The Best American Mystery Stories 2016

by Elizabeth George

  “She was in love with him. And he rejected her, you see.”

  “A woman scorned, eh?” he said, leaning back. “Once saw a jilted lady over on Cheremoya take a clothes iron to her fellow’s face while he slept.”

  “Look at this,” Penny said, pulling Mrs. Stahl’s little red book from her purse.

  “Gaudy Night,” he said, pronouncing the first word in a funny way.

  “I think it’s a dirty book.”

  He looked at her, squinting. “My wife owns this book.”

  Penny didn’t say anything.

  “Have you even read it?” he asked wearily.

  Opening the front to the inscription, she held it in front of him.

  “ ‘Dirty murderess.’ ” He shrugged. “So you’re saying this fella knew she was going to kill him, and instead of going to, say, the police, he writes this little inscription, then lets himself get killed?”

  Everything sounded so different when he said it aloud, different from the way everything joined in perfect and horrible symmetry in her head.

  “I don’t know how it happened. Maybe he was going to go to the police and she beat him to it. And I don’t know how she did it,” Penny said. “But she’s dangerous, don’t you get it?”

  It was clear he did not.

  “I’m telling you, I see her out there at night, doing things,” Penny said, her breath coming faster and faster. “She’s doing something with the natural gas. If you check the gas jets maybe you can figure it out.”

  She was aware that she was talking very loudly, and her chest felt damp. Lowering her voice, she leaned toward him.

  “I think there might be a clue in my oven,” she said.

  “Do you?” he said, rubbing his chin. “Any little men in there?”

  “It’s not like that. It’s not. I see them, yes.” She couldn’t look him in the eye or she would lose her nerve. “But I know they’re not really little men. It’s something she’s doing. It always starts at two. Two a.m. She’s doing something. She did it to Larry and she’s doing it to me.”

  He was rubbing his face with his hand, and she knew she had lost him.

  “I told you on the phone,” she said, more desperately now. “I think she drugged me. I brought the cup.”

  Penny reached into her purse again, this time removing the teacup, its bottom still brown-ringed.

  Detective Noble lifted it, took a sniff, set it down.

  “Drugged you with Old Grandad, eh?”

  “I know there’s booze in it. But detective, there’s more than booze going on here.” Again her voice rose high and sharp, and other detectives seemed to be watching now from their desks.

  But Noble seemed unfazed. There even seemed to be the flicker of a smile on his clean-shaven face.

  “So why does she want to harm you?” he asked. “Is she in love with you too?”

  Penny looked at him and counted quietly in her head, the dampness on her chest gathering.

  She had been dealing with men like this her whole life. Smug men. Men with fine clothes or shabby ones, all with the same slick ideas, the same impatience, big voice, slap-and-tickle, fast with a backhanded slug. Nice turned to nasty on a dime.

  “Detective,” she said, taking it slowly, “Mrs. Stahl must suspect that I know. About what she did to Larry. I don’t know if she drugged him and staged it. The hunting knife shows there was a struggle. What I do know is there’s more than what’s in your little file.”

  He nodded, leaning back in his chair once more. With his right arm he reached for another folder in the metal tray on his desk.

  “Miss, can we talk for a minute about your file?”

  “My file?”

  “When you called, I checked your name. S.O.P. Do you want to tell me about the letters you’ve been sending to a certain address in Holmby Hills?”

  “What? I . . . There was only one.”

  “And two years ago, the fellow over at MCA? Said you slashed his tires?”

  “I was never charged.”

  Penny would never speak about that, or what that man had tried to do to her in a back booth at Chasen’s.

  He set the file down. “Miss, what exactly are you here for? You got a gripe with Mrs. Stahl? Hey, I don’t like my landlord either. What, don’t wanna pay the rent?”

  A wave of exhaustion shuddered through Penny. For a moment she did not know if she could stand.

  But there was Larry to think about. And how much she belonged in Number Four. Because she did, and it had marked the beginning of things. A new day for Penny.

  “No,” Penny said, rising. “That’s not it. You’ll see. You’ll see. I’ll show you.”

  “Miss,” he said, calling after her. “Please don’t show me anything. Just behave yourself, okay? Like a good girl.”

  Back at Number Four, Penny lay down on the rattan sofa, trying to breathe, to think.

  Pulling Mrs. Stahl’s book from her dress pocket, she began reading.

  But it wasn’t like she thought.

  It wasn’t dirty, not like the brown-papered ones. It was a detective novel, and it took place in England. A woman recently exonerated for poisoning her lover attends her school reunion. While there, she finds an anonymous poison-pen note tucked in the sleeve of her gown: “You Dirty Murderess . . . !”

  Penny gasped. But then wondered: Had that inscription just been a wink, Larry to Mrs. Stahl?

  He gave her books she liked, Benny had said. Stiff British stuff that he could tease her about.

  Was that all this was, all the inscription had meant?

  No, she assured herself, sliding the book back into her pocket. It’s a red herring. To confuse me, to keep me from finding the truth. Larry needs me to find out the truth.

  It was shortly after that she heard the click of her mail slot. Looking over, she saw a piece of paper slip through the slit and land on the entryway floor.

  Walking over, she picked it up.

  Bungalow Four:

  You are past due.

  —Mrs. H. Stahl

  “I have to move anyway,” she told Benny, showing him the note.

  “No, kid, why?” he whispered. Mr. Flant was sleeping in the bedroom, the gentle whistle of his snore.

  “I can’t prove she’s doing it,” Penny said. “But it smells like a gas chamber in there.”

  “Listen, don’t let her spook you,” Benny said. “I bet the pilot light is out. Want me to take a look? I can come by later.”

  “Can you come now?”

  Looking into the darkened bedroom, Benny smiled, patted her forearm. “I don’t mind.”

  Stripped to his undershirt, Benny ducked under the bath towel Penny had hung over the kitchen door.

  “I thought you were inviting me over to keep your bed warm,” he said as he kneeled down on the linoleum.

  The familiar noise started, the tick-tick-tick.

  “Do you hear it?” Penny said, voice tight. Except the sound was different in the kitchen than in the bedroom. It was closer. Not inside the walls but everywhere.

  “It’s the igniter,” Benny said. “Trying to light the gas.”

  Peering behind the towel, Penny watched him.

  “But you smell it, right?” she said.

  “Of course I smell it,” he said, his voice strangely high. “God, it’s awful.”

  He put his face to the baseboards, the sink, the shuddering refrigerator.

  “What’s this?” he said, tugging the oven forward, his arms straining.

  He was touching the wall behind the oven, but Penny couldn’t see.

  “What’s what?” she asked. “Did you find something?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, his head turned from her. “I . . . Christ, you can’t think with it. I feel like I’m back in Argonne.”

  He had to lean backward, palms resting on the floor.

  “What is it you saw back there?” Penny asked, pointing behind the oven.

  But he kept shaking his head, breathing into t
he front of his undershirt, pulled up.

  After a minute, both of them breathing hard, he reached up and turned the knob on the front of the oven door.

  “I smell it,” Penny said, stepping back. “Don’t you?”

  “That pilot light,” he said, covering his face, breathing raspily. “It’s gotta be out.”

  His knees sliding on the linoleum, he inched back toward the oven, white and glowing.

  “Are you . . . are you going to open it?”

  He looked at her, his face pale and his mouth stretched like a piece of rubber.

  “I’m going to,” he said. “We need to light it.”

  But he didn’t stir. There was a feeling of something, that door open like a black maw, and neither of them could move.

  Penny turned, hearing a knock at the door.

  When she turned back around, she gasped.

  Benny’s head and shoulders were inside the oven, his voice making the most terrible sound, like a cat, its neck caught in a trap.

  “Get out,” Penny said, no matter how silly it sounded. “Get out!”

  Pitching forward, she leaned down and grabbed for him, tugging at his trousers, yanking him back.

  Stumbling, they both rose to their feet, Penny nearly huddling against the kitchen wall, its cherry-sprigged paper.

  Turning, he took her arms hard, pressing himself against her, pressing Penny against the wall.

  She could smell him, and his skin was clammy and goose-quilled.

  His mouth pressed against her neck roughly and she could feel his teeth, his hands on her hips. Something had changed, and she’d missed it.

  “But this is what you want, isn’t it, honey?” the whisper came, his mouth over her ear. “It’s all you’ve ever wanted.”

  “No, no, no,” she said, and found herself crying. “And you don’t like girls. You don’t like girls.”

  “I like everybody,” he said, his palm on her chest, hand heel hard.

  And she lifted her head and looked at him, and he was Larry.

  She knew he was Larry.

  Larry.

  Until he became Benny again, mustache and grin, but fear in that grin still.

  “I’m sorry, Penny,” he said, stepping back. “I’m flattered, but I don’t go that way.”

  “What?” she said, looking down, seeing her fingers clamped on his trouser waist. “Oh. Oh.”

  Back at Number Three, they both drank from tall tumblers, breathing hungrily.

  “You shouldn’t go back in there,” Benny said. “We need to call the gas company in the morning.”

  Mr. Flant said she could stay on their sofa that night, if they could make room under all the old newspapers.

  “You shouldn’t have looked in there,” he said to Benny, shaking his head. “The oven. It’s like whistling in a cemetery.”

  A towel wrapped around his shoulders, Benny was shivering. He was so white.

  “I didn’t see anything,” he kept saying. “I didn’t see a goddamned thing.”

  She was dreaming.

  “You took my book!”

  In the dream she’d risen from Mr. Flant’s sofa, slick with sweat, and opened the door. Although nearly midnight, the courtyard was mysteriously bright, all the plants gaudy and pungent.

  Wait. Had someone said something?

  “Larry gave it to me!”

  Penny’s body was moving so slowly, like she was caught in molasses.

  The door to Number Four was open, and Mrs. Stahl was emerging from it, something red in her hand.

  “You took it while I slept, didn’t you? Sneak thief! Thieving whore!”

  When Mrs. Stahl began charging at her, her robe billowing like great scarlet wings, Penny thought she was still dreaming.

  “Stop,” Penny said, but the woman was so close.

  It had to be a dream, and in dreams you can do anything, so Penny raised her arms high, clamping down on those scarlet wings as they came toward her.

  The book slid from her pocket, and both of them grappled for it, but Penny was faster, grabbing it and pushing back, pressing the volume against the old woman’s neck until she stumbled, heels tangling.

  It had to be a dream because Mrs. Stahl was so weak, weaker than any murderess could possibly be, her body like that of a yarn doll, limp and flailing.

  There was a flurry of elbows, clawing hands, the fat golden beetle ring on Mrs. Stahl’s gnarled hand against Penny’s face.

  Then, with one hard jerk, the old woman fell to the ground with such ease, her head clacking against the courtyard tiles.

  The rat-a-tat-tat of blood from her mouth, her ear.

  “Penny!” A voice came from behind her. It was Mr. Flant, standing in his doorway, hand to his mouth.

  “Penny, what did you do?”

  Her expression when she’d faced Mr. Flant must have been meaningful, because he had immediately retreated inside his bungalow, the door locking with a click.

  But it was time anyway. Of that she felt sure.

  Walking into Number Four, she almost felt herself smiling.

  One by one, she removed all the tacks from her makeshift kitchen door, letting the towel drop onto her forearm.

  The kitchen was dark, and smelled as it never had. No apricots, no jasmine, and no gas. Instead, the tinny smell of must, wallpaper paste, rusty water.

  Moving slowly, purposefully, she walked directly to the oven, the moonlight striking it. White and monstrous, a glowing smear.

  Its door shut.

  Cold to the touch.

  Kneeling down, she crawled behind it, to the spot Benny had been struck by.

  What’s this? he’d said.

  As in a dream, which this had to be, she knew what to do, her palm sliding along the cherry-sprig wallpaper down by the baseboard.

  She saw the spot, the wallpaper gaping at its seam, seeming to breathe. Inhale, exhale.

  Penny’s hand went there, pulling back, the paper glue dried to fine dust under her hand.

  She was remembering Mrs. Stahl. I put up fresh wallpaper over every square inch after it happened. I covered everything with wallpaper.

  What did she think she would see, breathing hard, her knees creaking and her forehead pushed against the wall?

  The paper did not come off cleanly, came off in pieces, strands, like her hair after the dose Mr. D. passed to her, making her sick for weeks.

  A patch of wall exposed, she saw the series of gashes, one after the next, as if someone had jabbed a knife into the plaster. A hunting knife. Though there seemed a pattern, a hieroglyphics.

  Squinting, the kitchen so dark she couldn’t see.

  Reaching up to the oven, she grabbed for a kitchen match.

  Leaning close, the match lit, she could see a faint scrawl etched deep.

  The little men come out of the walls. I cut off

  their heads every night. My mind is gone.

  Tonight, I end my life.

  I hope you find this.

  Goodbye.

  Penny leaned forward, pressed her palm on the words.

  This is what mattered most, nothing else.

  “Oh, Larry,” she said, her voice catching with grateful tears. “I see them too.”

  The sound that followed was the loudest she’d ever heard, the fire sweeping up her face.

  The detective stood in the center of the courtyard, next to a banana tree with its top shorn off, a smoldering slab of wood, the front door to the blackened bungalow on the ground in front of him.

  The firemen were dragging their equipment past him. The gurney with the dead girl long gone.

  “Pilot light. Damn near took the roof off,” one of the patrolmen said. “The kitchen looks like the Blitz. But only one scorched, inside. The girl. Or what’s left of her. Could’ve been much worse.”

  “That’s always true,” the detective said, a billow of smoke making them both cover their faces.

  Another officer approached him.

  “Detective Noble, we talked t
o the pair next door,” he said. “They said they warned the girl not to go back inside. But she’d been drinking all day, saying crazy things.”

  “How’s the landlady?”

  “Hospital.”

  Noble nodded. “We’re done.”

  It was close to two. But he didn’t want to go home yet. It was a long drive to Eagle Rock anyway.

  And the smell, and what he’d seen in that kitchen—he didn’t want to go home yet.

  At the top of the road he saw the bar, its bright lights beckoning.

  The Carnival Tavern, the one with the roof shaped like a big top.

  Life is a carnival, he said to himself, which is what the detective might say, wryly, in the books his wife loved to read.

  He couldn’t believe it was still there. He remembered it from before the war. When he used to date that usherette at the Hollywood Bowl.

  A quick jerk to the wheel and he was pulling into its small lot, those crazy clown lanterns he remembered from all those years ago.

  Inside, everything was warm and inviting, even if the waitress had a sour look.

  “Last call,” she said, leaving him his rye. “We close in ten minutes.”

  “I just need to make a quick call,” he said.

  He stepped into one of the telephone booths in the back, pulling the accordion door shut behind him.

  “Yes, I have that one,” his wife replied, stifling a yawn. “But it’s not a dirty book.”

  Then she laughed a little in a way that made him bristle.

  “So what kind of book is it?” he asked.

  “Books mean different things to different people,” she said. She was always saying stuff like that, just to show him how smart she was.

  “You know what I mean,” he said.

  She was silent for several seconds. He thought he could hear someone crying, maybe one of the kids.

  “It’s a mystery,” she said finally. “Not your kind. No one even dies.”

  “Okay,” he said. He wasn’t sure what he’d wanted to hear. “I’ll be home soon.”

  “It’s a love story too,” she said, almost a whisper, strangely sad. “Not your kind.”