream in the Messkin style. Best I can recollect, we left our wheels at the motel and took a cab to Boys Town. We hit places like the Honeymoon Hotel, the Dallas Cowboys, and the New York Yankey. Hell, I buried myself in brown titties, even ended up with a little Chink gal I wanted to smuggle home in my hat. Spent two nights with her and didn’t never want to go home.

  I ain’t sure, but seems to me I went back to the motel once on Saturday just to check on Billy. His car was gone, and there was a message for me blinking on the phone in my room, and five one-hundred-dollar bills on my pillow. Billy’s message said he had to go on over to Matamoros ’cause the truck for his shrimps had busted down, and he had to rent another one for shrimp night. So I had me a mess of Messkin scrambled eggs and rice and beans and a few thousand bottles of Negra Modelo. I headed on back for my China doll still shaky, but I hadn’t lost my boots or my El Patrón so I’m thinking I was a tall dog in short grass.

  There seems like there were times when I must a blanked out there. But somewhere along the line, I remember wandering the streets over around Boys Town when I come up on a little park that made me stop and watch. It happens in parks all over Mexico. The street lights ain’t nothing but hanging bare bulbs with swarms of bugs and darting bats. Boys and girls of fourteen to eighteen’n more’d make the nightly paseo—that’s like a stroll on the main drag, ’cause there ain’t no TV or nothing, and the paseo’s what they do to get out from the house to flirt. In some parts, the young folks form circles in the park. The boys’ circle’d form outside the girls’ circle and each circle moves slow in opposite directions so’s the boys and the girls can be facing each other as they pass. The girls try to squirt cheap perfume on a boy they fancy. The boys try to pitch a pinch of confetti into a special girl’s month. Everybody gets to laughing and spitting and holding their noses but inside their knickers they’re fixing to explode. It’s how folks get married down there.

  ’Course, getting married wasn’t on my mind. Something else was, and I did my best to satisfy my mind with some more of that authentic Chinee sweet and sour.

  Billy was asleep the next day, Sunday, when I come stumbling back, so I crapped out, too. I remember right, we headed home separate on Sunday night late. Both of us crippled and green but back in Laredo Billy’s car was washed and spanky clean except for a cracked rear window. Billy said some Matamoros drunk had made a failed try to break in. He showed me his raw knuckles to prove it.

  Billy said, “I can still punch like you taught me, Reddy.”

  Driving myself home alone, I was all bowlegged, and my heart was leaping sideways. But when it’s my time to go to sleep for the last time, I want to die in Boys Town teasing the girls and learning Chinee.

  I was still hung over on Monday, and had to lay around all pale and shaky until I could load up on biscuits and gravy, fresh salsa, fried grits, a near pound of bacon, three or four tomatoes, and a few thousand longnecks. I guess I slept most of the time ’cause I don’t remember no TV.

  It wasn’t until when I got to the gym on Tuesday that I found out about Kenny Coyle. Hunters found him dead in the dirt. He was beside his torched BMW in the mesquite on the outside of town. They found him Sunday noon, and word was he’d been dead some twelve hours, which meant he’d been killed near midnight Saturday night. Someone at the gym said the cops had been by to see me. Hell, me’n Billy was in Mexico, and Dee-Cee was in Houston.

  The inside skinny was that Coyle’d been hog-tied with them plastic cable-tie deals that cops’ll sometimes use instead of handcuffs. One leg’d been knee-capped with his own Ruger someplace else, and later his head was busted in by blunt force with a unknown object. His brains was said to hang free, and looked like a bunch of grapes. His balls was in his mouth, and his mouth had been slit to the ear so’s both balls’d fit. The story I got was that the cops who found him got to laughing, said it was funny seeing a man eating his own mountain oysters. See, police right away knew it was business.

  When the cops stopped by the gym Tuesday morning, I was still having coffee and looking out the storefront window. I didn’t have nothing to hide, so I stayed sipping my joe right where I was. I told them the same story I been telling you, starting off with stopping by to see old Royal in Dilley. See, the head cop was old Junior, and old Junior was daddy to that plain-Jane gal.

  I told him me and Billy had been down Nuevo Laredo when the tragedy occurred. Told him about the Cadillac Bar, and about drinking tequila and teasing the girls in Boys Town. ’Course, I left out a few thousand details I didn’t think was any of his business. Old Junior’s eyes got paler still, and his jaw was clenched up to where his lips didn’t hardly move when he talked. He didn’t ask but two or three questions, and looked satisfied with what I answered.

  Fixing to leave, Junior said, “Seems like some’s got to learn good sense the hard way.”

  Once Junior’d gone, talk started up in the gym again and ropes got jumped. Fight gyms from northern Mexico all up through Texas knew what happened to Coyle. Far as I know, the cops never knocked on Billy Clancy’s door, but I can tell you that none of Billy’s fighters never had trouble working up a sweat no more, or getting up for a fight neither.

  I was into my third cup of coffee when I saw old Dee-Cee get off the bus. He was same as always, except this time he had him a knobby new walking stick. It was made of mesquite like the last one. But as he come closer, I could see that the wood on this new one was still green from the tree.

  I said, “You hear about Coyle?”

  “I jus’ got back,” said Dee-Cee, “what about him?” One of the colored boys working out started to snicker. Dee-Cee gave that boy a look with those greeny-blue eyes. And that was the end of that.

  HANNAH TINTI

  Home Sweet Home

  FROM Epoch

  PAT AND CLYDE were murdered on pot roast night. The doorbell rang just as Pat was setting the butter and margarine (Clyde was watching his cholesterol) on the table. She was thinking about James Dean. She had loved him desperately as a teenager, seen his movies dozens of times, written his name across her notebooks, carefully taped pictures of him to the inside of her locker so that she would have the pleasure of seeing his tortured, sullen face from East of Eden as she exchanged her French and English textbooks for science and math. When she graduated from high school she took down the photos and pasted them to the inside co
ver of her yearbook, which she perused longingly several times over the summer and brought with her to the University of Massachusetts, where it sat, unopened, alongside her thesaurus and abridged collegiate dictionary until she met Clyde, received her M.R.S. degree, and packed her things to move into their two-bedroom ranch house on Bridge Street.

  Before she put the meat in the oven that afternoon, Pat had made herself a cup of tea and turned on the television. Channel 38 was showing Rebel Without a Cause, and as the light slowly began to rise through the screen of their old Zenith she saw James Dean on the steps of the planetarium, clutching at the mismatched socks of a dead Sal Mineo and crying. She put down her tea, slid her warm fingertips inside the V-neck of her dress, and held her left breast. Her heart was suddenly pounding, her nipple hard and erect against the palm of her hand. It was like seeing an old lover, like remembering a piece of herself that no longer existed. She watched the credits roll and glanced outside to see her husband mowing the lawn. He had a worried expression on his face and his socks pulled up to his knees.

  That evening before dinner, as she arranged the butter and margarine side by side on the table—one yellow airy and light, the other yellow hard and dark like the yolk of an egg—she wondered how she could have forgotten the way James Dean’s eyebrows curved. Isn’t memory a strange thing, she thought. I could forget all of this, how everything feels, what all of these things mean to me. She was suddenly seized with the desire to grab the sticks of butter and margarine in her hands and squeeze them until her fingers went right through, to somehow imprint their textures and colors on her brain like a stamp, to make them something that she would never lose. And then she heard the bell.

  When she opened the door Pat noticed that it was still daylight. The sky was blue and bright and clear and she had a fleeting, guilty thought that she should not have spent so much time indoors. After that she crumpled backwards into the hall as the bullet from a .38-caliber Saturday Night Special pierced her chest, exited below her shoulder blade, and jammed into the wood of the stairs, where it would later be dug out with a penknife by Lieutenant Sales and dropped gingerly into a transparent plastic Baggie.

  Pat’s husband Clyde was found in the kitchen by the back door, a knife in his hand (first considered a defense against his attacker and later determined as the carver of the roast). He had been shot twice—once in the stomach and once in the head—and then covered with cereal, the boxes lined up on the counter beside him and the crispy golden contents of Captain Crunch, Corn Flakes, and Special K emptied out over what remained of his face.

  Nothing had been stolen.

  It was a warm spring evening, full of summer promises. Pat and Clyde’s bodies lay silent and still while the orange sunset crossed the floors of their house and the streetlights clicked on. As darkness came, and the skunks waddled through the backyard and the raccoons crawled down from the trees, they were still there, holding their places, suspended in a moment of quiet blue before the sun came up and a new day started and life went on without them.

  It was Clyde’s mother who called the police. She dialed her son’s number every Sunday morning from Rhode Island. These phone calls always somehow perfectly coincided with whenever Pat and Clyde had just settled down to breakfast, or whenever they were on the verge of making love.

  Thar she blows, Clyde would say, and take his hot coffee with him over to where the phone hung on the wall, or slide out of bed with an apologetic glance at his wife. The coffee and Pat would inevitably cool, and in this way his mother would ruin every Sunday. It had been years now since they frolicked in the morning, but once, when they were first married and Pat was preparing breakfast, she had heard the phone, walked over to where her husband was reading the paper, dropped to her knees, pulled open his robe, and taken him in her mouth. Let it ring, she thought, and he had let it ring. Fifteen minutes later the police were on their front porch with smiles as Clyde, red-faced, bathrobe bulging, answered their questions at the door.

  In most areas of her life Clyde’s mother was a very nice person. She behaved in such a kind and decorous manner that people would often remark, having met her, What a lovely woman. But with Clyde she lost her head. She was suspicious, accusing, and tyrannical. Her husband had died suddenly a few years back, and once she got through her grief her son became her man. She pushed this sense of responsibility through him like fishhooks, plucking on the line, reeling him back in when she felt her hold slipping, so that the points became embedded in his flesh so deep that it would kill him to take them out.

  She dialed the police after trying her son thirty-two times, and because the lieutenant on duty was a soft touch, his own mother having recently passed, a cruiser was dispatched to Pat and Clyde’s on Bridge Street, and because one of the policemen was looking to buy in the neighborhood, the officers decided to check out the back of the house after they got no answer, and because there was cereal blowing around in the yard the men got suspicious, and because it was a windy day and because the hinges had recently been oiled and because the door had been left unlocked and swung open and because one of them had seen a dead body before, a suicide up in Hanover, and knew blood and brain and bits of skull when he saw them, he made the call back to the station, because his partner was quietly vomiting in the rosebushes, and said, We’ve got trouble.

  Earlier that morning, as Little Mike Findleman delivered Pat and Clyde’s Sunday Globe, the comics straining around the sections like wrapping on an inappropriate gift, he noticed that the welcome mat was gone. It had been ordered out of an expensive catalog and said, Home Sweet Home. Every day when Little Mike rode up on his bicycle and delivered the paper, he looked at the mat and thought of his own home. It was not sweet.

  Little Mike’s father had recently returned from a minimum-security prison, where he had spent the past three years doing time for embezzlement. With her husband back in the house, Little Mike’s mother, a charismatic redhead, was now on antidepressants, and had cooked spaghetti for dinner twenty-eight days in a row. To top it off, Little Mike had not made the cut to junior league baseball, as his friends Norman and Greg Kessler had, and the shame he felt when he checked the list posted outside the gym and later as he told the twins, who squinted into the sun and shrugged their shoulders together as if they were brushing him off their lives like a bug, struck him deeply and confirmed his suspicions of his own lack of greatness. Little Mike enjoyed getting off of his bicycle and kicking Pat and Clyde’s welcome mat as he dropped off their paper just after dawn, leaving it askew and glancing back at it as he walked down the front porch steps. It made him feel less alone.

  Each morning he would return and find the welcome mat back in place. He wondered sometimes if they complained about their delivery, but Pat and Clyde never said anything, and when the money was due for the paper they left a check in an envelope taped above the doorbell, usually with a few extra bucks for a tip. So when he walked up the porch steps and found the door shut tight and no Home Sweet Home, Little Mike paused. Later, when he was interviewed by Lieutenant Sales, he would say that he had sensed that something was wrong. But in that moment, standing on the porch in the smoky light of early morning, he felt angry and cheated, as if this small pleasure of kicking the mat had been plugging up a large and gaping hole inside of him, and now that it was gone he saw through it to all the other empty places in his life. Little Mike threw the Sunday Globe off the porch into the bushes with a vengeance, where it would later be found by Buster, the Mitchells’ Labrador retriever, and buried in another part of the yard along with some abandoned Kentucky Fried Chicken rummaged from the local barrels. Little Mike did not tell the police that he had done this. He claimed that he had left the paper on the front porch as always. He did not want anyone to think he was a bad delivery boy.

  Buster was the kind of dog who knew how to feel at home. He treated all the yards on Bridge Street as if they were his own, making his way leisurely through flower beds, pausing for a drink from a sprinkler, tearing into ga
rbage bags and relieving himself among patches of newly planted rutabagas. When he discovered Pat and Clyde’s Sunday Globe caught in the low branches of a rhododendron it was after eight. Mrs. Mitchell had let him out that morning with an affectionate pat on his behind. Don’t get into too much trouble, she said. He had left her with his nose to the ground.

  The Kentucky Fried Chicken was a gift. Half a bucket of wings and drumsticks left in an open trash can by a teenager on his way home after a night of near misses. The dog fell upon it like a drunk on whiskey, without remorse or pause or reason, with no more than the sense of get this in me now. But he also caught a whiff of melancholy left on the bucket from the teenager’s hands, and the smell told the dog to save some bones for a time when he was not so lucky.

  Buster was already digging a hole in Pat and Clyde’s yard when he noticed a small golden flake on the grass. It was food, and he followed the promise of more across the lawn, through the back door, and over to Clyde, stiff and covered with flies, the remaining cereal a soggy wet pile of pink plaster across his shoulders. The rug underneath the kitchen table was soaked in blood. Buster left red paw prints as he walked around the body and sniffed at the slippers on the dead man’s feet.

  The dog smelled fear in the sweat of Clyde’s last moment. It had curled in the arch of his foot as he listened to his wife answer their front door. The bell rang just as he pierced the roast with the carving fork, releasing two streams of juice, which ran down the sides of the meat until they were captured by the raised edge of the serving plate. He paused then, as he lifted the knife, waiting to hear and recognize the voices of his wife and whoever had come to their house. When he heard nothing, an uneasiness tightened at the base of his stomach. Their home contained his life, and he realized, suddenly, that he could not imagine something that could not be greeted by name, could not easily become a part of everything they had inside: their potholders in the shape of barnyard animals; the creak in the third stair; the way their bedroom door stuck in the summer heat. When the shot exploded, he felt it all at once and everywhere—in the walls, in his eyes, in his chest, in his arms, in the utensils he was holding, in the piece of meat he was carving, in the slippers that placed him on the floor, in the kitchen, before their evening meal.