The Best American Mystery Stories 2016

by Elizabeth George

  The Old Man’s eyes glinted like bullets.

  “It’s his birthday,” I said. “He just turned a hundred and fifty. Something on your mind?”

  “Thought maybe we had something to celebrate,” he said. “You here to accept my job offer?”

  He placed one of the drinks carefully on the table in front of me, lifted the other to his lips and downed it.

  I turned a tarnished silver ring around my finger, rubbed a thumb over the smooth jade stone. The ring had been my father’s, and was all that remained of him.

  I pushed the glass away. “Not today.”

  Zartell nodded at the stage. “You staying for the burly-que? You’d make your ma proud.”

  A coolness washed over me. “She’s here?”

  “Not today. But she’d hear about it.”

  From him, no doubt. And it would give my mother great satisfaction to know I was as human as the next chump. It was a satisfaction I was determined to deny her.

  I was hunting a suitable comeback when the Old Man wrapped a stubby hand around the highball glass, made the liquor vanish, and let out a prodigious belch.

  Zartell waved the fumes away. “That geezer needs a shot of Geritol,” he said, and left.

  We watched until he passed behind the bar and oozed through a doorway.

  “I take it,” the Old Man said, “that you and Nick are well acquainted.”

  “He wanted to be my stepfather once, but my mother gave him the air.”

  “A woman of discriminating tastes.”

  “Not so much,” I said. “She lived with him six years before doing it.”

  If the Old Man had any thoughts on that subject, he kept them to himself.

  “Thought you’d like a look at him,” I said. “He’s the local crime lord.”

  The Old Man did something with his lips that sent spiders crawling up my back.

  It was even scarier when I realized it was a smile.

  Rain soaked my hat and made rivers on my overcoat as we strolled down Salmon Street toward the Portland home of Continental Investigations, Inc. Next to me, the Old Man remained relatively dry. Wide as he was, he had a way of sliding between the raindrops. There was no justice in it.

  I said, “Sure you want to do this?”

  “We’re doing it.”

  The old guy had never met my boss, Harold Abernathy, and wanted to size him up.

  “How do I introduce you? As my grandfather?”

  “Uncle.” There was acid in his voice.

  “How about a name?”

  He considered that. “Tracy will do.”

  “Can I call you Uncle Dick?”

  He curled a lip. “Make it Sam. Better yet, Samuel. Now spill the dope on Abernathy and Zartell.”

  I spilled.

  For the past three months, I explained, I’d been collecting envelopes from Zartell and placing them in the fat greasy hand of my boss. Zartell insisted I be the go-between, claiming he didn’t trust his own men with cash. That was probably true enough, but the real reason was he liked reminding me my side of the fence was no cleaner than his. Three weeks ago the envelopes got fatter—much fatter—and I knew something big was coming. That’s when I wrote the agency.

  Next time Zartell phoned, I was ready. Abernathy took the call in his office, and I beat it down to the furnace room, where a certain loose pipe funnels sound from the boss’s heat vent.

  “I didn’t get much,” I finished up. “I heard Abernathy say, ‘That Chinese gentleman is no baby to fool with. This will require extra funding.’ ”

  The Old Man’s eyes gleamed. “And this Chinese gentleman?”

  “Abernathy dropped no names, but I’ve had my ears peeled since.”

  We had half a block of silence before the Old Man said, “I knew your father.”

  That stopped me flat. My father, known as Slippery Ed Collins, had been a rumrunner during the Roaring Twenties, and worked himself up to Zartell’s lieutenant by 1939, when pieces of him started turning up along the banks of the Willamette River. One of those pieces was a bloated hand wearing his trademark jade ring. My entry into the crime-fighting business was based at least in part on a desire to even up with the universe.

  Five paces ahead, the Old Man turned, saying, “I can’t believe he named you Peter.”

  I believed it, but I’d had twenty-odd years to get used to the idea. In underworld slang, “Peter Collins” meant “nobody.” To my father, it had been a great joke. To me, it was more an indication of what I’d meant to him.

  I said, “How’d you know him?”

  “Put him away once,” he said, “for an armored car job.” And despite my cajoling would say no more.

  After a stop at a newsstand, where the Old Man shelled out a quarter for a pulp magazine, we risked our necks in the rickety elevator serving Portland’s venerable Victory Building. Emerging on the third floor, I led him past the offices of a cut-rate secretarial service, an unlicensed accountant, and a shyster lawyer, stopping at a glass-paneled door.

  The inscription—CONTINENTAL INVESTIGATIONS, INC.—brought a grimace.

  “That new moniker,” the Old Man said, “is the bunk.”

  I pretended to agree. But hell, the detective agency had been operating since the Civil War, establishing branch offices in every major American city—and plenty of minor ones too. If the head hawkshaws back east wanted to update their image, it was no skin off my butt.

  I laid a hand on the latch. “Here we go, then. Through the looking glass.” And through we went.

  Harold Abernathy, a neckless toad of a man with four eyes and three chins, squatted behind his desk, one hand in the drawer he thought hid his bottle of Canadian Club. He removed the hand, threw me a scowl, and examined the fat Old Man like something he’d found on the sole of his shoe.

  I said, “Chief, meet my Uncle Sam.”

  The Old Man’s cheek twitched, but he stuck out a paw and smiled like a halfwit. “Samuel Tracy,” he said. “Young Pete here’s been singing your praises up, down, and sideways. Makes you sound like the reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes.”

  Abernathy ignored the paw, saying, “I trust you gentlemen will excuse me. I have a lot to—”

  “Say no more. I understand perfectly.” The Old Man slid into the chair facing Abernathy and said, “I was in the detective game myself, you know, after a fashion.” He tugged a rolled-up copy of Smashing Detective from his pocket and smoothed it out on the desk. “Used to write for rags like this back in the day. Pure flapdoodle, of course, but the readers ate it up.”

  Abernathy gave up getting a word in and slumped back to wait out the storm.

  “I’m contemplating a comeback,” the Old Man said, “for a better magazine, of course—probably Collier’s—and doing it up right. I mean to show folks how a real sleuth works, and you’re the perfect model. What do you say? Mind if I make you famous?”

  Abernathy’s eyes said he was sorely tempted. His mouth said, “My apologies, Mr., uh, Tracy, but agency rules strictly prohibit such self-aggrandizement.”

  “See, Unc? The chief isn’t one to toot his own kazoo. You can write about me instead.”

  This produced snorts from both men. Miffed, I pried “Uncle Samuel” out of his chair, shooed him into the outer office, and stuck my head back through Abernathy’s door.

  “Anything cooking?” I asked, hoping for something Chinese.

  “If you value your job,” he said, “keep that old dodo away from me.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes. Shut the damn door.”

  Two days passed. Two very long days, in which the chubby ex-op grew ever more cranky. I spent the second day in the office, wondering what had possessed me to get into the bloodhound business.

  What I came up with was this: After my father died, Nick Zartell became a fixture around the house and began grooming me to join his crew. My mother, herself the daughter of a racketeer, was all for it. I wasn’t. So when the army wanted soldiers for Korea, I
was first in line. They made killing Commies sound like a worthy endeavor, but as it turned out, the Commies were just people, and just like us except they lived in huts instead of duplexes. Still, the army taught me to shoot, and I’d hoped to employ that newfound skill as a member of the Portland police force.

  But things had changed. Or maybe I had. I returned to a town ruled by graft and fear, so riddled with corruption that the police force was little more than a private army protecting the rackets. Still, I was determined to fight crime, so I signed on with Continental Investigations. At the time it seemed a swell idea, but in light of recent developments I might as well have followed the paternal footsteps.

  I was still moping when Abernathy said, “Get in here, Collins. And close the damn door.”

  When I’d done both, he said, “You familiar with Hung Lo’s Hop House?”

  Hung Lo ran the deadliest of the local tongs, and his opium den was reputed to be the most profitable. It was also reputed to have the best police protection money could buy.

  “Sure,” I said. “Ma always took me there for my birthday.”

  “Fine,” he said. “That’s fine. Well, you’re going back. In fact, you’re going to become a regular customer.”

  At one time Portland’s Chinese temples, restaurants, joss houses, and fan-tan parlors had been sprinkled all over the downtown area, rubbing elbows with like-minded Occidental establishments. These days they huddled together in an area north of Burnside, between Broadway and the Willamette River.

  Smack in the middle of that new Chinatown sat the Gilded Duck Restaurant, the legitimate face of Hung Lo’s business empire.

  Parked across Fifth Avenue in my Studebaker Starlight coupe, the Old Man and I argued. Or, to be more precise, I argued while he ignored me.

  “I don’t need you nursemaiding me,” I said.

  “What kind of mileage does this machine get?”

  “I know what I’m doing. I’ve been undercover before.” That was a lie, and I half expected him to call me on it.

  Instead he said, “Never owned a car myself, but Dinah Shore’s been hounding me to see the U.S.A. in a Chevrolet.”

  I’d filled him in on the job, or at least the version of the job Abernathy had fed me. The grieving parents of a spoiled wastrel who’d been driven to wrack and ruin—and finally to suicide—by his cravings for Hung Lo’s hop had hired the Continental to see justice done. With the fix in, there was no chance of police intervention, so the clients insisted we bust the place open and spill its dirty secrets all over the newspapers. The public outcry would force the cops to act.

  My assignment was to make myself a fixture in the joint, at least for a few days, so when the time came I’d be on the inside to bop Chinamen on their skulls and open the gates for the Continental army.

  Trouble was, the Old Man insisted on tagging along. He wanted the dirt on Abernathy and Zartell and figured he was the guy to ferret it out. This was Wednesday, and the raid was set for Saturday night, so he’d have to ferret fast.

  The result was that he followed me into the Gilded Duck, followed suit when I slipped the waiter ten dead presidents, and followed the two of us down three creaky flights of stairs into Portland’s fabled underground.

  Legend had it the tunnels beneath the streets had once been used to shanghai recruits for smuggling ships, and during Prohibition they’d been a fine place to hide hooch. Now, with crime running wide open, the underground had been pretty much abandoned to opium dens and the white slavery racket.

  I wriggled my nose against a hundred unnamed and unnameable smells as the waiter led us through a maze of dark passages and ancient doorways. Sometimes we had concrete underfoot, sometimes wooden planks, and sometimes bare earth. After several conks on the noodle from low-hanging pipes, I wised up and crouched to half my height, inching along like a crab. This gave the Old Man a smirk; he was short enough not to stoop. We turned this way and that, scuttling through a dozen more passageways before halting at a red door I’d have bet my pants was less than fifty feet from where we’d entered the underground.

  Following a Chinese variant on shave-and-a-haircut-six-bits, the door opened and the waiter released us to the care of a pinch-faced kid in gold silk pajamas.

  At my shoulder, the Old Man said, “Let me. I know how to talk to these people.”

  He shuffled past, bowed his head, and steepled his fingers beneath his chin. “This low-born mongrel,” he said, “begs entry to your palace of heavenly delights.”

  Pajama Boy rolled his eyes at me. “Your friend’s seen too many Charlie Chan movies.”

  “He’s no friend of mine,” I said. “If you hear of any crew vacancies, feel free to shanghai him.”

  After the exchange of a week’s worth of junior detective pay, our host led us down a hazy hallway, past a small office where a bald man hunched over a desk, and finally to a dim-lit room lined with bunk beds. Half the beds held immobile shapes that might once have been human beings. The air was heavy with the scent of crushed flowers and unwashed bodies.

  Spotting a vacant bed, I made for the bottom bunk, but the Old Man barreled past me, insisting I climb up top. I got my revenge by stepping on his ear.

  Almost immediately a skeletal man in a tasseled hat shuffled out of the gloom bearing two wooden trays. Each held a long-stemmed pipe and a small oil lamp. The Old Man had told me what to expect, and the extent of his knowledge made me wonder how he’d come by it.

  The idea was to load the pipe with a small dose of hop called a “pill,” then hold the bowl over the lamp’s glass chimney until the drug was vaporized. To avoid suspicion, we’d each have to burn a few pills, while taking care not to inhale.

  I tried one.

  Though I didn’t inhale, there was no escaping the smell—a sharp, flowery perfume that made me gag. I lay back on the bunk, trying to relax, but my thoughts kept returning to the Old Man.

  It occurred to me that if Fate had assigned me an opposite number, this guy was it. Aside from the fact we both were—or had been—Continental operatives, we were as different as two male humans could be.

  I was young. He was old. I was tall. He was short. I was thin. He was fat. I was at the beginning of my career. His was already over. I believed in concepts like hope and justice. He’d surrendered to the harsh realities of judgment and law. I trusted my feelings and wasn’t afraid to act on them. He considered feelings a nuisance. If he accidentally experienced an honest human emotion he’d probably dig it out with a pocket knife. My greatest fear was I’d turn out just like him.

  I burned a couple more pills.

  This business of not inhaling was all well and good, but the flowery scent was so thick there was no escaping it. Before long I was sitting on a cloud, bouncing Lauren Bacall on one knee and Veronica Lake on the other.

  That’s when the Old Man kicked my bunk and whispered, “When the ruckus starts, watch the Chinese.”

  I did my best to keep Lauren and Veronica from scooting off my knees, but both vanished and I was left saying, “Huh?”

  “The Chinese, dammit. See where they go.”

  I chased the brains around in my skull, wondering what he meant, and was still chasing when someone shouted, “Fire!”

  That someone was the Old Man. He was a ghostly bear blundering about in the darkness, yanking dreamers from their bunks and creating pandemonium.

  Watch the Chinese, he’d said. See where they go.

  Slipping to the floor, I joined the befuddled mob and spotted one of the employees swimming against the tide. I moved to intercept him, but at the rendezvous point found nothing but bare wall.

  I was scratching my head when the bald gent squirted from his hall office and danced past me. I felt a breeze at my back, turned, and watched his shirttails disappear into a gap in the wall. I followed the shirttails. They led me down a narrow tunnel.

  Three crooked passageways and two flights of stairs later, I emerged into the basement of a Chinese laundry.

  So this w
as what the Old Man wanted me to find. An escape route.

  I was grateful, but not nearly grateful enough to worry what had become of him.

  As it happened, he was fine. I found him camped on my doorstep Thursday morning when I left for work. A purple mouse clung to his face beneath his right eye, but he appeared otherwise unscathed. The bad news—or good, depending where you sat—was that he’d been spotted as the false-alarmer and was no longer welcome at Hung Lo’s.

  Unfortunately, that didn’t stop him from following me to the office and regaling Abernathy with more of his mystery-writing claptrap.

  Abernathy escaped him long enough to say, “We’ll need extra guns for Saturday’s party. See what Seattle and Spokane can send us.”

  Borrowing men from other Continental branches made sense, since I was one of only three operatives on Portland’s regular roster.

  When I told the Old Man he practically salivated. “That’s my meat,” he said. “Leave it to me.”

  Another night of pretend opium smoking—this time solo—went by before I found out what that meant. The occasion was a Friday-morning powwow in the Old Man’s hotel room, attended by four men twice my age.

  “Mike, Alec, and Rufus,” the Old Man said, shooting the first three with his finger. He nodded at the fourth. “And we’ll call him Bob.”

  I didn’t like that so much. “Don’t they have real names?”

  “Sure,” the Old Man said. “But names are overrated.”

  He then pronounced mine, producing a round of sniggers, but whether his pals considered it his joke or my father’s I couldn’t tell.

  There was a lot of talk about people I didn’t know, places I’d never been, and cases I’d never heard of. I smiled when they laughed and frowned when they swore, trying to be one of the gang, but I might as well have been wearing short pants and a beanie. The only one who addressed me directly was Mike, and that was to offer me bubblegum.

  I learned things, though, including that all four belonged to the San Francisco branch, and had ridden the red-eye up the coast. All knew the Old Man well enough to kid him, but only to a point. Beyond that they treated him with the deference due a powder keg.