The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021

by The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021

  “There is a boat train leaving in two minutes,” said Holmes, returning to us. “No doubt she will be on it, her plan scotched, and hopefully that bag of useless drivel effective in confusing her masters for quite a while.”

  In fact, it did. Mycroft Holmes’s sources learned that not only were Fräulein Walbeck’s superiors more than taken in by the false documents, but later—when it was realized what she had brought them—her credibility was destroyed, to her great sorrow.

  However, that afternoon, it sufficed that she had taken the bait while abandoning the pesterment of a plan that would have discredited Sir Cecil and the others at a moment when they could ill afford the distraction. Holmes, Lestrade, and I returned to Scotland Yard in the cab, and I was gratified to finally hear the surprising details of the Brune Street killing, which ended up being quite a bit more complex than I would have thought—which was really no surprise at all.

  *I’ve been writing since I was a boy, borrowing my dad’s typewriter to crank out my own Hardy Boys adventures. In my twenties, I was a US Federal Investigator, and while on very long trips away from home, I bought a cheap typewriter at Walmart, and then spent the nights in the hotels writing what became a six-hundred-plus-page (unpublished) Ludlum-esque novel about my thinly disguised alter ego’s adventures. That’s where I learned two important author lessons: It only gets written if you sit your butt in the chair and write it, and always trust the muse that’s whispering in your ear. For that massive first novel, I made an outline, but it quickly became useless once the characters started talking, and I simply raced to stay caught up, transcribing what they were saying, page after page. Years later, after having gone back to school to be a civil engineer, I found myself laid off from an engineering job, and I decided to use some of that time to write about my main hero, Sherlock Holmes. Those two author lessons still applied, leading to a lot of new Sherlock Holmes adventures. There are apparently two kinds of writers—those who outline, and those who write by the seats of their pants. I am the latter. I open a new Word document with no plan or outline and then let Watson tell me a story. That’s how “The Adventure of the Home Office Baby” arrived: I’d had several of my Holmes stories published in The Strand magazine, and it was time to submit a new one—which meant that I had to sit down and write it. As always, I just started recording what Watson was telling me (based upon what’s in my head from decades of collecting, reading, and chronologizing literally thousands of Holmes pastiches) and somewhere soon after the story began, my brain recalled reading something about an 1884 incident called “The Home Office Baby” and so it went from there—and now to this book. As writers know, it isn’t an easy process, but it’s incredibly rewarding. I go into “The Zone” and come back several hours later with half a story that didn’t exist before, and all of my coffee is gone. I’m very fortunate indeed.

  Tom Mead is a UK-based author and translator. He is a prolific writer of short fiction whose work has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Lighthouse, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Mystery Weekly, and various others. He recently completed his first full-length novel, Occam’s Razor, featuring series detective Joseph Spector.

  HEATWAVE

  Tom Mead

  The summer of 1954, we were pushing 110 degrees in Los Angeles. Windows and doors gaped wide; you could have mistaken Downtown LA for the most welcoming place on Earth. The papers screamed about the increasing death rate: the old and the weak sizzling away in their armchairs and hospital beds. But heat like that brings with it the threat of violence. The air in those empty streets gets so thick that it eats at your mind. Some people get desperate.

  The papers were promising the heat would break within a day or two; they’d been making similar promises for about two weeks. Skipping through pages of this kind of stuff, I dived straight into the police beat on page fourteen. There I found, among others, the story of a dead girl on La Cienega. A cashier at Thrifty’s All-Night Drug Store. She’d been shot to death in a messy, heat-crazed robbery. The perpetrators made off with six thousand dollars from the safe and a drizzling of the young girl’s blood on their clothes.

  Elsewhere a family man had bludgeoned his eight-year-old daughter into a coma with a teakettle, a delirious teenager had set himself afire in Inglewood, and an elderly couple were missing (presumed dead) after their neatly piled clothes and an elegantly calligraphed suicide note were found under a rock on Venice Beach. I was reading that story when the phone rang.

  I pulled up at the roadside on Washington Boulevard, letting the Pontiac amble to a halt in the shade of a camphor tree. I’d picked out the house straightaway: it was the only one on the street with all its doors bolted shut. I waited for a moment, watching for movement in either of the twin front windows. I saw none.

  Loosening my tie, undoing a second button on my shirt, and tilting the brim of my lead-gray trilby to dab the sweat against my forehead, I looked bad and knew it. My face was an unshaven brick and my suit didn’t fit anymore. I couldn’t tell if the sweats were from the heatwave or the DTs.

  I approached at a slow, lumbering pace, taking in the faded pink stucco and terra-cotta roof tiles lined up like row upon row of crooked, off-white teeth. When I reached the door, my knock was loud and businesslike. I wanted her to think that God himself might be on the other end of that knock.

  She opened the door slowly and a wave of fetid warmth seeped out. “Yes?”

  I didn’t smile. “Mrs. Lukather?”

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Max Ehrlich. You called me this morning.”

  “Have you any identification Mr. Ehrlich?” Her tone was not unfriendly. I showed her the photostat of my license I carried everywhere, though the thin-faced thirty-something in the photo no longer looked like me.

  Mrs. Lukather threw open the door to let me in and it was as if the whole house sighed, as if it had been holding its breath in anticipation. She led me through to the living room, babbling the whole time. “To be frank, Mr. Ehrlich, I’m afraid I may be bothering you unnecessarily. My phone call this morning was made while I was under extreme mental anguish—I have a tendency toward irrational emotional responses—and now that I’m in my right mind I can see that all this bother might very well be over nothing . . .” She wore a natty, cinnamon-colored gabardine suit, her hands fluttering like a couple of calloused butterflies as she spoke. When my eyes were on her, she grinned, but as my gaze wandered around the room, her face sagged.

  “You mentioned your son. You said he was missing.”

  “Uh yes, uh, well, that’s right, I haven’t heard from my son Arnold in a little while, but perhaps I’m worrying too much, he always tells me I worry too much, that I should lay off once in a while and . . .”

  “Mrs. Lukather, why did you call me and not the police?”

  Suddenly, her face crumpled and she let out a long sob. I waited for her to catch her breath. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, it’s just . . .”

  She reached behind the couch and produced an object wrapped in a yellow dishrag. She proffered it like a holy relic and I took it from her—its dead weight was fearfully familiar. I unwrapped a snub-nosed .38.

  “I found that under his mattress. He didn’t come home last night, Mr. Ehrlich, and now I’m completely terrified.”

  I leaned back and felt the easy chair groan under my weight.

  “My rates are thirty dollars per diem.”

  “That’s not a problem, Mr. Ehrlich. I have a little rainy day fund put aside. And, though the sun may be shining out there, this looks like quite a rainy day to me. In fact, let’s say I’ll give you an additional seventy-five dollars if you can get Arnie back here today.”

  I nodded. “How old is your son?”

  “Seventeen. It was his birthday two weeks ago. We had a little get-together at home, just me and him.”

  “When’s the last time you heard from him?”

  “Yesterday. Around eight. A friend
of his came by to pick him up. They were going somewhere, movies I think.”

  “Who’s the friend?”

  “Just a kid, I don’t know, I don’t keep track of Arnie’s friends, he hates it when I do that.”

  “Male, female?”

  “Arnie’s not the type to run around with girls. It was one of his high school buddies—Roy, I think the name is.” She rubbed her forehead then struggled to her feet. “Hold on a second.”

  I waited while she shuffled out of the room, then came back bearing a small square photograph, a polaroid. It showed two adolescent males in baseball uniforms, both grinning widely and stupidly. The uniforms were nondescript: plain white, with bold vertical stripes. Each had numbers stitched to their breast pockets, like a pair of jailbirds.

  “That’s my Arnie,” she said, pointing to the kid on the left, number nine. He was wiry, smooth-chinned, with dark eyes and wild black hair. He looked like he would make a good baseball player. “And that—” she indicated the kid next to him, number fifteen, “is Roy. Roy Moretz, I remember the name now.” Roy was wider, with a belly like a beer cask. Skin and hair shimmeringly pale.

  “Can I borrow this photo?”

  “All yours, Mr. Ehrlich. I took it last summer.”

  “Uh-huh. So this Roy kid picked up Arnie last night. Do you know where Roy lives?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Did they leave in a car?”

  “Oh yes. Roy owns a dreadful old Ford De Luxe, such a noisy machine, churning out black smoke. I don’t know how he keeps it running. Anyway, he came for Arnie in that.”

  “Color?”

  “Rust.”

  “I see.”

  As soon as she mentioned it, I knew the car would be the key. Who would forget a car like that?

  “Does Arnie have a father, Mrs. Lukather?”

  She didn’t answer. She aimed her gray eyes at the window and pretended not to hear.

  “Could I take a look at Arnie’s room, Mrs. Lukather?”

  “Well of course, right this way.”

  The only conclusion I drew from that little bedroom was that it did not belong to a would-be gangster. Various trophies for sporting achievement served as bookends, sealing in row upon row of trashy adventure novels: Tarzan, Sinbad, Conan the Barbarian, King Solomon’s Mines. The walls were lined with posters of famous athletes. The bed was narrow, more fit for a child than an adolescent on the cusp of manhood. There was nothing of use here.

  “Do you have a phone I could use?”

  “In the hall.”

  She let me find my own way, but I could hear her bustling conspicuously in the kitchen as I gave the operator a number. I pictured her leaning toward the wall, aching to hear what I had to say about her boy. My first call was to a friend in police dispatch, who was able to give me the lowdown on Roy Moretz.

  Roy, it seemed, was a problem child. Mother dead, father jailed for embezzling funds from the venetian-blind manufacturer where he worked. Roy was legally emancipated at age seventeen, only to be subsequently arrested for marijuana possession, drunkenness, and disorderly conduct, all within a six-month period. His last known address was a bungalow a couple of blocks away from the Lukather residence.

  As for Arnie, he had no record of any kind. His mother must have been proud.

  My second call was to ambulance dispatch. The girl I spoke to was bright and keen, her voice like sunshine over the telephone wires. I had never met her, but she knew me by reputation. I gave her a description of Roy’s infamous automobile and she swiftly responded that a car matching that description had been involved in a collision at around three a.m. that very morning, somewhere up in the Hollywood Hills. Just a drunken accident which resulted in said vehicle getting wrapped around a palm tree. I waited on the line while she tried to identify the ambulance men who took the callout.

  She gave me the name Jasper Monroe, and provided a direct line to the ambulance drivers’ break room in the Santa Monica depot. While I waited for Monroe to come on the line, I developed a pretty firm idea of what had happened: two drunken kids had gone on a wild bender, culminating in an ugly smash. Roy and Arnie were probably being patched up in hospital rooms at that very moment.

  “Hello?” said a voice on the other end of the line.

  “Yes, am I speaking to Jasper Monroe?”

  “That’s me.”

  “My name is Max Ehrlich, Jasper. I understand you drove the ambulance from the scene of a crash in the Hollywood Hills this morning.”

  “Uh-huh.” He was impatient. That was fine, my questions were easy enough.

  “I just have a couple of things I need to ask, Jasper. The guys in the car, were they a pair of teenagers, one skinny and dark, the other fair and fat?”

  There was a pause. “Well, you got it half right. There was only one kid in the car, though. He was skinny, like you say.”

  “Huh.” So Arnie had ditched Roy somewhere along the way and ridden off in his car. Naughty boy. “Dark-haired boy?”

  “Yeah, dark curly hair. He was unconscious when we pulled him out of the wreck.”

  “ID?”

  “He had a driver’s license on him, but I forget the name.”

  “Could it have been Arnold Lukather?”

  A pause. “Yeah. Hey, yeah, I think that’s it.”

  “Where did you take him, Jasper?”

  “We had to drive around for a while, all the emergency rooms were so busy. In the end we wound up at Linda Vista Community.”

  “What time was that?”

  “That would have been around four A.M.”

  “Wonderful. Thanks Jasper, I owe you a beer.”

  As I hung up the phone, Mrs. Lukather came out from the kitchen to check on me. “Success?” she inquired.

  “Just putting a few feelers out there. Thanks for the use of your phone. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d better get to work.”

  The drive to the emergency room was strangely relaxed, in spite of the humidity. I had just made an easy thirty dollars and was well on track for an easy seventy-five. Of course, I did not know what had gone on between the two boys, Arnold and Roy, or how Arnold had come to wrap Roy’s car around a tree in the early hours of the morning, but those unanswered questions were not a part of this particular job description.

  I found the parking lot packed to the gills, eventually giving up and abandoning the Pontiac with two wheels bumped up on the sidewalk. No one was around to stop me. I straightened my tie and marched toward the double doors of the vast, white building.

  “I’m looking for a patient named Arnold Lukather. You got a man by that name?”

  The desk nurse looked up at me, unimpressed. She didn’t reply, and went back to her paperwork.

  “Vehicular smash. He was brought in this morning.”

  Still, no answer. Rolling my eyes, I removed a loose cigarette from my pocket and slipped it between my lips.

  “Don’t you dare,” the nurse said.

  “Maybe you didn’t hear me . . .”

  “I heard you, mister, I’m not deaf. But look here, this is a heatwave. We’ve been getting tens of thousands of new patients every day for the past two weeks. Every hour, it feels like. I’m just one woman here!”

  “Remind me to write a letter to Queen for a Day. I’m sure your work is sterling, but how is that going to help me find my friend?”

  The nurse exhaled slowly, and it was the most desolate sound I had heard. “Try Ward 6. Most of the new arrivals this morning ended up there.”

  “God bless you,” I said with an antiseptic smile. I turned on my heel and marched off, dropping the cigarette to the floor unlit.

  After a few minutes’ bemused wandering, I found Ward 6 halfway down a long, bone-colored corridor on the first floor. I took a deep breath at the door. I removed the photo from my pocket. Then I plunged in.

  Molten sunlight streaked in on row upon row of deathly pallid men. The whole ward screamed and broiled to the beat of nurses’ skittering fo
otsteps. Gurneys shrieked past. I strode up and down a few times like a commander inspecting troops. I took about ten minutes making sure none of these men was Arnold Lukather. When I’d been there so long that my presence could no longer be reasonably ignored, a stout matron (is there any other kind?) approached.

  “Can I do something for you?” she said.

  “I hope so. My name is Max Lukather, I’m looking for a relative of mine named Arnold.”

  The name meant something to her; her eyes flashed. “Oh, Mr. Lukather. Please come with me.” She led me to a row of sleeping old men, which was obviously the closest this place had to a sanctuary. There, she lowered her voice. “I’m afraid I have some terrible news, Mr. Lukather. Arnold Lukather passed away an hour ago.”

  I breathed in the thin, disinfected air. “I see. That is most upsetting.”

  “My condolences. It was quite peaceful, I assure you,” said the matron. The suffering in this place was so pointedly vocal that I found her second statement difficult to credit. “And anyway, he’s with God now. Were you close?”

  “Cousins. Yes, very close.”

  “Would you like to see him? Perhaps say a final goodbye?”

  “That would be nice.”

  I found my way down to the morgue in spite of the matron’s directions. Morgues are never hard to find. They are always below, isolated and sealed off by steel doors. Death is a dirty secret. When I got there, just saying “Arnold Lukather” in somber tones was all the soft-spoken mortician required. A steel body-drawer was swiftly pulled out, a toe-tag checked.

  “You might want to . . .” the mortician demonstrated covering his mouth and nose. I didn’t argue; I removed my handkerchief and put it to use. When the shroud was folded back, I surveyed the corpse’s face dispassionately. I had seen all shapes and sizes in my time, but none quite so . . . tumescent. This one looked like an effigy in melting candlewax. I was seized by the irrational urge to reach out and poke it, to see if my fingers would sink right into the soft, yellow flesh.