The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

by Michael Connelly

  The skull was gone from Kyle’s laboratory. There would be a private burial of Sabrina Jackson’s remains in Easton, Pennsylvania. Now it was known that the young woman was dead, the investigation into her disappearance would intensify. In time, Kyle didn’t doubt, there would be an arrest.

  Kyle Cassity! Congratulations.

  Amazing, that work you do.

  Good time to retire, eh? Quit while you’re ahead.

  There was no longer mandatory retirement at the university. He would never retire as a sculptor, an artist. And he could continue working indefinitely for the State of New Jersey since he was a freelance consultant, not an employee subject to the state’s retirement laws. These protests that rose in him he didn’t utter.

  He’d ceased playing the new CDs. His office and his laboratory were very quiet. A pulse beat sullenly in his head. Disappointed! For Sabrina Jackson wasn’t the one he’d sought.

  ~ * ~

  “Officer. Come in.”

  The face of Sabrina Jackson’s mother was as tight as a sausage in its casing. She made an effort to smile, like a sick woman trying to be upbeat but wanting you to know she was trying for your sake. In her dull eager voice she greeted Kyle Cassity, and she would persist in calling him “Officer,” though he’d explained to her that he wasn’t a police officer, just a private citizen who’d helped with the investigation. He was the man who’d drawn the composite sketch of her daughter that she and other relatives of the missing girl had identified.

  Strictly speaking, of course, this wasn’t true. Kyle hadn’t drawn a sketch of Sabrina Jackson but of a fictitious girl. He’d given life to the skull in his keeping, not to Sabrina Jackson, of whom he’d never heard. But such metaphysical subtleties would have been lost on the forlorn Mrs. Jackson, who was staring at Kyle as if, though he’d just reminded her, she couldn’t recall why he’d come, who exactly he was. A plainclothes officer with the Easton police, or somebody from New Jersey?

  Gently, Kyle reminded her: the drawing of Sabrina? That had appeared on TV, in papers? On the Internet, worldwide?

  “Yes. That was it. That picture.” Mrs. Jackson spoke slowly, as if each word were a hurtful pebble in her throat. Her small warm bloodshot eyes, crowded inside the fatty ridges of her face, were fixed upon him with a desperate urgency. “When we saw that picture on the TV ... we knew.”

  Kyle murmured an apology. He was being made to feel responsible for something. His oblong shaved head had never felt so exposed and so vulnerable, veins throbbing with heat.

  “Mrs. Jackson, I wish that things could have turned out differently.”

  “She always did the wildest things, more than once I’d given up on her, I’d get so damn pissed with her, but she’d land on her feet, you know? Like a cat. That Sabrina! She’s the only one of the kids, counting even her two brothers, made us worry so.” Oddly, Mrs. Jackson was smiling. She was vexed at her daughter but clearly somewhat proud of her too. “She had a good heart, though, Officer. Sabrina could be the sweetest girl when she made the effort. Like the time, it was Mother’s Day, I was pissed as hell because I knew, I just knew, not a one of them was going to call —”

  Strange and disconcerting it was to Kyle, the mother of the dead girl was so young: no more than forty-five. A bloated-looking little woman with a coarse ruddy face, in slacks and a floral-print shirt and flip-flops on her pudgy bare feet, hobbled with a mother’s grief like an extra layer of fat. Technically, she was young enough to be Kyle Cassity’s daughter.

  Well! All the world, it seemed, was getting to be young enough to be Kyle Cassity’s daughter.

  “I’d love to see photographs of Sabrina, Mrs. Jackson. I’ve just come to pay my respects.”

  “Oh, I’ve got ‘em! They’re all ready to be seen. Everybody’s been over here wanting to see them. I mean, not just the family and Sabrina’s friends — you wouldn’t believe all the friends that girl has from just high school alone — but the TV people, newspaper reporters. There’s been more people through here, Officer, in the last ten, twelve days than in all of our life until now.”

  “I’m sorry for that, Mrs. Jackson. I don’t mean to disturb you.”

  “Oh, no! It’s got to be done, I guess.”

  The phone rang several times while Mrs. Jackson was showing Kyle a cascade of snapshots crammed into a family album, but the fleshy little woman, seated on a sofa, made no effort to answer it. Even unmoving on the sofa, she was inclined to breathlessness, panting. “Those calls can go onto voice mail. I use that all the time now. See, I don’t know who’s gonna call anymore. Used to be, it’d be just somebody I could predict, like out of ten people in the world, or one of those damn solicitors I just hang up on, but now, could be anybody almost. People call here saying they might know who’s the guilty son of a bitch did that to Sabrina, but I tell them call the police, see? Call the police, not me. I’m not the police.”

  Mrs. Jackson spoke vehemently. Her body exuded an odor of intense excited emotion. Hesitantly Kyle leaned toward her, frowning at the snapshots. Some were old Polaroids, faded. Others were creased and dog-eared. In family photos of years ago it wasn’t immediately obvious which girl was Sabrina, Mrs. Jackson had to point her out. Kyle saw a brattish-looking teenager, hands on her hips and grinning at the camera. As a young adolescent she’d had bad skin, which must have been hard on her, granting even her high spirits and energy. In some of the close-ups, Kyle saw an almost attractive girl, warm, hopeful, appealing in her openness. Hey: look at me! Love me. He wanted to love her. He wanted not to be disappointed in her. Mrs. Jackson sighed heavily. “People say those drawings looked just like Sabrina, that’s how they recognized her, y’know, and I guess I can see it, but not really. If you’re the mother you see different things. Sabrina was never pretty-pretty like in the drawings, she’d have laughed like hell to see ‘em. It’s like somebody took Sabrina’s face and did a makeover, like cosmetic surgery, y’know? What Sabrina wanted, she’d talk about sort of joking but serious, was, what is it, ‘chin injection’? ‘Implant’?” Ruefully, Mrs. Jackson was stroking her chin, receding like her daughter’s.

  Kyle said, as if encouraging, “Sabrina was very attractive. She didn’t need cosmetic surgery. Girls say things like that. I have a daughter, and when she was growing up . . . You can’t take what they say seriously.”

  “That’s true, Officer. You can’t.”

  “Sabrina had personality. You can see that, Mrs. Jackson, in all her pictures.”

  “Oh, Christ! Did she ever.”

  Mrs. Jackson winced as if, amid the loose, scattered snapshots in the album, her fingers had encountered something sharp.

  For some time they continued examining the snapshots. Kyle supposed that the grief-stricken mother was seeing her lost daughter anew, and in some way alive, through a stranger’s eyes. He couldn’t have said why looking at the snapshots had come to seem so crucial to him. For days he’d been planning this visit, summoning his courage to call Mrs. Jackson.

  Mrs. Jackson said, showing him a tinted matte graduation photo of Sabrina in a white cap and gown, wagging her fingers and grinning at the camera, “High school was Sabrina’s happy time. She was so, so popular. She should’ve gone right to college, instead of what she did do, she’d be alive now.” Abruptly then Mrs. Jackson’s mood shifted, she began to complain bitterly. “You wouldn’t believe! People saying the crudest things about Sabrina. People you’d think would be her old friends, and teachers at the school, calling her ‘wild,’ ‘unpredictable.’ Like all my daughter did was hang out in bars. Go out with married men.” Mrs. Jackson’s ruddy skin darkened with indignation. Half-moons of sweat showed beneath her arms. She said, panting, “If the police had let it alone, it’d be better, almost. We reported her missing back in May. Over the summer, it was like everybody’d say, ‘Where’s Sabrina, where’s she gone to now?’ A bunch of us drove to Atlantic City and asked around, but nobody’d seen her, it’s a big place, people coming and going all the time, and the cops k
ept saying, “Your daughter is an adult’ and crap like that, like it was Sabrina’s own decision to disappear. They listened to her tape and came to that conclusion. It wasn’t even a ‘missing persons’ case. So we got to thinking maybe Sabrina was just traveling with this man friend of hers. The rumor got to be, this guy had money like Donald Trump. He was a high-stakes gambler. They’d have gotten bored with Atlantic City and gone to Vegas. Maybe they’d driven down into Mexico. Sabrina was always saying how she wanted to see Mexico. Now — all that’s over.” Mrs. Jackson shut the photo album, clumsily; a number of snapshots spilled out onto the floor. “See, Officer, things maybe should’ve been left the way they were. We were all just waiting for Sabrina to turn up, anytime. But people like you poking around, ‘investigating,’ printing ugly things about my daughter in the paper, I don’t even know why you’re here taking up my time or who the hell you are.”

  Kyle was taken by surprise, Mrs. Jackson had suddenly turned so belligerent. “I, I’m sorry. I only wanted —”

  “Well, we don’t want your sympathy. We don’t need your goddamn sympathy, Mister. You can just go back to New Jersey or wherever the hell you came from, intruding in my daughter’s life.”

  Mrs. Jackson’s eyes were moist and dilated and accusing. Her skin looked as if it would be scalding to the touch. Kyle was certain she wasn’t drunk, he couldn’t smell it on her breath, but possibly she was drugged. High on crystal meth — that was notorious in this part of Pennsylvania, run-down old cities like Easton.

  Kyle protested, “But, Mrs. Jackson, you and your family would want to know, wouldn’t you? I mean, what had happened to ...” He paused awkwardly, uncertain how to continue. Why should they want to know? Would he have wanted to know, in their place?

  In a voice heavy with sarcasm Mrs. Jackson said, “Oh, sure. You tell me, Officer. You got all the answers.”

  She heaved herself to her feet. A signal it was time for her unwanted visitor to depart.

  Kyle had dared to take out his wallet. He was deeply humiliated but determined to maintain his composure. “Mrs. Jackson, maybe I can help? With the funeral expenses, I mean.”

  Hotly the little woman said, “We don’t want anybody’s charity! We’re doing just fine by ourselves.”

  “Just a ... a token of my sympathy.”

  Mrs. Jackson averted her eyes haughtily from Kyle’s fumbling fingers, fanning her face with a TV Guide. He removed bills from his wallet, fifty-dollar bills, a one-hundred-dollar bill, folded them discreetly over, and placed them on an edge of the table.

  Still, the indignant Mrs. Jackson didn’t thank him. Nor did she trouble to see him to the door.

  ~ * ~

  Where was he? A neighborhood of dingy wood-frame bungalows, row houses. Northern outskirts of Easton, Pennsylvania. Midafternoon: too early to begin drinking. Kyle was driving along potholed streets uncertain where he was headed. He’d have to cross the river again to pick up the big interstate south ... At a 7-Eleven he bought a six-pack of strong dark ale and parked in a weedy cul-de-sac between a cemetery and a ramp of the highway, drinking. The ale was icy cold and made his forehead ache, not disagreeably. It was a bright blustery October day, a sky of high scudding clouds against a glassy blue. At the city’s skyline, haze the hue of chewing-tobacco spittle. Certainly Kyle knew where he was, but where he was mattered less than something else, something crucial that had been decided, but he couldn’t recall what it was that had been decided just yet. Except he knew it was crucial. Except so much that seemed crucial in his younger years had turned out to be not so, or not much so. A girl of about fourteen pedaled by on a bicycle, ponytail flying behind her head. She wore tight-fitting jeans, a backpack. She’d taken no notice of him, as if he, and the car in which he was sitting, were invisible. With his eyes he followed her. Followed her as swiftly she pedaled out of sight. Such longing, such love, suffused his heart! He watched the girl disappear, stroking a sinewy throbbing artery just below his jawline.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  GEORGE P. PELECANOS

  The Dead Their Eyes Implore Us

  FROM Measures of Poison

  Someday I’m gonna write all this down. But I don’t write so good in English yet, see? So I’m just gonna think it out loud.

  Last night I had a dream.

  In my dream, I was a kid, back in the village. My friends and family from the chorio, they were there, all of us standing around the square. My father, he had strung a lamb up on a pole. It was making a noise, like a scream, and its eyes were wild and afraid. My father handed me my Italian switch knife, the one he gave me before I came over. I cut into the lamb’s throat and opened it up wide. The lamb’s warm blood spilled onto my hands. My mother told me once: Every time you dream something, it’s got to be a reason.

  I’m not no kid anymore. I’m twenty-eight years old. It’s early in June, Nineteen-hundred and thirty-three. The temperature got up to 100 degrees today. I read in the Tribune, some old people died from the heat. Let me try to paint a picture, so you can see in your head the way it is for me right now. I got this little one-room place I rent from some old lady. A Murphy bed and a table, an icebox and a stove. I got a radio I bought for a dollar and ninety-nine. I wash my clothes in a tub, and afterwards I hang the roocha on a cord I stretched across the room. There’s a bunch of clothes, pantalonia and one of my work shirts and my vrakia and socks, on there now. I’m sitting here at the table in my union suit. I’m smoking a Fatima and drinking a cold bottle of Abner Drury beer. I’m looking at my hands. I got blood underneath my fingernails. I washed real good but it was hard to get it all.

  It’s five, five-thirty in the morning. Let me go back some, to show how I got to where I am tonight.

  What’s it been, four years since I came over? The boat ride was a boat ride so I’ll skip that part. I’ll start in America.

  When I got to Ellis Island I came straight down to Washington to stay with my cousin Toula and her husband Aris. Aris had a fruit cart down on Pennsylvania Avenue, around 17th. Toula’s father owed my father some lefta from back in the village, so it was all set up. She offered me a room until I could get on my feet. Aris wasn’t happy about it but I didn’t give a good goddamn what he was happy about. Toula’s father should have paid his debt.

  Toula and Aris had a place in Chinatown. It wasn’t just for Chinese. Italians, Irish, Polacks, and Greeks lived there, too. Everyone was poor except the criminals. The Chinamen controlled the gambling, the whores, and the opium. All the business got done in the back of laundries and in the restaurants. The Chinks didn’t bother no one if they didn’t get bothered themselves.

  Toula’s apartment was in a house right on H Street. You had to walk up three floors to get to it. I didn’t mind it. The milkman did it every day and the old Jew who collected the rent managed to do it, too. I figured, so could I.

  My room was small, so small you couldn’t shut the door all the way when the bed was down. There was only one toilet in the place, and they had put a curtain by it, the kind you hang on a shower. You had to close it around you when you wanted to shit. Like I say, it wasn’t a nice place or nothing like it, but it was okay. It was free.

  But nothing’s free, my father always said. Toula’s husband Aris made me pay from the first day I moved in. Never had a good word to say to me, never mentioned me to no one for a job. He was a son of a bitch, that one. Dark, with a hook in his nose, looked like he had some Turkish blood in him. I wouldn’t be surprised if the gamoto was a Turk. I didn’t like the way he talked to my cousin, either, ‘specially when he drank. And this malaka drank every night. I’d sit in my room and listen to him raise his voice at her, and then later I could hear him fucking her on their bed. I couldn’t stand it, I’m telling you, and me without a woman myself. I didn’t have no job then so I couldn’t even buy a whore. I thought I was gonna go nuts. Then one day I was talking to this guy, Dimitri Karras, lived in the 606 building on H. He told me about a janitor’s job opened up at S
t. Mary’s, the church where his son Panayoti and most of the neighborhood kids went to Catholic school. I put some Wildroot tonic in my hair, walked over to the church, and talked to the head nun. I don’t know, she musta liked me or something, ‘cause I got the job. I had to lie a little about being a handyman. I wasn’t no engineer, but I figured, what the hell, the furnace goes out you light it again, goddamn.

  My deal was simple. I got a room in the basement and a coupla meals a day. Pennies other than that, but I didn’t mind, not then. Hell, it was better than living in some Hoover Hotel. And it got me away from that bastard Aris. Toula cried when I left, so I gave her a hug. I didn’t say nothing to Aris.

  I worked at St. Mary’s about two years. The work was never hard. I knew the kids and most of their fathers: Karras, Angelos, Nicodemus, Recevo, Damiano, Carchedi. I watched the boys grow. I didn’t look the nuns in the eyes when I talked to them so they wouldn’t get the wrong idea. Once or twice I treated myself to one of the whores over at the Eastern House. Mostly, down in the basement, I played with my pootso. I put it out of my mind that I was jerking off in church.