The Best American Mystery Stories 3
Page 40
After Anthony turns the shower off, he just lies there. He can’t move. He hears her talking. Who’s she talking to? He gets out of the shower and wraps one of her towels around him. She’s on the telephone.
“…none of your business,” she says. “I’m just tellin’ you we were attacked by some homeless and I ran and they caught my friend.” She hangs up the phone, when she sees Anthony.
“Why’d you do that?” Anthony asks.
“We should’ve cut his hands off,” she says. “I’m gonna go wash my hair.”
Anthony lies down on her bed and falls asleep. The pounding on the door wakes him. Some man is yelling, “Lila! Come out of there.”
He sees her standing near the bed. She is wearing pajamas. “What do you want? I’m sleepin’,” she says. Her hair hangs in her face.
“Come out at once. The police want to talk to you.”
“Stay here,” she whispers to Anthony. She leaves the room, but the door is half open.
Anthony gets into his clothes, pulls on his Nikes. He wants to leave, but he’s trapped. He looks around the room. There’s no blood that he sees. He goes into the bathroom. No blood. Maybe he can leave by the back way. They wouldn’t be talking in the kitchen. He pushes the door open a crack, and someone grabs his arm and pulls him out.
“Look what we have here, Pierce. Come on out and talk to us.” Anthony can tell he’s a cop, though he’s not in uniform. The cop brings him into a big room where Lila’s parents are sitting on a couch, in bathrobes, both looking at the same time angry and scared. Lila is in a chair near the fireplace and another cop, also not in uniform, is leaning against the fireplace. Lila gives Anthony a terrible look, like she wants to kill him. Anthony can’t stop shivering.
They sit him on a chair next to Lila, and take out notepads and pencils.
“So where were we?” the cop named Pierce says. “Oh, yeah, you made an anonymous phone call to nine-one-one to tell us a friend of yours was attacked in the park.”
Lila doesn’t say anything.
“Is this the friend?” Pierce looks at Anthony.
She gives Anthony another look. “I’ve only known him a couple of weeks.”
Anthony has to pee. He can’t concentrate. What did she do with his knife?
“Your doorman said you both came in the side entrance a couple of hours ago, covered with blood.”
Lila’s mother gasps, her hand over her mouth. Her father, a small guy with thin hair, puts his arm around his wife. They both look sick. Lila glows with a kind of light like Anthony’s seen around the Virgin Mary at St. Anne’s.
“Nice ring,” Pierce says.
Lila looks at her ring.
Pierce takes Lila’s hand. “How’d you get blood on it?”
Anthony can’t believe it, but she starts crying. Her parents rush to her. She’s screaming and throwing herself on the floor.
“We were drinkin’ and he got jealous and did it.” Lila points at Anthony. “I tried to give him mouth to mouth, but it was too late.”
“Stop talking, Lila,” her father says. “You’re incriminating yourself.”
Anthony can’t move. Did she say he did it?
Lila turns on her father, smacking him. “Get away from me, asshole. You think I don’t know they’re writin’ down what I say? I don’t give a fuck.”
“I know my daughter couldn’t —”
Lila shrieks at him, “You don’t know me.”
“Hold up your foot, Anthony,” Hernandez says. Anthony holds up his foot. Hernandez nods at Pierce. “Blood in the grooves.”
“Let’s take a walk, kids,” Pierce says.
“I don’t think —” Lila’s father stops.
“You can come along with us, sir,” Pierce says. “We’re just going to see where the kids got attacked and what happened to their friend.”
“You got a backpack or something?” Hernandez asks Anthony. Anthony nods. “Come along, then, and we’ll get it.” He’s putting on latex gloves.
Lila’s room looks the same only the bed is rumpled where he slept and there are wet towels on the floor. His backpack is next to the bed. He picks it up and Hernandez takes it from him. “Let me help you,” he says, and then he opens it. “Nice blades.” And then, “Your knife?”
Anthony stares at the knife. Hernandez says, “Get up against the wall, Anthony, spread eagle.” Hernandez pats him down. “Good boy.” They go back to the living room, Hernandez holding the backpack. He nods at Pierce.
“Come on, kids,” Pierce says.
“You can’t take her away,” Lila’s mother cries. “It’s not safe in the park at night. “
“We’ll be back,” Hernandez says. “We’re just going for a little walk. And she’ll be plenty safe with us.” Hernandez takes Anthony by the arm and Lila goes with Pierce.
In the elevator. Pierce tells Lila to stand still, and he frisks her. “Hate to do it in front of your parents,” he said, “but it’s got to be done.”
“What’re you searchin’ me for? Search him,” Lila says.
They leave the apartment building by the main entrance. It must be three or four in the morning because it’s quiet on the street, and in the park the moonlight makes Anthony think he’s in a movie. Lila’s parents stayed in the apartment. Anthony heard her father on the telephone as they were leaving.
Lila leads the way, like she’s a dog on a trail, right down to the lake. The moon is so bright it’s like daylight, or maybe it’s all the searchlights and the cop cars. Anthony sees yellow tape around a place on the edge of the lake, where a dark lump lies half in and half out of the water. And the shadows of the night people beyond the tape, with the cops on loudspeakers yelling for everybody to get out of the park.
Lila is shrieking and crying. “I was afraid of him. I thought he was gonna kill me, too.” She looks down at Danny Boy, blubbering and choking. “I tried to help you.”
Hernandez puts his hands on Anthony’s shoulders. “You have the right to remain silent...”
<
~ * ~
JOYCE CAROL OATES
The High School Sweetheart
from Playboy
There was an intensely private man whose fate was to become, as year followed year, something of a public figure and a model for others. Nothing astonished R__ more, and more alarmed him! Relatively young, he’d achieved renown as a writer of popular yet literary novels; his field was the psychological suspense mystery, a genre in which he excelled, perhaps because he respected the tradition and took infinite care in composition. These were terse, minimally plotted but psychologically knotty novels written, as R__ said in interviews, sentence by sentence, and so they must be read sentence by sentence, with attention, as one might perform steps in a difficult dance. R__ was himself both choreographer and dancer. And sometimes, even after decades of effort, R__ lost his way, and despaired. For there was something of horror in the lifelong contemplation of mystery; a sick, visceral helplessness that must be transformed into control, and mastery. And so R__ never gave up any challenge, no matter how difficult. “To give up is to confess you’re mortal and must die.”
R__ was one of those admired persons who remain mysterious even to old friends. By degrees, imperceptibly as it seemed to him, he became an elder, and respected, perhaps because his appearance inspired confidence. He had fair, fine, sand-colored hair that floated about his head, a high forehead and startlingly frank blue eyes; he was well over six feet tall and lean as a knife blade, with long loose limbs and a boyish energy. He seemed never to grow older, nor even mature, but to retain a dreamy Nordic youthfulness with a glisten of something chill and soulless in his eyes, as if, inwardly, he gazed upon a tundra of terrifying, featureless white and the utterly blank, vacuous Arctic sky above. One of the prevailing mysteries about R__ was his marriage, for none of us had ever glimpsed his wife of four decades, let alone been introduced to her; it was assumed that her name began with “B,” for each of R__’s eleven novels was de
dicated, simply and tersely, to “B,” and it was believed that R__ had married, very young, a girl who’d been his high school sweetheart in a small town in northern Michigan, that she wasn’t at all literary or even interested in his career, and that they had no children.
In one of his reluctant interviews R__ once admitted, enigmatically, that, no, he and his wife had no children. “That, I haven’t committed.”
How proud we were of R__, as one of the heralded patricians in the field! When he spoke to you, smiled and shook hands, like a big animated doll, you felt privileged, if only just slightly uneasy at the remote, arctic glisten in those blue, blue eyes.
R__ was often nominated to run for office in professional organizations to which he belonged, yet always he declined out of modesty, or self-doubt: “R__ isn’t the man you want, truly!” But finally, at the age of sixty, he gave in and was elected by a large majority as president of the American Mystery Writers, a fact that seemed to both deeply move him and fill him with apprehension. Repeatedly he called members of the executive board to ask if truly R__ was the man we wanted; repeatedly we assured him, yes, certainly, R__ was.
On the occasion of his induction as president, R__ meant to entertain us, he promised, with a new story written especially for that evening, not a lengthy, rambling speech interlarded with lame jokes, like certain of his predecessors. (Of course there was immediate laughter at this remark. For our outgoing president, an old friend of R__’s and of most of us in the audience, was a well-liked but garrulous gentleman not known for brevity.)
Almost shyly, however, R__ took the podium and stood before an audience of perhaps five hundred mystery writers and their guests, straight-backed and handsome in his detached, pale, Nordic way, a fine figure of a man in an elegant tuxedo, white silk shirt, and gleaming gold cuff links. R__’s hair was more silvery than we recalled but floated airily about his head; his forehead appeared higher, a prominent ridge of bone at the hairline. Well back into the audience, you could see those remarkable blue eyes.
In a beautifully modulated, rather musical voice, R__ thanked us for the honor of electing him president, thanked outgoing officers of the organization, and alluded with regret to the fact that “unforeseen circumstances” had prevented his wife from attending that evening. “As you know, my friends, I did not campaign to be elected your president. It’s an honor, as the saying goes, that has been thrust upon me. But I do feel that I am a kinsman of all of you, and I hope I will be worthy of your confidence. I hope you will like the story I’ve written for you!” Almost, R__’s voice quavered when he said these words, and he had to pause for a moment before beginning to read, in a dramatic voice, from what appeared to be a handwritten manuscript of about fifteen pages.
The High School Sweetheart: A Mystery
There was an intensely private man whose fate was to become, as year followed year, something of a public figure and a model for others. Nothing astonished R__ more, and more alarmed him! Relatively young, he’d achieved renown as a writer of popular yet literary novels; his field was the psychological suspense mystery, a genre in which he excelled, perhaps because he respected the tradition and took infinite care in composition. These were terse, minimally plotted but psychologically knotty novels written, as R__ said in interviews, sentence by sentence, and so they must be read sentence by sentence, with attention, as one might perform steps in a difficult dance. R__ was himself both choreographer and dancer. And sometimes, even after decades of effort, R__ lost his way, and despaired. For there was something of horror in the lifelong contemplation of mystery; a sick, visceral helplessness that must be transformed into control, and mastery. And so R__ never gave up any challenge, no matter how difficult. “To give up is to confess you’re moral and must die.”
~ * ~
At this apparent misstatement, R__ paused in confusion, peering at his manuscript as if it had deceived or betrayed him; but a moment later he regained his composure, and continued —
~ * ~
“To give up is to confess you’re mortal and must die.”
Forty-five years ago! I wasn’t yet R__ but a fifteen-year-old named Roland, whom no one called Rollie, skinny, gawky, self-conscious, with a straight-A average and pimples like hot little beads of red pepper scattered across forehead and back, lost in helpless erotic dreams of a beautiful, popular blond senior named Barbara, whom everyone at Indian River High School called Babs. Now that I am no longer this boy, I can contemplate him without the self-loathing he’d felt at the time. I can feel a measure of pity for him, and sympathy, if not tenderness. Or forgiveness.
My high school sweetheart was two years older than I, and, I’m ashamed to confess, didn’t realize that she was my high school sweetheart. She had a boyfriend her own age, and numerous other friends besides, and had no idea how I secretly observed her, and with what yearning. The name Babs — unremarkable, yet so American and somehow wholesome — makes me feel faint, still, with hope and longing.
In high school, I came to dread mirrors as I dreaded the frank assessing stares of my classmates, for these confronted me with a truth too painful to acknowledge. Like many intellectually gifted adolescents I was precocious academically and retarded socially. In my dreams, I was freed of my clumsy body and often glided along the ground, or soared, swift as thought; I felt myself purely a mind, a questing spirit: it was my own body I fled, my base, obsessive sexual yearning. In actual life I was both shy and haughty; I carried myself stiffly, conscious of being a doctor’s son in predominantly working-class Indian River, even as I saw with painful clarity how my classmates were only polite with me when required, their mouths smiling in easy deference even as their eyes drifted past me. Yes, you’re Roland, the doctor’s son, you live in one of the big brick houses on Church Street, and your father drives a new, shiny black Lincoln, but we don’t care for you anyway. Already in grade school I’d learned the crucial distinction between being envied and being liked. Where there was laughter, there, Roland, the doctor’s son, was excluded. Of course, I had one or two friends, even rather close friends, boys like myself, brainy and lonely, and given to irony, though we were too young to grasp the meaning of irony: where heartbreak and anger conjoin. And I had my secret dreams, which attached themselves with alarming abruptness and a terrible fixedness, at the start of my sophomore year in high school, to beautiful blond Babs, a girl whose father, a carpenter and stone mason with a good local reputation, had worked for my father.
Why this fact filled me with shame in Babs’s presence, while Babs herself took no notice of it at all, I can’t explain.
Adolescence! Happiness for some, poison for others. The killer’s heart is forged in adolescence. Sobering for R__ in his rented tuxedo, gold cufflinks gleaming, to recall that fifteen years ago he would have eagerly exchanged his privileged life as a small-town physician’s brainy, beloved son, destined to graduate summa cum laude from the University of Michigan, for that of Babs Hendrick’s boyfriend Hal McCreagh, a good-looking football player with a C average, destined to work in an Indian River lumberyard for life. If I could be you. And no more me. Mostly I managed not to think of Hal McCreagh at all, but solely of Babs Hendrick, whom in fact I saw infrequently. When I did manage to see her, in school, in passing, I was so focused on the girl that she existed for me in a rarefied dimension, like a specimen of some beautiful creature — butterfly, bird, tropical fish -— safely under glass. I saw her mouth move but heard no sound. Even when Babs smiled in my direction and gaily murmured Hi! in the style of popular girls at Indian River High who made it a point, out of Christian charity perhaps, to ignore no one, I scarcely heard her. In a buzzing panic, I could only stammer a belated reply, half-shutting my eyes in terror of staring at Babs too openly, her small shapely dancerlike body, her radiantly glistening pink-lipsticked lips and widened smiling eyes, for in my paranoia I was convinced that others could sense my yearning, my raw, hopeless, contemptible desire. I imagined overhearing, and often in my fever dreams I did actually hea
r, voices rising in derision, “Roland? Him?” And cruel adolescent laughter of the kind that, decades later, still reverberates through R__’s dreams.
For this I cannot truly blame the girl. She knew nothing of her power over me.
Did she ?
Babs was a senior, and I was only a sophomore and did not exist to her; to be in close proximity to such a girl, I had to join the Drama Club, in which Babs was a prominent member, a high school star, invariably cast in student productions directed by our English teacher Mr. Seales. Onstage, Babs was a lively, pretty, and energetic presence, one of those golden creatures at whom others gaze in helpless admiration, though to be truthful, and I mean to be truthful in this narrative, Babs Hendrick was probably only moderately talented. But by the standards of Indian River, Michigan, she shone. In Drama Club I was an eager volunteer for work no one else wanted to do, like set design and lighting; I helped Mr. Seales organize rehearsals. To the surprise of my friends, who had no idea of my infatuation with Babs, I spent more and more time with the Drama Club crowd, comfortable in my relatively invisible role, happy to leave the spotlight to others.