The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories

by Otto Penzler

  “Maurie Moleva,” Paul said when the old guy at last had moved on. “I just didn’t want him remembering I’m still alive.” Elstner swallowed hard on the hunk of schnitzel he’d stopped chewing when Moleva appeared.

  I asked what it was Paul had done to Maurie.

  “Me? Nothin’. Nada. This isn’t about what anybody did to Maurie. It’s about what Maurie did to somebody else.” Elstner looked into his Diet Coke while the racket of the restaurant swelled around us. “This is obviously a story I shouldn’t be telling anybody,” he said.

  “OK,” I answered, meaning I was not asking for more. Elstner rattled the cubes in his drink, chasing a necklace of tiny brown bubbles to the sides of the glass, plainly reconsidering it all, the secret and its consequences.

  “This was a long time ago,” he finally said. “Before the earth had cooled. No more than a year after you and I finished law school. I was still working for Jack Barrish. You remember Jack. Wacky stuff was always going on around that office. He’s defending hookers and taking it out in trade, or trying to give me something hot—a camera, a suit—instead of half my salary. You remember.”

  “I remember,” I said.

  “Anyway, Jack, you know, his business clients are all Kehwahnee hustlers just like him, and this guy Maurie Moleva is one of them. Dr. Moleva. PhD. Research chemist who went into business. A few years back now, he sold off his company to some New York Stock Exchange outfit, Tinker and Something, one of those conglomerates. I read about it in the Journal, forty million bucks, fifty million, you know, pocket money to them but a piece of change. Back then, the time I’m talking about, the company was still Maurie’s.

  “Moleva started out making household products, bleach and spot remover, off-brand stuff that they’d sell at the independent grocers, but by then he’s really ringing the gong selling to the military. One of his biggest contracts is for windshield washer fluid. For jeeps. Airplanes. Tanks. Helicopters. And of course, the kind of guy he is, whatever he’s got, he wants more, so the government is like, We need some chemical, HD-12 or whatever, in the washer fluid, in case we’re in the desert, the sand won’t stick. And Maurie, he’s a smart guy, we’ve got several hundred thousand troops in the jungles of Nam, no sand there, and the HD-12, I don’t know, it adds two bucks a gallon, so he tells them on the assembly line, ‘Leave it out.’

  “Now the guys on the line, they’re all to a man Maurie’s people from the old country. Including Maurie’s cousin Dragon. When Cousin Dragon was about nine years old, he started in writing to Maurie, ‘America’s my dream, I need to come to America, I hate these commies over here, they’re godless tyrants, they crush the spirit of every man,’ and Maurie read these letters for about a decade. He’d never set eyes on Dragon, but like every tough SOB I ever met, he’s sort of a softie on his own time, very sentimental. So Maurie pays Dragon’s way, meets his plane, kisses Dragon’s cheeks, gives him a diamond medallion with the American flag surrounded by some vines that are a big symbol in the homeland, and puts Dragon to work on the line. Then Maurie goes off to tell everybody at the church men’s club what a hero he is for rescuing his young cousin.

  “Anyway, Dragon’s here for a while and he begins to get the low-down. Mamie’s sons are driving shiny cars, they got lovely wives and big houses, and Cousin Dragon is bustin’ his hump on the line, starting at six AM every day because Maurie doesn’t like his employees stuck in traffic. And long story short, Dragon begins to remember what’s so great about communism. He starts in asking, Where’s a little more for the workin’ stiff? He even, God save the poor son of a bitch, talks on the assembly line about a union. Not smart. Maurie gets his two sons and they throw Dragon’s butt out. Literally. They toss him through the door in the middle of winter without his hat and gloves. ‘I bought your fuckin’ hat, I bought your gloves, I brought your ungrateful pink heinie here from the old country. Go.’

  “Bad news for Dragon. And worse news it turns out for Maurie. Because within a few months, an Army helicopter gets caught in a desert storm and goes kerplunk in the Mojave. One survivor. Who says they went down because they couldn’t get the sand off their frigging windshield.

  “So we have a big federal grand jury investigation started up. Which is where my boss Jack comes in. The G, of course, has figured out that their windshield wiper fluid doesn’t have any HD-12 in it and Maurie’s answer is, ‘Darn it, can you believe what knuckleballs I got on my line? I need better help.’ That’s not so bad, right? As a defense? That could sell?”

  It sounded OK to me, but I’d never practiced criminal law.

  “It didn’t,” Elstner said. “Nope. The AUSA says, ‘Nope, we’re gonna put Maurie in the pokey, let the big boys call him Sweetie. We’re gonna forfeit Maurie’s great business ’cause he’s a racketeer.’ ‘How you gonna do that?’ Jack says. ‘This is a terrible accident.’ ‘Nope,’ says the AUSA. ‘Nope, I got a witness.’”

  “Dragon.”

  “You can move on to the Jeopardy round.”

  “So Maurie did some time?”

  “Hardly. Negative on that one, flight commander. Maurie strolled. Here’s where I come into the picture,” Elstner said.

  I made a sound to show I was getting interested.

  “There was this night,” Paul said. “I get a call. Past midnight. It’s Maurie. Says he’s been phoning Boss Jack everywhere and can’t find him. When I tell Maurie that Jack went to take an emergency dep in Boston, you’d think from the sound that old Maurie was passing a stone. Finally he tells me to meet up with him instead. Now, I don’t even own a car. I have to go wake up my sister across town. And I’m following Maurie’s directions, which take me to East Bumblefuck. There are moons of Jupiter that are closer. I’m in cornfields. And here near one of these roadside telephone booths, here at two-thirty in the goddamn morning, here is Maurie Moleva. It’s springtime. The earth is soft. Stuff is growing. The air smells of loam. There’s a bright moon. He’s in a rumpled seersucker suit. With mud up to his knees. He’s got on a straw fedora and he’s carrying a briefcase. He gets in the car and tells me to drive him home. That’s all he says. Not hello. Not thanks. Just, ‘Drive.’ The Great Communicator. At his feet he’s got the briefcase, which won’t quite close because the wooden handle of something is sticking out of it. He’s got a ring of grime under his polished fingernails, and every so often he’s jiggling a chain in one palm. In time I see the medallion—diamond, flag, vines. I didn’t have a clue right then whose it was, but still and all, this is bad voodoo. I’m definitely scared, especially a few days later when it turns out that good old Cousin Dragon is AWOL.”

  “Isn’t that big trouble for Maurie?” I asked. “Prosecutors aren’t going to have to summon the oracle to figure out who’d want to disappear Dragon.”

  “Yeah, well, Maurie’s not stupid. Nobody will ever hang that on him. In about a week, Dragon’s beater car turns up at the airport. So the FBI searches all the flight manifests and, can you imagine, one of them shows Dragon boarded a plane home the same night Maurie was taking mud baths in the boonies. Had a reservation and all, paid his ticket in cash. Bureau questions the guys on Maurie’s line and some are saying Dragon was talking about making some bigtime money. Couple of them are even hearing from Aunt Tatiana who heard from Cousin Lugo how Dragon’s back in the old country and acting real flush.

  “Now the G, of course, they’re up Maurie’s hind end with a miner’s light, because they just know he paid off dear old Dragon to boogie. Feebies tear up every bank account, they stick Maurie’s bookkeeper in the grand jury, hoping to trace the money, but no luck. So they call Interpol to find Dragon, but he left no trail once he stepped off the plane.

  “And of course, I’m young and dumb, and this is really killing me. Attorney-client, I can’t talk about what I know, and I’m too petrified to do it anyway, but one Sunday I mosey back to where I picked Maurie up, just hoping to figure all this out for my own sake. Which I pretty much do. Maurie’s in the chemical business, ri
ght? Ever hear of hazardous waste?”

  “That’s how Clarissa describes our marriage.”

  Elstner stopped to laugh. “Yeah, right. Well, this place, these days you’d call it a brownfield, a disposal site. My guess, it was owned by the outfit that hauled Maurie’s stuff. Today, with the EPA, you probably have to have the Marines posted at the perimeter, but back then there’s just a chainlink fence, and you can see somebody did a number on the padlock. Inside there are all these trenches, each longer than a football field, set about twenty yards apart and filled with rock and soil. The last one’s open, maybe three, four feet deep with Styrofoam liner, and a couple dozen fifty-five-gallon drums of shit in there waiting to be buried.”

  “And ‘RIP Dragon’ written on one of the drums. Is that how it adds?”

  “That’s my arithmetic. I figure Dr. Maurie told Dragon he’d send him home rich, then took the guy down instead. Fella like Maurie, he’d kill you sooner than let you put the squeeze on him.”

  “And who got on the airplane with Dragon’s passport?”

  “My bet? One of the sons. Cousins, there’s probably some resemblance. Besides, something like this stays at home.”

  “That’s why you quit on Jack?”

  “Hey, after this one, a nice real estate deal, that sounded just right. And even so, I’ve been scared all these years Maurie was gonna come for me with his meat ax or his latrine shovel or whatever it was he had in that briefcase. That’s why this tale never got told. I mean,” Elstner said, looking across the table, “how can you tell anyone a story like this?”

  So that was what my pal Paul Elstner had told me several years before. By now I was seeing a good deal of Paul, because I had left Clarissa. I barely got out at first, but one of Paul’s partners had deserted Elstner on their season tickets for the Hands basketball games over at the university, and I was happy to buy in.

  Like most people who split up, I had told myself that I was starting a new life, a better life, a life in which I’d finally become my true self, but turmoil consumed most of my private moments, confining me within walls of pain. It is such a mystery, really, that you can stop loving someone. You grow up believing love is one of the epic forces of nature, like tidal patterns and the creeping of the earth’s crust, an indomitable element. So how can it just go away? I would turn this question over in my head for hours at a time, sitting in my bare high-rise apartment and watching the city twinkle desolately at night.

  I didn’t know if I had married Clarissa for the wrong reasons or if she had changed, with the babies, the years at home, the death of her older sister and her mother. I could not explain why a somewhat wry, laconic woman, whom I’d found thrillingly bright when I first met her, became so obsessed with her children’s health that barely a week passed without a visit to the pediatrician, or why at the age of forty a person who had been a defiant atheist returned to the Catholic Church and insisted, with the same ferocity with which she had once spurned religion, that the boys be baptized in a faith I did not share. I could not explain any of it, the passions or the quirks that had grown unbearably grating over time, but we had ended up like most couples who don’t make it—embittered rivals who saw each other as emblems of life’s shortcomings.

  My sons had remained with their mother. At all moments, I seemed to feel them behind me, like passengers left on some pier. They were both in high school, a sophomore and a senior. I felt awful for them. But I felt worse for myself.

  I moved into an apartment building in Center City, not far from work. The building’s population was mostly young, late-twenties just-getting-starteds. I was weirdly aware of the number who moved out each week. Common sense suggested that they had fallen in love and were relocating to begin a life with someone else. The sight of furniture on dollies, of bags and boxes piled in the service elevator, seemed to seize all of my attention, like somebody calling my name.

  I turned into one of those people who arrive home for a night alone, carrying as much as possible—the cleaning, something I’d had repaired, and a few groceries for dinner. Twice a week I saw my sons. The other nights I tried not to drink too much, certain that this cataclysm would finally make me the gentle alcoholic my father was in his later years, always waiting for sunset and the first Manhattan. I had been told that women would find a successful single man in his late forties magnetic, but I felt too sad even to start in that direction. Eventually, I began attending the kind of tony intellectual events around the city at which I’d envisioned myself when I first came here for law school and which Clarissa for years had derided as a complete bore—art openings, symphonies, lectures. There were few singles at these events, and I often felt out of place, but I was desperate to make some effort at self-improvement.

  One of these evenings, involving a fundraising dinner and a reading by a poet celebrated in circles too narrow to mean much to me, was held in the West Bank condo of old acquaintances, Leo Levitz, a shrink, and his wife, Ruth, whose industrial-design firm has been an off-and-on client of mine for years. In their late sixties, the Levitzes had achieved an enviable settled grace. Vivid paintings and objects of primitive art they’d gathered from around the world crowded the track-lit corridors of their apartment. Alone, I studied each piece, deeply struck that a congenial married life could be reflected by such tangible beauty.

  By ten, the gathering had thinned and I prepared to shirk the pretense I had made of being cheerful, humorous, of feeling I was of interest to other people. Shortly, I would again be on my own. I bade the Levitzes goodbye. Waiting in the small corridor outside their door for the elevator, I heard a vague thudding. I swore out loud when I realized it was the skylight overhead.

  “I’m sorry?” A tall woman with straight black hair was working the key into the lock of her apartment across the hall. I’d noticed her once or twice during the evening, especially as she’d departed immediately before me. She smiled sociably, revealing a front tooth lapped over its neighbor. She had a long face and dark eyes, a woman close to my age who knew she still retained much of the appeal of youth.

  “Is it raining out there?” I asked. It was fall, late November, and the prediction had been snow rather than rain. Without an umbrella, my topcoat would become sodden and emit a repellent scent that would taint the close air of my apartment.

  “Take a look.” Across the threshold, she gestured to her living room window. Staring down, I could make out both rain and snow, leaving a lethal glister on the streets. The smarter taxi drivers, who valued their lives and property, would already have called it a night.

  She introduced herself as Karen Kolmar. Her apartment had soft yellow walls and deep Chinese rugs. A book about Coco Chanel was open on a cocktail table. We talked about the poet who’d read.

  “His work seemed cold to me,” she said. “But I suppose a lot of it was just over my head.” She shrugged, not much concerned.

  I would have said the same thing, I told her, but lacked the strength of character to admit it.

  “I’m at peace as a middlebrow,” she answered. I liked her. Self-awareness seemed a particularly appealing trait at the moment.

  She asked whether it was the Levitzes or poetry that had brought me around, and in no time I had explained my situation in life, saying far too much about Clarissa. Karen Kolmar smiled philosophically. She was not wearing a wedding ring and no doubt had encountered her share of guys like me.

  In fact, I soon picked out a photo of a fellow I figured for her beau, given the prominence with which the picture was displayed on the closed ebony lid of a baby grand in the corner. A healthy-looking older guy, he seemed mildly familiar, if only for his buoyant smile that appeared all too obviously manufactured for the sake of the camera. Looking at the photograph, I sized up my hostess’s situation. A divorce. Some money. This guy who was at least ten years too old for her but who probably paid a lot of attention. That, I was slowly coming to realize, was one more sadness in divorce, not merely getting to the middle of your life and confessi
ng that the most basic things had not worked out but finding that you’re one of life’s bench players waiting to get on the court again with the rest of the second string.

  “That’s my father,” she told me when she caught my eye. “I just put up his picture a couple of days ago. We’re having a rapprochement. My mother died and so we’re being nice to one another. It might not last. We didn’t speak for two years before this.”

  She asked if my parents were living. Neither was. Like her, I’d lost my mother recently. I wondered all the time if I would have left Clarissa but for that, if I’d hung on to my marriage for years for my mother’s sake. I thought I might have. I told her that—I seemed willing to say anything, and she to listen to it appreciatively.

  “I’m trying to figure out if my father is why I have trouble with men,” she said.

  She didn’t seem to me to have much problem with men. She knew what she was doing.

  “Three-time loser,” she added and waggled the fourth finger of her left hand.

  “God, three times,” I said, before I could catch myself. “I’d throw myself under a train.”

  That could have gone badly, but her look was sadly sympathetic.

  “It gets easier,” she said. “Unfortunately.” She didn’t have kids, though. That was different. She asked if I was thinking of going back. I wasn’t, although Clarissa, after weeks in which she’d been shrill and recklessly accusing—no one person could ever love me as much as I wanted to be loved; I was trying to change her because I could not change myself—had recently turned plaintive. After all this time, she asked me. After all this time? It was the only thing that ever had any resonance.