The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories

by Otto Penzler

  I tried one swat.

  “Hard,” she said. “Harder. Keep doing it. I’ll say when I want you to stop. I’ll enjoy it.”

  But I didn’t.

  “No,” I said suddenly, and pushed her off my lap. I went for my clothing.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to be this to you,” I said.

  “Be what? The man who pleases me?”

  “Not like that.”

  “It’s what I want,” she said.

  “No,” I said again and left.

  “I think I have to tell her,” I said to Elstner the next night. “About her father.”

  Paul took his time now. I’d been late and we’d skipped Gil’s, settling instead for dogs we were gobbling down as we stood at a little linoleum table fixed to one of the elderly pillars in the Field House.

  “You can’t tell her,” Pavil said then. “That’s all. You can’t. You can’t for my sake. And her sake. And your sake. You can’t. This isn’t comedy. This is real life. This guy is a murderer. And smart enough to realize there’s no statute of limitations. He killed a man to keep from getting caught. You think he wouldn’t do it again?”

  “Paul, she wouldn’t say anything to Maurie. I’d make her promise.”

  “Like you promised me?”

  “I’ll keep you out of it.”

  “He’ll figure it out. She knows we’re friends.” Paul seldom took advantage of his size, but he’d drawn himself up to his full height. I wanted to explain what it was like to be alone, to feel you have a chance to regain the purpose love alone imparts.

  “Paul, it might make a difference. It might open her eyes. To this whole thing with her old man. I really think it might.”

  “You think people open their eyes just because you tell them to look? There’s no happily-ever-after on this. You’re dreaming.”

  I kept shaking my head. “This is your fault, Elstner.”

  “My fault? Because I told you a story years ago about the father of some girl you didn’t even know existed?”

  “No,” I said. “No. Because of what you said last time. About stopping at halfway? I’ll say it to myself now, if I don’t do this. I want to go for it all with this woman. To see if she can really be what I need. So don’t tell me it’s her or you.”

  Elstner stalked away to drop his little paper basket, now bearing only a few specks of relish, into the trash. When he came back, he said, “I’m not telling you it’s her or me. I’m telling you that you don’t have that choice. You gave me your word. And I have a God-given right to sleep at night. So you can’t tell her.” He stared at me, giving no ground. Instead he was calling in the cards guys like to think they have with one another, especially honor and loyalty.

  Inside the arena, the horn blared, indicating the end of the shootaround. It was game time. Paul’s eyes had never left mine.

  “I can’t tell her,” I said at last.

  I told her anyway.

  I didn’t see Karen or call her for several days after that encounter in her bedroom. Four or five nights along, I returned from work to find two items at my apartment door, a little bud vase with two sweetheart roses in fresh water, and a narrow box. Inside was a pair of suspenders with a note. “Forget about your belt. . . . Sorry to messup. . . . Call me. Please.”

  I met her for lunch the next day.

  “I offended you,” she said, as soon as the waiter had left us in peace.

  “No.”

  “I know I did. I didn’t think. We’ve been so compatible that way, I just got caught up in my own stuff. I was stupid.”

  “It’s not that.” I felt she was taking me as puritanical or blinkered. “There are just some things I have in my head.”

  “What things?”

  “I can’t explain.”

  “Try,” she said. “Please. This doesn’t have to be an impasse.”

  I avoided several questions and she grew more imploring.

  “What is it?” She leaned across the table to touch my hands. “What’s the problem? What aren’t you saying?” In her long face, I saw an urgency no different than my own, a will to connect and to escape the complexities of what had left us alone, to be a better person with a better life. In the end, it was exactly as I had told Elstner. I could not stop halfway, without taking the chance.

  “There’s something I’ve been told,” I answered. I was surprised at the smoothness with which the tale emerged. I’d heard a story. From a reliable source. Someone I knew. A former prosecutor. I was so intent on the telling that I did not at first notice her draw away on the other side of the table, but when I finished, she was watching me with a bitter smile.

  “That?” she asked. “That ridiculous, moldy rumor? Do you know how long people have been saying that? It’s absurd.”

  It was one of those moments. In the crowded dining room, I thought I could somehow hear my watch tick. After a confused instant, I decided she had simply not understood. I repeated myself, more slowly, but her look soon hardened with suspicion. That glass wall I had smashed against so often with Clarissa had descended. Karen stared through it with appalling remoteness.

  “And why are you telling me this?” she asked then. “Is that how you see me? Is this something genetic?”

  “Of course not.”

  “So what is the point? I’m neurotic? Because my father is supposedly some hoodlum?” With vehemence, she shifted in her chair. “You know, every divorced man I meet either has had no therapy or way too much. Go shrink somebody else’s head.” I reached for her as she marched from the table. “No!” she said and swung her arm away violently. “It’s me anyway. You don’t want me. My father is just an excuse.”

  She disappeared around a pillar. In her wake, I was miserable, but I knew two things for certain. It was over. And I was never going to tell Paul.

  In late March, the Hands ended a dismal season with one more agonizing loss. They took the game to overtime, then, while they were trailing by a single point with only a few seconds left, Pokey Corr, the Hands’ only star, broke free on the baseline and ascended toward the basket. He wound up and slammed his intended dunk shot against the back iron of the rim. Along with everyone else in the stadium, Pokey watched as the ball floated along an arc that brought it down almost at center court as time expired.

  Like a losing bettor at the track, Elstner threw the season’s last ticket into the air. Then we started up toward the exit, inching ahead as the crowd merged into the walkways. From one stair above, I felt the weight of someone staring. It was Maurie Moleva.

  “Oh, Christ!” he said. “Look at this. The heartbreaker.” His tone wasn’t completely malicious. His crooked brown teeth even appeared briefly as he smiled.

  “It was mutual,” I said.

  “Not how I hear it. How you keeping?”

  I said I was OK.

  “Gone back to your wife yet?”

  I absorbed Dr. Moleva’s estimate of my situation, which he must have shared with his daughter long ago. With Maurie, anything that came at Karen’s expense was never waylaid by circumspection.

  “Not so far as I know,” I told him. Clarissa had lately taken to mentioning counseling, an option she’d adamantly refused during the years I’d suggested it. Now I had no idea how to regard her surrender. I was fairly sure I no longer had the strength or interest. Oddly, though, there were moments when I felt sorry for her, sorry to see that loneliness had broken her will. Clarissa liked to portray herself as a person beyond regrets.

  Maurie introduced me to his companion, a woman not quite his age. Reliably himself, Elstner had stood, face averted, as if studying something on the empty basketball court behind us.

  “Doctor, did you ever meet Paul Elstner?” Elstner went rigid as I placed my hand on his shoulder, but he turned and greeted Moleva.

  “Not so as I recall,” Moleva answered. “But I don’t remember my own name these days. Bad eyes, bad back, bad memory. I’m beginning to think I’m not getting younger.”
>
  We all laughed as if this were original, then, when the crowd began moving, parted with a genial wave.

  Elstner was still agitated when we settled in my car. “Thanks,” he said. “Thanks a lot. I really needed to renew acquaintances.”

  “I didn’t have any choice. And besides—he doesn’t remember you. I really don’t think he does. Not tonight anyway.”

  “Probably not most nights,” said Elstner. “That’s how he sleeps.”

  I edged my car out of the lot.

  “So you never told her?” Elstner asked me. “I’d have bet a whole lot you told her.”

  “I told her.”

  He swore at me. “I knew you’d tell her.”

  “I thought it would make a difference, Paul.”

  “Screw you. You’re too old to believe people change because you want them to. They change because they get tired of themselves.”

  “She didn’t believe it anyway,” I said. “And I knew you’d be fine, because she’d never tell her old man about it.”

  “And how’s that?”

  “Because she’d never take the chance on seeing it might be true.”

  The remark cast him down into silence as we swept into the lights and rush of the highway. After a few minutes his indignation rose up again.

  “I can’t believe you told her,” he said. “Jesus Christ. Why do I put up with you?”

  “Why do you?” I asked with sudden earnestness. The question seemed to exasperate him more than anything I’d said yet.

  “Because you’re part of my life,” said Elstner. “How many people do we get in a lifetime? And I’m loyal. I’m a loyal person. Loyalty is an undervalued virtue these days. Besides, I have too much respect for myself to think I wasted twenty-five years on you. Or that I just figured you out. You’ve always been trying to find the Holy Grail with women. You haven’t changed either.”

  “Well, apparently then, I expected better from her.”

  “Don’t laugh, pal.” My sarcasm had provoked Elstner to point a finger. “The older I get, the more I’m just watching the same movie. He’s and she’s, the attraction is that they’re different, right? Everybody’s looking for the other piece. And then nothing makes them crazier. She’s upset because he’s not like she is, or vice versa, and then there are nimrods like you who actually think different oughta mean better, all the time hoping that will make you better, too. Grow up.”

  With that blow delivered, he did not speak until we reached his house. I was furious, but also aware that I was due a lashing of some kind. A client, a trader from the exchange, had given me a couple of Cubans. I’d left them on the dashboard for Paul and remembered them now, fortuitous timing. Elstner studied the label with appreciation.

  “Smoke one with me,” he said.

  Hanging around with Paul, I’d puffed on a short cigar now and then and saw the wisdom of a peace pipe. I rolled down all the windows. It was a fairly mild night for mid-March, and we lit up the Cubans and reclined the front seats and talked in a dreamy reconciled way, reviewing the season. The Hands, who’d been a Final Four team within the last decade, were not even going to the Big Dance this season. We tried at great length to discern the ephemeral difference between winning and losing, how coaching and spirit contribute to talent. We talked about great teams we’d seen and, by contrast, recollected our own failed careers as high school athletes.

  Finally, Elstner decided it was time for him to get inside. I watched as Paul, with his sloppy loping stride, made his way to the house he’d lived in for decades. From the door, he gave an elaborate wave, like a campaigning politician. I thought he was marking the end of the season or the peace reestablished between us, but over time the image of him there on his stoop, grandly flagging his hand, has returned to me often, and with it the suspicion that he meant to acknowledge more. An intuitive creature like Elstner probably knew before I did that I was headed back to Clarissa, that she and I would find a new mercy with each other and make better of it, and that, as a result, I would see him less. Paul never required any explanation. In fact, I had no doubt that reviving my marriage was what he would have counseled, if I’d ever allowed him to lift his embargo on advice.

  I remember all this because we lost Paul Elstner last week. He developed cancer of the liver and slipped off in a matter of months. I saw him often during his illness. One day he cataloged all the other ways he’d worried he might die—an extensive list with Maurie Moleva still on it—but he spoke the name without rancor. It turns out that there are far too many ironies as one’s life draws to a close to linger much with a small one like that.

  It was Paul’s wish, another of his harmless eccentricities, to be buried in cigar ash. On a bitterly cold day, with the graveyard mounded with snow, the casket was lowered and the entire burial procession was presented with lighted Coronas. Paul had many friends, of course, and we formed a long, moving circle around the open grave, each person approaching to tamp whatever ash had developed since the last time she or he had gone past. The proceedings had all the comic elements Elstner would have savored, with designated puffers to keep the cigars going for the nonsmokers and many mourners making smart comments about the smell, which they figured would linger in their clothing forever, Paul’s unwelcome ghost. This rite continued for more than half an hour, with the group dwindling in the cold. I was among the last. The ember by now was near the fingertips of my gloves. Before surrendering the last bit to the earth, I stood above the casket, desperate to speak, but able to summon only a few fragments to mind. All our longings, I thought. All our futility. The comfort we can be to each other. Then Clarissa and I went home.

  ANDREW KLAVAN

  Her Lord and Master

  FROM Dangerous Women

  IT WAS OBVIOUS she’d killed him, but only I knew why. I’d been Jim’s friend, and he’d told me everything. It was a shocking story in its way. I found it shocking, at any rate. More than once, when he confided in me, I’d felt the sweat gathering under my collar, on my chest. Goose bumps, and what in a more decorous age we would have called a “stirring in the loins.” Nowadays, of course, we’re supposed to be able to talk about these things, about anything, in fact. There are so many books and movies and television shows claiming to shatter “the last taboo” that you’d think we were in danger of running out of them.

  Well, let’s see. Let’s just see.

  Jim and Susan knew each other at work, and began a relationship after an office party, standard stuff. Jim was Vice President in charge of Entertainment at one of the larger radio networks. “I don’t know what my job is,” he used to say “but by gum I must be doing it.” Susan was an Assistant Manager in Personnel, which meant she was the secretary in charge of scheduling.

  Jim was a tallish, elegant Harvard grad, thirty-five. On the job, he had a slow, thoughtful manner, a way of appearing to consider every word he spoke. Plus a way of boring into your eyes when you spoke, as if every neuron he had was engaged in whatever tedious matter you’d brought before him. After hours, thankfully, he became more satirical, more sardonic. To be honest, I think he considered most people little better than idiots. Which makes him a cockeyed optimist, if you ask me.

  Susan was sharp, dark, energetic, in her twenties. A little thin and beaky in the face for my taste, but pretty enough with long, straight, black, black hair. Plus she had a fine figure, small and compact and gracefully meltingly round at breast and hip. Her attitude was aggressive, funny, challenging: You gonna take me as I am, pal, or what? Which I think disguised a certain defensiveness about her Queens background, her education, maybe even her intelligence. In any case, she could put a charge in your morning, striding by in a short skirt, or drawing her hair from her mouth with one long nail. A Watercooler Fuck, was the general male consensus. In those sociological debates in which gentlemen are prone to discuss how their various female colleagues and acquaintances should be coupled with, Susan was usually voted the girl you’d like to shove against the watercooler and take
standing up with the overnight cleaning crew vacuuming down the hall.

  So at a party one February at which we celebrated the launch and certain failure of some new moronic management scheme or other, we watched with glee and envy as Jim and Susan stood together, talked together, and eventually left together. And eventually slept together. We didn’t watch that part, but I heard all about it later.

  I’m a news editor, thirty-eight, once divorced, seven years, two months, and sixteen days ago. Sexually, I think I’ve pretty much been around the block. But we’ve all pretty much been around the block these days. They probably ought to widen the lanes around the block to ease the traffic. So, at first, what Jim was telling me brought no more than a mild glaze of lust to my eyes, not to mention the thin line of drool running unattended from the corner of my mouth.

  She liked it rough. That’s the story. Now it can be told. Our Susan enjoyed the occasional smack with her rumpty-tumpty. Jim, God love him, seemed somewhat disconcerted by this at first. He’d been around the block too, of course, but it was a block in a more sedate neighborhood. And I guess maybe he’d missed that particular address.

  Apparently, when they went back to his apartment, Susan had presented Jim with the belt to his terrycloth bathrobe and said, “Tie me.”Jim managed to follow these simple instructions and also the ones about grabbing her black, black hair in his fist and forcing her mouth down on what I will politely assume to be his throbbing tumescence. The smacking part came later, after he’d hurled her bellyward onto his bed and was ramming into her from behind. This, too, at her specific request.

  “It was kind of kinky,” Jim told me.

  “Hey, I sympathize,” I said. “What does this make you, only the second or third luckiest man on the face of the earth?”

  Well, it was a turn-on, Jim admitted that. And it wasn’t that he’d never done anything like it before. It was just that, in Jim’s experience, you had to get to know a girl a little before you started clobbering her. It was intimate, fantasy stuff, not the sort of thing you did on a first date.