The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories

by Otto Penzler

  Buster pulled off one of the slippers and sank his teeth into it. It was rank, worn, and sour-tasting, cutting the sweetness of the Captain Crunch. He worked on removing the stuffing of the inner sole and kept his eye on the dead man who used to shoo-shoo him away from garbage bags, from munching the daffodils that lined the walk, from humping strays behind the garage. Once, after catching the dog relieving himself in the middle of the driveway, Clyde had dragged him by the collar all the way down Bridge Street. Listen to me, pooch, Mr. Mitchell had said after Clyde had left, one hand smoothing where the collar had choked and the other hand vigorously scratching the dog’s behind. You shit wherever you feel like shitting.

  On his way out of the yard Buster found the Sunday Globe that Little Mike Findleman had tossed. It held the same scent he’d picked up over the body—anger, fear, and disconnectedness—things that cried out to be buried. He dragged the paper over to the hole he’d already started and threw it in with the slipper and the leftover chicken. The earth had a way of settling things. The dog walked back and forth over the spot once it was filled, then lifted his leg to mark it. He shook some dirt out of his ear and used four paws to take himself home.

  The Mitchells had moved into the neighborhood five years before. They brought their dog with them. Three years later, a son arrived—not a newborn baby decked out in bonnets but a thin, dark boy of indiscriminate age. His name was Miguel, and it was unclear to the people living on Bridge Street whether he was adopted or a child from a previous marriage. He called the Mitchells his mother and father, enrolled in the public school for the district, and quietly became a part of their everyday lives.

  In fact, Miguel was the true son of Mr. Mitchell, sired unknowingly on a business trip with a Venezuelan prostitute some seven years before. The mother had been killed in a bus accident along with fifty-three other travelers on a road outside Caracas, and the local police had contacted Mr. Mitchell from a faded company card she had left pressed in her Bible. After a paternity test, the boy arrived at Logan airport with a worn-out blanket and duffel bag full of chickens (his pets), which were quickly confiscated by customs officials. Mr, Mitchell drove down Route 128 in his station wagon, amazed and panicked at his sudden parenthood, trying to comfort the sobbing boy and wondering how Miguel had managed to keep the birds quiet on the plane.

  When they pulled into the driveway, Mrs. Mitchell was waiting with a glass of warm milk sweetened with sugar. She was wearing dungarees. She took the boy in her arms and carried him immediately into the bathroom, where she sat him on the counter and washed his face, his hands, his knees, and his feet. Miguel sipped the milk while Mrs. Mitchell gently ran the washcloth between his toes. When she was finished, she tucked him into their guest bed and read him a stack of Curious George books in Spanish, which she had ordered from their local bookstore. She showed Miguel a picture of the little monkey in the hospital getting a shot from a nurse and the boy fell asleep, a finger hooked around the belt loop of her jeans. Mrs. Mitchell sat on the bed beside him quietly until he rolled over and let it go.

  Mr. Mitchell had met his wife in Northern California. They pulled up beside each other at a gas station. He had just completed his business degree, and was driving a rented car up the coast to see the Olympic rain forest. She was in a pickup truck with Oregon plates. They both got out and started pumping. Mr. Mitchell finished first, and on his way back to his car after paying, he watched the muscles in her thick arm flexing as she replaced the hose. She glanced up, caught him looking, and smiled. She was not beautiful, but one of her teeth stuck out charmingly sideways. He started the car, turned out of the station, and glanced into his rearview mirror. He watched the pickup take the opposite road, and as it drove away he felt such a pulling that he turned around and followed it for 150 miles.

  At the rest stop, he pretended that he was surprised to see her. Later he discovered that many people followed his wife, and that she was used to this, and that it did not seem strange to her. People she had never met came up and began to speak to her in supermarkets, in elevators, in the waiting rooms of doctors, at traffic lights, at concerts, at coffee shops and bistros. Even their dog, a stray she fed while camping in Tennessee, came scratching outside their door six weeks later. Mr. Mitchell was jealous and frightened by these strangers, and often used himself as a shield between them and his wife. What do they want from her? he often found himself thinking. But he also felt, What will they take from me?

  His wife was a quiet woman, in the way that large rocks just beyond the shore are quiet; the waves rush against them and the seaweed hangs on and the birds gather round on top. Mr. Mitchell was amazed that she had married him. He spent the first few years doing what he could to please her and watched for signs that she was leaving.

  Sometimes she got depressed and locked herself in the bathroom. It made him furious and desperate. When she came out, tender and pink from washing, she would put her arms around him and tell him that he was a good man. Mr. Mitchell was not sure of this, because sometimes he found himself hating her. The door was in front of him but the knob wouldn’t turn. He wanted her to know what it felt like to be powerless. He found himself taking risks.

  When he got the call from Venezuela telling him about Miguel, he was terrified that he might lose his wife and also secretly happy to have wounded her. But all of the control he felt as they prepared for his son’s arrival slipped away as he watched her take the strange dark boy into her arms and tenderly wash his feet. He realized then that she was capable of taking everything from him.

  The three of them formed an awkward family. Mr. Mitchell tried to place the boy in a home but his wife would not let him. She did this to punish him. He had now been an accidental father for two years. He took the boy to baseball games and bought him comic books and drove him to school in the mornings. Sometimes Mr. Mitchell enjoyed these things, other times they made him angry. One day he walked in on Miguel talking to his wife in Spanish and the boy immediately stopped. He realized then that his son was afraid of him. He was sure his wife had done this too. Mr. Mitchell began to resent what had initially drawn him to her, and to offset these feelings he began an affair with their neighbor, Pat.

  It did not begin innocently. Mr. Mitchell walked over to Pat one afternoon as she was planting bulbs in her garden and slid his hand into the elastic waistband of her Bermuda shorts. He leaned her up against the fence, underneath a birch tree, right there in the middle of a bright, spring day where everyone could see. He didn’t say anything, but he could tell by her breath and the way she rocked on his hand that she wasn’t afraid.

  He hadn’t known that it was in him to do anything like this. He had never been attracted to Pat; he had never had any conversation with her that went beyond the weather or the scheduling of trash. He had been on his way to the library to return some books. Look, there they were, thrown aside on the grass, wrapped in plastic smeared with age and the fingers of readers who were unknown to him. And here was another person he did not know, panting in his ear, streaking his arms with dirt. Someone he had seen bent over in the sunlight, a slight glistening of sweat reflecting in the backs of her knees, and for which he had suddenly felt a hard sense of lonesomeness and longing. A new kind of warmth spread in the palm of his hand and he tried not to think about his wife.

  They had hard, raw sex in public places—movie theaters and parks, elevators and playgrounds. After dark, underneath the jungle gym, his knees pressing into the dirt, Mr. Mitchell began to wonder why they hadn’t been caught. Once, sitting on a bench near the reservoir, Pat straddling him in a skirt with no underwear, they had actually waved to an elderly couple passing by. The couple continued on as if they hadn’t seen them. Who knows, maybe they were half-blind, but the experience left the impression that his meetings with Pat were occurring in some kind of alternative reality, a bubble in time that he knew would eventually pop.

  Pat told him that Clyde had been impotent for years—a reaction, it seemed, from witnessing his fath
er’s death. The man had been a mechanic, and was working underneath a bulldozer when the lift slipped, crushing him from the chest down. The father and the son had held hands, and the coldness that came as life left seemed to spread through Clyde’s fingers and into his arms, and he stopped using them to reach for his wife. Since the funeral she’d had two lovers. Mr. Mitchell was number three.

  There were rumors, later on, that the lift had been tampered with—that Clyde’s father had owed someone money. Pat denied it, but Mr. Mitchell remembered driving by the garage and sensing he’d rather buy his gas somewhere else.

  Mr. Mitchell’s desire increased with the risk of discovery, and he’d started arranging meetings with Pat that were closer to home. In his house he fantasized about the dining room table, the dryer in the laundry room, the space on the kitchen counter beside the mixer. He touched these places with his fingertips and trembled, thinking of how he would feel later, watching his wife sip her soup, fold sheets, mix batter for cookies in the same places.

  On the day Pat was murdered, before she put the roast in the oven or reminisced about James Dean or thought about the difference between butter and margarine, she was having sex in the vestibule. The coiled rope of Home Sweet Home scratched her behind and dug into Mr. Mitchell’s knees. He had seen Clyde leave for a bowling lesson, and as he waited on the front porch for Pat to open the door, something had made him pick up the welcome mat. When she answered he’d thrown it down in the hall, then her, then himself, the soles of his shoes knocking over the entry table.

  Mrs. Mitchell would soon be home with Miguel. Mr. Mitchell brought Pat’s knees to his shoulders and listened for the choking hum of his wife’s Reliant.

  The following day when Lieutenant Sales climbed the stairs of Pat and Clyde’s porch he did not notice that there was nothing to wipe his feet on. He was an average-looking man: six feet two inches, 190 pounds, brown hair, brown eyes, brown skin. He had once been a champion deep-sea diver, until a shark attack (which left him with a hole in his side crossed with the pink, puckered scars of new skin) pulled him from the waters with a sense of righteous authority and induced him to join the force. He lived thirty-five minutes away in a basement apartment with a Siamese cat named Frank.

  When Sales was a boy, he’d had a teacher who smelled like roses. Her name was Mrs. Bosco. She showed him how to blow eggs. Forcing the yolk out of the tiny hole always felt a little disgusting, like blowing a heavy wad of snot from his nose, but when he looked up at Mrs. Bosco’s cheeks, flushed red with effort, he knew it would be worth it, and it was—the empty shell in his hand like a held breath, like the moment before something important happens. Whenever he began an investigation he’d get the same sensation, and as he stepped into the doorway of Pat and Clyde’s house he felt it rise in his chest and stay.

  He interviewed the police who found the bodies first. They were sheepish about their reasons for going into the backyard, but before long they began loudly discussing drywall and sheetrock and the pros and cons of lanceted windows (all of the men, including Lieutenant Sales, carried weekend and part-time jobs in construction). The policeman who had thrown up in the roses had gone home early. When Sales spoke to him later, he apologized for contaminating the scene.

  Lieutenant Sales found the roast on the counter. He found green beans still on the stove. He found a sour cherry pie in the oven. He found the butter and the margarine, softened tubes of yellow, half melted on the dining room table. He found that Pat and Clyde used cloth napkins and tiny separate plates for their dinner rolls. The silverware was polished. The edges of the steak knives turned in.

  He found their unpaid bills in a basket by the telephone. He found clean laundry inside the dryer in the basement—towels, sheets, T-shirts, socks, three sets of Fruit of the Loom, and one pair of soft pink satin panties, the elastic starting to give, the bottom frayed and thin. He found an unfinished letter Pat had started writing to a friend who had recently moved to Arizona: What is it like there? How can you stand the heat? He found Clyde’s stamp albums from when he was a boy—tiny spots of brilliant color, etchings of flowers and portraits of kings, painstakingly pasted over the names of countries Lieutenant Sales had never heard of.

  He found the bullet that had passed through Pat’s body embedded in the stairs. He found a run in her stocking, starting at the heel and inching its way up the back of her leg. He thought about how Pat had been walking around the day she was going to die, not realizing that there was a hole in her pantyhose. He found a stain, dark and blooming beneath her shoulders, spreading across the oriental rug in the foyer and into the hardwood floors, which he noticed, as he got down on his knees for a closer look, still held the scent of Murphy’s Oil. He found a hairpin caught in the fringe. He found a cluster of dandelion seeds, the tiny white filaments coming apart in his fingers. He found a look on Pat’s face like a child trying to be brave, lips tightened and thin, forehead just beginning to crease, eyes glazed, dark, and unconvinced. Her body was stiff when they moved her.

  There were dog tracks on the back porch. They were the prints of a midsized animal, red and clearly defined as they circled the body in the kitchen, then crisscrossing over themselves and heading out the door, fading down the steps and onto the driveway before disappearing into the yard. Lieutenant Sales sent a man to knock on doors in the neighborhood and find out who let their dogs off the leash. He interviewed the paperboy and Clyde’s mother. He went back to the station and checked Pat and Clyde’s records—both clean. When he finally went to sleep that night, the small warmth of his cat tucked up behind his knees, Lieutenant Sales thought about the feel of satin panties, missing slippers, stolen welcome mats, dandelion seeds from a yard with no dandelions, and the kind of killer who shuts off the oven.

  A month before Pat and Clyde were murdered, Mrs. Mitchell was fixing the toilet. Her husband passed by on his way to the kitchen, paused in the doorway, shook his head, and told her that she was too good for him. The heavy porcelain top was off; her arms elbow deep in rusty water. The man she had married was standing at the entrance to the bathroom and he was speaking to her, but she was not thinking about him, and so she did not respond. She was concentrating on the particular tone in the pipes she was trying to clear. It was this same ability to turn her attention into focus, like a lighthouse whose spinning had unexpectedly stopped, that made people follow her.

  Mr. Mitchell went into the kitchen and began popping popcorn. The kernels cracked against the insides of the kettle as his words settled into her, and when, with a twist of the coat hanger in her hand beneath the water, she stopped the ringing of the pipes, Mrs. Mitchell sensed in the quiet that came next that her husband had done something wrong. She had known in this same way before he told her about Miguel. A breeze came through the window and made the hair on her wet arms rise. She pulled her hands from the toilet and thought to herself, I fixed it.

  When Miguel came into their home, she had taken all the sorrow she felt at his existence and turned it into a fierce motherly love. Mrs. Mitchell thought her husband would be grateful; instead he seemed to hold it against her. He became dodgy and spiteful. Her mind was full of failings, but all she understood was that her husband was having difficulty loving her, because it seemed as if she didn’t make mistakes. It was the closest she ever came to leaving; but she hadn’t expected the boy.

  Miguel spent the first three months of his life in America asking to go home. When the fourth month came he began to sleepwalk. In the dark he wandered downstairs to the kitchen, emptied the garbage can onto the floor, and curled up inside. The next morning Mrs. Mitchell would find him asleep, shoulders in the barrel, feet in the coffee grounds and leftovers. He told her he was looking for his mother’s head. She had been decapitated in the bus accident, and now she stepped from the corners of Miguel’s dreams at night and beckoned him with her arms, tiny chicks resting on her shoulders, pecking at the empty neck.

  Mrs. Mitchell suggested that they make her a new one. She brought mater
ials for papier-maché. The strips of newspaper felt like bandages as she helped Miguel dip them in glue and smooth them over the surface of the inflated balloon. They fashioned a nose and lips out of cardboard. Once it was dry, Miguel described his mother’s face and they painted the skin brown, added yarn for hair, cut eyelashes out of construction paper. Mrs. Mitchell took a pair of gold earrings, poked them through where they’d drawn the ears, and said, heart sinking, She’s beautiful. Miguel nodded. He smiled. He put his mother’s head on top of the bookcase in his room and stopped sleeping in the garbage.

  Sometimes when Mrs. Mitchell checked on the boy at night she’d feel the head looking at her. It was unnerving. She imagined her husband making love to the papier-maché face and discovered a hate so strong and hard it made her afraid of herself. She considered swiping the head and destroying it, but she remembered how skinny and pitiful the boy’s legs had looked against her kitchen floor. Then Miguel began to love her. She suddenly felt capable of anything. She thumbed her nose at the face in the corner. She held her heart open.