The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021

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

  Sonia looked at Gabriella in astonishment, but when she saw the dress inside the parcel and fingered the fine material, her face softened and she muttered a startled thanks. However, while we were at dinner, Mr. Litvak barged into the house. He flung the dress—which he’d cut into strips—at my mother.

  “How dare you come into my house and act as if I can’t look after my own children? We don’t need your pity, your charity, your saintly good deeds. Come near my family again and I’ll have the law on you.”

  My father, the most peaceable man on earth, was on his feet, moving Litvak back to the door. “If you ever threaten my wife again, I will arrest you myself. You don’t deserve a family. You’re the only man in the neighborhood who isn’t at your son’s baseball games, isn’t listening to your daughter’s piano recitals. Not that she has any, because she’s looking after your children and your home. Go away and don’t come back until you’ve taken on adult responsibility for your family.”

  It was as if someone had stuck a pin into Mr. Litvak. All the air oozed out of him. He left without another word.

  That was the last time I actually saw a member of the family up close: after that, Sonia and her brothers would cross the street when they saw me, making ostentatious retching noises. And then the day came when Sonia showed up in my office.

  4

  Before visiting Gregory at County, I had gone to see Sergeant Pizzello. She’d been transferred to the Eighth District, which included the section of South Pulaski where the Roccamena warehouse stood. She’d handled Gregory’s interrogation when they picked him up.

  “Was he on the run? How did you find him?”

  “Solid police work, Warshawski. We knocked on the door of the crappy little hellhole he lives in. He was drinking bourbon and eating chicken wings. In his underwear. At five in the morning.”

  “I missed the latest set of new felonies out of the legislature. Is it the hour, the underwear, or wings with bourbon that made him a suspect?”

  “You trying for Second City? Your act needs polish. When a guy with a grudge is awake at five A.M., and his place of employment was turned into a shambles an hour earlier, it raises questions. The shortest way to point B is from—”

  “The right starting place,” I interrupted. “Did he have glass on him? From what I read about the damage, there must have been glass dust in his hair and face—you couldn’t keep it off you.”

  “The humble police sergeant thanks the superior intellect of the private investigator. Litvak was naked except for his Y-fronts. Any clothes that would have carried glass into the apartment he’d ditched before he came home.”

  “You find them?”

  She shook her head regretfully. “Still, doesn’t mean anything. It’s a big city, and there are a lot of places you can get rid of incriminating evidence.”

  “Any witnesses report a heavyset white man wandering around naked at five A.M.?”

  She pressed her lips together and looked away.

  “Eugene Horvath,” I said. “It sounds like a hideous death, buried under a mound of broken bottles.”

  “It was.” She clicked on her keyboard and turned the screen around to show me the crime scene photos.

  I sucked in a breath when I saw the destruction at the warehouse: twenty-foot-high shelves had been toppled on top of each other. Thousands of bottles had crashed as the shelves went down. Broken glass lay hip deep in some places.

  Pizzello also showed me copies of half a dozen stills from the internal security cameras. They showed the forklift at the head of an aisle. The teeth were under a set of shelves in one frame. In the next the shelves had jackknifed at a crazy angle, as if a tank had crashed into them. The other stills showed piles of broken glass and pools of alcohol. The forklift had clearly been driven by an experienced handler.

  “Why we picked up Litvak. Someone knew that warehouse inside and out. They were skilled with a forklift. Litvak’s prints were all over the forklift.”

  “Anyone else’s?” I asked.

  She bit her lower lip, a kind of “tell” with her that she was on thin ice. “Some of the other operators.”

  I made a show of entering her answer into my tablet. “How long did this mayhem go on? Don’t they have an alarm system?”

  “Disabled. Which also points to Litvak. He says he never knew the codes on the door or on the internal alarms, but after eighteen years—you’d have to be a total zombie not to pick up that stuff.”

  If it had been Donny, yes, but Gregory seemed too listless and depressed to spy on someone typing in an alarm code.

  “Who called the cops?” I asked.

  “Litvak lost his head—left through the loading bays. They have bar locks that you can slide open from the inside, but if you do, that triggers the alarm system. We had a patrol there in fifteen minutes, but he’d taken off.”

  I made another note.

  “What about the dead man? How did he end up in the warehouse during the rampage?”

  “That’s a mystery.” Pizzello bared her teeth in a hideous parody of a grin. “Something for the suave sleuth. We don’t know. His wife says he had a dinner meeting, but she doesn’t know who with. His phone has disappeared and his desktop calendar was wiped clean. We don’t know if he was lured to the warehouse, or if he went in to check on something—the wife says he worked odd hours sometimes, especially at tax season—or if he drove past and saw lights blazing and went in to investigate.”

  “The suave sleuth thinks time of death could narrow that down.”

  Pizzello brought up photos of Horvath’s body. He looked as though he’d been through a cattle stampede, the skin flailed from most of his body, left ear dangling from the skull.

  “I get it,” I said, my voice thick with nausea. “Hard to pin down. I assume that applies to the cause of death too.”

  “What do you mean?” She stared. “You imagining some kind of superhero able to withstand a ton of glass coming down on your head?”

  “I’m wondering if the murder was the sideshow or the main attraction. Maybe he was killed by the ton of glass, but maybe it was an altercation that got out of hand and was covered by a ton of glass. Or a bullet, covered ditto, or if he was even alive when he came into the warehouse.”

  She digested those possibilities in silence, but said, “Whether it was a sideshow or main attraction, Litvak is still in the frame.”

  “Then it will be my job to paint a new canvas.” I left on that grandiose line and went to County, where I met with Gregory.

  By the time I’d finished interviewing him, I was sure of two things: he wouldn’t survive a month in the jail, and he hadn’t killed Horvath or even destroyed the Roccamena warehouse.

  5

  Nick Vishnikov, Cook County’s deputy chief medical examiner, was a fracquaintance: somewhere between friend and business contact. He’d personally conducted Eugene Horvath’s autopsy. They’d x-rayed the body: it didn’t hold any extraneous metal; he had a plate in his left elbow and quite a few dental crowns, but no bullets.

  “He ate his last meal about two hours before he died. Find out what time he ate and you’ll know what time he was killed. Beyond that—was he dead before being mangled by glass and a warehouse tractor? No way of knowing. Not even Abby Sciuto or Ducky could tell you.”

  I had already exchanged emails with Gregory’s harried public defender, getting his permission to be signed on as part of Gregory’s legal team. That had allowed me access to him in prison, as well as to the state’s case. Now I told the PD I thought we could raise significant doubts about the murder, along with the warehouse destruction; I thought it worthwhile to apply for a new bail hearing.

  The PD, an anxious young man named Colin Vilot, was reluctant, mostly because he was juggling one hundred twenty-three cases, but he finally agreed to set up a hearing if I promised to put everything he should say into writing, complete with bullet points.

  The new hearing was set for a week away. In the meantime, it could be worthwhi
le to look at Roccamena’s finances. Sonia had said maybe the Roccamenas had destroyed the warehouse themselves to collect the insurance—a not uncommon strategy for a business with cash flow problems, but one that usually involves arson.

  Colin Vilot refused to subpoena the Roccamena financial records. He had about three minutes for me to explain why that would help: if we could show dubious finances, we could raise additional doubts about Gregory’s involvement.

  “You want to take over his defense? Be my guest. I can’t handle the cases I’ve got, anyway,” he finally exploded.

  I hastily demurred, mended my fences. I hadn’t been a litigator for two decades—even a harassed PD could outmaneuver me. Anyway, Roccamena would fight a subpoena, we’d be in court a dozen times or more, and the clock would keep ticking on Gregory.

  Instead, I went to Roccamena’s offices. They were a big outfit—besides the central warehouse where Gregory had worked, they had satellites around the city perimeter, and had recently expanded to Milwaukee and Peoria. Their offices were inside their main depot, in the maze of half streets and warehouses south of Midway Airport. I often get lost there. This time I drove in circles around a multiplex and a few big-box outlets before realizing that Roccamena occupied all of a spur of Eighty-Seventh Place.

  A foreman blocked my passage at the main entrance. When I explained I was a lawyer working for Gregory Litvak, he unbent slightly: Gregory had been an odd duck, a loner, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly. If he had killed Horvath, it was an accident, no way should he be arrested for murder. The foreman called inside, and in a few minutes a man in coveralls and a hard hat came out to escort me to the office.

  My escort took me around the side of the building to an exterior iron staircase that led to the offices. The door at the top opened from the inside only. My escort kept a finger on a buzzer until someone let us in. Once inside, I saw there was a camera and a monitor that overlooked the stairwell.

  The offices occupied space built above the truck bays. They’d been pretty well soundproofed, but they still shook as the semis pulled in and dropped their loads.

  As Harry Truman sort of said, if a detective wants a friend, she should get a dog. Fortunately I had two at home, because my welcome was somewhere between glacial and frigid. The HR director wouldn’t tell me why Gregory had been fired.

  “State secret?” I suggested. “Altering wine labels to send coded messages to Putin? Or was he spending too much time playing games on his phone?”

  The HR director said that she couldn’t talk to Gregory’s lawyer, since his dismissal was a legal matter.

  “Is he suing for wrongful dismissal?” I was startled—neither Gregory nor Sonia had told me this.

  “No, no.” She was impatient. “You must know—he’s being tried for murder.”

  “No, we don’t know that, Ms.”—I squinted at the name plate buried behind some computer manuals—“Forde. He’s a long way from being tried. There are a lot of holes in the state’s case, and I am finding out more every half hour I’m on the job. So let’s go back to why he was fired. Was he fiddling with the company’s finances?”

  Unless Gregory was the best actor since Humphrey Bogart, I couldn’t picture him doing something that active. I only said it to try to force Ms. Forde into blurting out an indiscretion, so I was surprised when she looked frightened. Eyes wide, looking nervously to her office door, she said, “Of course not. What a ridiculous idea, a loser who moved boxes around knowing how to break into our computers.”

  The words were scornful, but the tone was quavery.

  “Had Eugene Horvath discovered something wrong with the company’s books?” I asked.

  “I’m just the HR secretary. You need to talk to Mr. Roccamena.” She tapped a couple of digits on her phone. “Ellie? It’s Carmen in HR. One of Gregory Litvak’s lawyers is here, and she’s asking about the pension fund. Can Harvey talk to her?”

  A few minutes later, a tall man with thick gray hair and a deeply lined face joined us. “Harvey Roccamena. You the lawyer? We aren’t discussing why we terminated Litvak. Just be assured it was for cause.”

  “The pension fund?” I said. “How did he have access to that?”

  The crags between the creases in his cheeks turned burgundy. He waited a fraction of a second too long before saying, “Who knows what a punk can figure out.”

  “So there is something wrong with the pension fund?”

  The burgundy deepened to cabernet. “We run a liquor business, not a fishing company. Off you go, counselor.”

  Off I went. On my way back to my car, I passed the loading dock where trucks hauling California wines, Europeans, South Americans, liquors, liqueurs, mixers, beers were lined up to water the Roccamena empire.

  Every bay at the loading dock had a semi backed up to it. I hoisted myself up onto the lip of the dock. Forklifts were beetling from the semis into the warehouse, stacked with high loads of crates. So much booze made me feel unwell. Made me wonder what it meant for the son of a determined alcoholic like Karen Litvak to work in the liquor business. Pizzello had said they’d found Gregory in his Y-fronts drinking bourbon. Maybe he’d been fired for siphoning off the inventory.

  At each bay, a couple stood with a clipboard, ticking off the load. One from the truck, one from the warehouse. When they’d agreed on the delivery, the Roccamena employee signed the bill of lading and the trucker took off. The insurers must have come through quickly for the restocking to be happening at this pace.

  I went back to my car for the hard hat I keep in the trunk and wandered into the interior of the building. In the press of activity, no one had time to notice me.

  New floor-to-ceiling shelves had been bolted into place, new signage hung above the ends of the aisles. Men were on catwalks high above the aisles, shifting crates from the lifts to the shelves. It was like watching a futuristic horror movie, maybe Metropolis, where people are enslaved to machines and the machines know the human addictions.

  I slipped among the tractors, wondering which one had done last week’s damage, looking for someone taking a break. I came to a side door, propped open, and found what I needed—a trio of smokers. When I joined them, they moved closer together, solidarity against an outsider.

  “That’s a zoo.” I jerked my head toward the open door.

  One of them stubbed out his cigarette against his boot heel. The other two took that as a signal that the break was over. Before they disappeared into the building, I said, “I’m Gregory Litvak’s lawyer. One of the team, anyway.”

  “Don’t know a Litvak,” the stubber said.

  I spoke to the parking lot on his left. “If Gregory didn’t do all that damage and didn’t kill Horvath, who did? He seems depressed and lethargic to me. Maybe that’s just from being at County, but it’s hard to picture him doing all the planning it took to destroy the inventory here.”

  The stubber paused.

  “He needed to figure out the door code, needed to make sure his face didn’t show up on the security cameras. Needed to get Horvath into the warehouse in the middle of the night.”

  “You saying he’s not guilty?”

  “I’m saying the proof isn’t there. It’s sketchy, it’s circumstantial. I’d love to know why they fired Gregory. Was he stealing? Drinking on the job? I’d also love to know how Eugene Horvath happened to be in the warehouse that night. And I’d like to know if there’s a problem with the pension fund. Harvey Roccamena didn’t want to talk about it.”

  The three men exchanged glances, nodded to one another.

  “Litvak. You’re right about him. He did a hard day’s work most of his damned life here. Not a sociable guy. Never went out for a beer or whatever at the end of his shift. You think when you first meet him he’s a snob, then you realize he’s scared twenty-four seven, afraid we’ll pick on him, whatever. Two years ago they brought in a new floor manager, couldn’t leave the guy alone. Twenty years, your pension is fully vested. They went after vulnerable targets, forced ’em t
o quit, and most of them did, but Litvak, what was he going to do? He didn’t have a life, far as I could tell. But it got to him. He started missing shifts. Not a lot, but every month, there’d be a day, sometimes two. So they sort of had cause.

  “Horvath, who knows why he ever did anything he did. He was tight with Walker. Clarence Walker, the new floor manager. Speaking of which, I need a full paycheck this week. We were off for four days while they cleaned out the mess and put up new shelves.”

  I handed them my business card and trailed after them into the warehouse. At the far end of the floor, an interior staircase also led to the offices I’d just visited. A few plate glass windows were cut into the wall so that management could look down on the operation, but security cameras were also plentiful: they were mounted at every aisle as well as in the corners. Roccamena had an inventory that people wanted. A determined filcher could lift a few bottles along the way, but it would be hard to lift a whole case.

  I stood in the Nebbiolo aisle. After studying the cartons for a few minutes, I pulled one toward me and started to undo the staples holding it shut. It took about ninety seconds for a forty-something man in a hard hat and shirtsleeves to appear, shouting at me.

  “Get the fuck away from that shelf. Who the fuck are you and what are you doing in a restricted zone?”

  “You Clarence Walker?” I said. “I’m checking your security system. Do you know how easy it was for me to get into this warehouse? Is anyone monitoring your cameras, or are they only for decoration? Your insurance carrier is going to have a bucket of questions about whether you were negligent, and whether they should force you to return your claim check. You say the perpetrator of the damage hid from the cameras, but someone should have seen a feed of what he was doing.”