The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories

by Otto Penzler

  “Good,” she said with the pitched nod of her head that he suddenly realized he had been looking forward to seeing again. “I didn’t mean it as an insult or anything. Do I look at the mug books now?”

  This time McQueen’s laugh was genuine. “No, no, that’s your words now. We call it a photo array. I’ll show you eight photos of men roughly matching the description you gave me. You tell me if one of them is the right one.”

  “All right, then.” She straightened herself in her chair and folded her hands in her lap. She cradled the broken right fingers in the long slender ones of her left hand. The gentleness made McQueen’s head swim with—what?—grief?—pity? He didn’t know.

  When he came around to her side of the desk and spread out the color photos before her, he knew immediately. She looked up at him—and the sapphires swam in tears yet again. She turned back to the photos and lightly touched one.

  “Him,” was all she said.

  “You know,” Rizzo said, chewing on a hamburger as he spoke, “you can never overestimate the stupidity of these assholes.”

  It was just after nine on a Thursday night, and the two detectives sat in the Chevrolet and ate their meals. The car stood backed into a slot at the rear of the Burger King’s parking lot, nestled in the darkness between circles of glare from two lampposts. Three weeks had passed since the assault on Amy Taylor.

  McQueen turned to his partner. “Which assholes we talking about here, Joe?” In the short time he had been working with Rizzo, McQueen had developed a grudging respect for the older man. What Rizzo appeared to lack in enthusiasm, he more than made up for in experience and with an ironic, grizzled sort of street smarts. McQueen had learned much from him and knew he was about to learn more.

  “Criminals,” Rizzo continued. “Skells in general. This burglary call we just took reminded me of something. Old case I handled seven, eight years ago. Jewelry store got robbed, over on Thirteenth Avenue. Me and my partner, guy named Giacalone, go over there and see the victim. Old Sicilian lived in the neighborhood forever, salt-of-the-earth type. So me and Giacalone, we go all out for this guy. We even called for the fingerprint team, we were right on it. So we look around, talk to the guy, get the description of the perp and the gun used, and we tell the old guy to sit tight and wait for the fingerprint team to show up and we’ll be in touch in a couple of days. Well, the old man is so grateful, he walks us out to the car. Just as we’re about to pull away, the guy says, ‘You know, the guy that robbed me cased the joint first.’ Imagine that?—‘cased the joint’—Musta watched a lot of TV, this old guy. So I say to him, ‘What d’ya mean, cased the joint?’ And he says, ‘Yeah, two days ago the same guy came in to get his watch fixed. Left it with me and everything. Even filled out a receipt card with his name and address and phone number. Must have been just casing the place. Well, he sure fooled me.’”

  Rizzo chuckled and bit into his burger. “So,” he continued through a full mouth, “old Giacalone puts the car back into park and he leans across me and says, ‘You still got that receipt slip?’ The old guy goes, ‘Yeah, but it must be all phony. He was just trying to get a look around.’ Well, me and Giacalone go back in and we get the slip. We cancel the print guys and drive out to Canarsie. Guess what? The asshole is home. We grab him and go get a warrant for the apartment. Gun, jewelry, and cash, bing-bang-boom. The guy cops to rob-three and does four-to-seven.”

  Rizzo smiled broadly at McQueen. “His girlfriend lived in the precinct, and while he was visiting her, he figured he’d get his watch fixed. Then when he sees what a mark the old guy is, he has an inspiration! See? Assholes.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a good thing,” McQueen said. “I haven’t run across too many geniuses working this job.”

  Rizzo laughed and crumpled up the wrappings spread across his lap. “Amen,” he said.

  They sat in silence, Rizzo smoking, McQueen watching the people and cars moving around the parking lot.

  “Hey, Joe,” McQueen said after a while. “Your theory about this neighborhood is a little bit off base. For a place supposed to be all Italian, I notice a lot of Asians around. Not to mention the Russians.”

  Rizzo waved a hand through his cigarette smoke. “Yeah, somebody’s got to wait the tables in the Chinese restaurants and drive car service, You still can’t throw a rock without hitting a fucking guinea.”

  The Motorola crackled to life at McQueen’s side. It was dispatch directing them to call the precinct via telephone. McQueen took his cell from his jacket pocket as Rizzo keyed the radio and gave a curt “Ten-four.”

  McQueen placed the call and the desk put him through to the squad. A detective named Borrelli came on the line. McQueen listened. His eyes narrowed and, taking a pen from his shirt, he scribbled on the back of a newspaper. He hung up the phone and turned to Rizzo.

  “We’ve got him,” he said softly.

  Rizzo belched loudly. “Got who?”

  McQueen leaned forward and started the engine. He switched on the headlights and pulled away. After three weeks in Bensonhurst, he no longer needed directions. He knew where he was going.

  “Flain,” he said. “Peter Flain.”

  Rizzo reached back, pulled on his shoulder belt, and buckled up. “Imagine that,” he said with a faint grin. “And here we was, just a minute ago, talking about assholes. Imagine that.”

  McQueen drove hard and quickly toward Eighteenth Avenue. Traffic was light, and he carefully jumped a red signal at Bay Parkway and turned left onto Seventy-fifth Street. He accelerated to Eighteenth Avenue and turned right.

  As he drove, he reflected on the investigation that was now about to unfold.

  It had been Rizzo who had gotten it started when he recalled the prior crimes with the same pattern. He had asked around the precinct and someone remembered the name of the perp. Flain. Peter Flain.

  The precinct computer had spit out his last known address in the Bronx and the parole officer assigned to the junkie ex-con. A call to the officer told them that Flain had been living in the Bronx for some years, serving out his parole without incident. He had been placed in a methadone program and was clean. Then, about three months ago, he disappeared. His parole officer checked around in the Bronx, but Flain had simply vanished. The officer put a violation on Flain’s parole and notified the state police, the New York Supreme Court, and NYPD headquarters. And that’s where it had ended, as far as he was concerned.

  McQueen had printed a color print from the computer and assembled the photo array. Amy Taylor picked Flain’s face from it. Flain had returned to the Six-two Precinct.

  Then Rizzo had really gone to work. He spent the better part of a four-to-midnight hitting every known junkie haunt in the precinct. He had made it known he wanted Flain. He had made it known that he would not be happy with any bar, poolroom, candy store, or after-hours joint that would harbor Flain and fail to give him up with a phone call to the squad.

  And tonight, that call had been made.

  McQueen swung the Chevy into the curb, killing the lights as the car rolled to a slow stop. Three storefronts down, just off the corner of Sixty-ninth Street, the faded fluorescent of the Keyboard Bar shone in the night. He twisted the key to shut off the engine. As he reached for the door handle and was about to pull it open, he felt the firm, tight grasp of Rizzo’s large hand on his right shoulder. He turned to face him.

  Rizzo’s face held no sign of emotion. When he spoke, it was in a low, conversational tone. McQueen had never heard the older man enunciate more clearly. “Kid,” Rizzo began, “I know you like this girl. And I know you took her out to dinner last week. Now, we both know you shouldn’t even be working this collar since you been seeing the victim socially. I been working with you for three weeks now, and you’re a good cop. But this here is the first bit of real shit we had to do. Let me handle it. Don’t be stupid. We pinch him and read him the rights and off he goes.” Rizzo paused and let his dark brown eyes run over McQueen’s face. When they returned to the cold b
lue of McQueen’s own eyes, they bored in.

  “Right?” Rizzo asked.

  McQueen nodded. “Just one thing, Joe.”

  Rizzo let his hand slide gently off McQueen’s shoulder.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I’ll process it. I’ll walk him through central booking. I’ll do the paperwork. Just do me one favor.”

  “What?” Rizzo repeated.

  “I don’t know any Brooklyn ADAs. I need you to talk to the ADA writing tonight. I want this to go hard. Two top counts, D felonies. Assault two and sexual abuse one. I don’t want this prick copping to an A misdemeanor assault or some bullshit E felony. OK?”

  Rizzo smiled, and McQueen became aware of the tension that had been hidden in the older man’s face only as he saw it melt away. “Sure, kid,” he nodded. “I’ll go down there myself and cash in a favor. No problem.” He pushed his face in the direction of the bar and said, “Now, let’s go get him.”

  Rizzo walked in first and went directly to the bar. McQueen hung back near the door, his back angled to the bare barroom wall. His eyes adjusted to the dimness of the large room and he scanned the half-dozen drinkers scattered along its length. He noticed two empty barstools with drinks and money and cigarettes spread before them on the worn Formica surface. At least two people were in the place somewhere, but not visible. He glanced over at Joe Rizzo.

  Rizzo stood silently, his forearms resting on the bar. The bartender, a man of about sixty, was slowly walking toward him.

  “Hello, Andrew,” McQueen heard Rizzo say. “How the hell you been?” McQueen watched as the two men, out of earshot of the others, whispered briefly to one another. McQueen noticed the start of nervous stirrings as the drinkers came to realize that something was suddenly different here. He saw a small envelope drop to the floor at the feet of one man.

  Rizzo stepped away from the bar and came back to McQueen.

  He smiled. “This joint is so crooked, old Andrew over there would give up Jesus Christ Himself to keep me away from here.” With a flick of his index finger, Rizzo indicated the men’s room at the very rear in the left corner.

  “Our boy’s in there. Ain’t feeling too chipper this evening, according to Andrew. Flain’s back on the junk, hard. He’s been sucking down Cokes all night. Andrew says he’s been in there for twenty minutes.”

  McQueen looked at the distant door. “Must have nodded off.”

  Rizzo twisted his lips. “Or he read Andrew like a book and climbed out the fucking window. Lets us go see.”

  Rizzo started toward the men’s room, unbuttoning his coat with his left hand as he walked. McQueen suddenly became aware of the weight of the 9mm Glock automatic belted to his own right hip. His groin broke into a sudden sweat as he realized he couldn’t remember having chambered a round before leaving his apartment for work. He unbuttoned his coat and followed his partner.

  The men’s room was small. A urinal hung on the wall to their left, brimming with dark urine and blackened cigarette butts. A cracked mirror hung above a blue-green stained sink. The metallic rattle of a worn, useless ventilation fan clamored. The stench of disinfectant surrendered to—what?—vomit? Yes, vomit.

  The single stall stood against the wall before them. The door was closed. Feet showed beneath it.

  McQueen reached for his Glock and watched as Rizzo slipped an ancient-looking Colt revolver from under his coat.

  Then Rizzo leaned his weight back, his shoulder brushing against McQueen’s chest, and heaved a heavy foot at the stress point of the stall door. He threw his weight behind it, and as the door flew inward, he stepped deftly aside, at the same time gently shoving McQueen the other way. The door crashed against the stall occupant and Rizzo rushed forward, holding the bouncing door back with one hand, pointing the Colt with the other.

  Peter Flain sat motionless on the toilet. His pants and underwear lay crumpled around his ankles. His legs were spread wide, pale and varicosed, and capped by bony knees. His head hung forward onto his chest, still. McQueen’s eyes fell on the man’s greasy black hair. Flain’s dirty gray shirt was covered with a brown, foamy, blood-streaked vomit. More blood, dark and thick, ran from his nostrils and pooled in the crook of his chin. His fists were clenched.

  Rizzo leaned forward and, carefully avoiding the fluids, lay two fingers across the jugular.

  He stood erect and holstered his gun. He turned to McQueen.

  “Morte,” he said. “The prick died on us!”

  McQueen looked away from Rizzo and back to Flain. He tried to feel what he felt, but couldn’t. “Well,” he said, just to hear his own voice.

  Rizzo let the door swing closed on the sight of Flain. He turned to McQueen with sudden anger on his face. “You know what this means?” he said.

  McQueen watched as the door swung slowly back open. He looked at Flain, but spoke to Rizzo.

  “It means he’s dead. It’s over.”

  Rizzo shook his head angrily. “No, no, that’s not what it fucking means. It means no conviction. No guilty plea. It means, ‘Investigation abated by death’! That’s what it means.”

  McQueen shook his head. “So?” he asked. “So what?”

  Rizzo frowned and leaned back against the tiled wall. Some of the anger left him. “So what?” he said, now more sad than angry. “I’ll tell you ‘so what.’ Without a conviction or a plea, we don’t clear this case. We don’t clear this case, we don’t get credit for it. We don’t clear this case, we did all this shit for nothing. Fucker would have died tonight anyway, with or without us bustin’ our asses to find him.”

  They stood in silence for a moment. Then, suddenly, Rizzo brightened. He turned to McQueen with a sly grin, and when he spoke, he did so in a softer tone.

  “Unless,” he said, “unless we start to get smart.”

  In six years on the job, McQueen had been present in other places, at other times, with other cops, when one of them had said, “Unless . . .” with just such a grin. He felt his facial muscles begin to tighten.

  “What, Joe? Unless what?”

  “Un-less when we got here, came in the john, this guy was still alive. In acute respiratory distress. Pukin’ on himself. Scared, real scared ’cause he knew this was the final overdose. And we, well, we tried to help, but we ain’t doctors, right? So he knows he’s gonna die and he says to us, ‘I’m sorry.’ And we say, ‘What, Pete, sorry about what?’ And he says, ‘I’m sorry about that girl, that last pretty girl, in the subway. I shouldn’ta done that.’ And I say to him, ‘Done what, Pete, what’d you do?’ And he says, ‘I did like I did before, with the others, with the knife.’ And then, just like that, he drops dead!”

  McQueen wrinkled his forehead. “I’m not following this, Joe. How does that change anything?”

  Rizzo leaned closer to McQueen. “It changes everything,” he whispered, holding his thumb to his fingers and shaking his hand, palm up, at McQueen’s face. “Don’t you get it? It’s a deathbed confession, rock-solid evidence, even admissible in court. Bang—case closed! And we’re the ones who closed it. Don’t you see? It’s fucking beautiful.”

  McQueen looked back at the grotesque body of the dead junkie. He felt bile rising in his throat, and he swallowed it down.

  He shook his head slowly, his eyes still on the corpse.

  “Jesus, Joe,” he said, the bile searing at his throat. “Jesus Christ, Joe, that’s not right. We can’t do that. That’s just fucking wrong!”

  Rizzo reddened, the anger suddenly coming back to him.

  “Kid,” he said, “don’t make me say you owe me. Don’t make me say it. I took this case on for you, remember?”

  But it was not the way McQueen remembered it. He looked into the older man’s eyes.

  “Jesus, Joe,” he said.

  Rizzo shook his head, “Jesus got nothin’ to do with it.”

  “It’s wrong, Joe,” McQueen said, even as his ears flushed red with the realization of what they were about to do. “It’s just wrong.”

&n
bsp; Rizzo leaned in close, speaking more softly, directly into McQueen’s ear. The sound of people approaching the men’s room forced an urgency into his voice. McQueen felt the warmth of Rizzo’s breath touching him.

  “I tole you this, kid. I already tole you this. There is no right. There is no wrong.” He turned and looked down at the hideous corpse. “There just is.”

  SCOTT TUROW

  Loyalty

  FROM Playboy

  THIS HAPPENED, the first part, four or five years before everything else. In those days I was still sweeping a lot of stuff under the rug with Clarissa, and we didn’t see the Elstners often, because my wife, given the history, was never really at ease around Paul and Ann. Instead, every few months, Paul Elstner and I would take in a game on our own—basketball in the winter, baseball in the summer—meeting first for an early dinner usually at Gil’s, near the University Field House, formerly Gil’s Men’s Bar and still a bastion of a lost world, with its walls wainscoted in sleek oak.

  And so we were there, feeling timeless, telling tales about our cases and our kids, when this character came to a halt near our table. I could feel Elstner start at the sight of him. The man had a generation on us, putting him near seventy at this point. He was in a longhair cashmere topcoat, with a heavy cuff link winking on his sleeve and his sparse hair puffed up in a fifty-dollar do. But he was the kind you couldn’t really dress up. He was working a toothpick in his mouth, and on his meaty face there was a harsh look of ingrained self-importance. He was a tough mug, you could see it, the kind whose father had come over on the boat and who had grown up hard himself.

  “Christ,” Elstner whispered. He’d raised his menu to surround his face. “Christ, don’t look at him. Oh, Christ.” Elstner has always run a little over the margins. Never mind the dumb stuff twenty years before when we were law school roommates. But even now, a married grownup with two daughters, Paul would ride around in the dead of winter with his car windows open so he wouldn’t kill himself with his own cigar smoke, a pair of yellow headphones mounted over his earmuffs so he could rock with the Rolling Stones despite the onrushing wind. Looking at him with the two sides of the menu pushed against his ears, even though he was twice the size of the guy he was hiding from, I figured, It’s Elstner.