Providence Noir

by Ann Hood

  “Unused.”

  Even in this state, Tenpenny couldn’t help but wonder if the ticket was refundable. Then: “Look, maybe he gave Ellie a fake . . . or maybe she just has a shitty memory. I’m telling you, they met. Otherwise, he couldn’t have known that I’d told her I was a writer.”

  “We checked her passport—she’s never been to Europe.”

  Dizzy now, Tenpenny rifled through his notes, searching for something they’d overlooked. Then he saw it. “What about the envelope?”

  “What envelope?”

  “The envelope that the original manuscript was mailed to Knopf in—I never touched it. Check that envelope for fingerprints and that’s how you’ll find the kid!”

  “Oh, we did,” said Sheehan.

  “And?”

  “We found quite a few fingerprints on it. Most of them yours.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Not according to Quantico, it isn’t.”

  “Now you are lying,” Tenpenny said, moving toward full panic. “That’s not possible, I never touched that thing. You are the liar!” He turned to his suddenly bored-looking lawyer. “They’re trying to frame me. I made mistakes, but I wasn’t the one who sent that book in!”

  Scholl stood. “Cry me a fucking river, Roger. Even if you were set up—which you weren’t—why would we care? You can’t unmake a cake.”

  “Can’t unmake a . . . ? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “It doesn’t matter how it came to be—you’re the one who came to my office, you’re the one who insisted the book not be published in Europe, you’re the one whose name was on the contracts, and you’re the one who cashed the paychecks.”

  “Right, and I admit that. But don’t you care about the truth?”

  “Truth? You’re talking to me about truth?” Scholl slapped his thigh theatrically. “Oh, that is rich.”

  “Fuck you!” Tenpenny screamed. “You do realize that this wouldn’t have happened if you just did your damn job—it’s called vetting, dummy.”

  “You motherless cunt!” Scholl sprung toward Tenpenny, but Sheehan quickly wrapped him up.

  “How was I supposed to know about some old German book?” Tenpenny said from where he’d retreated to across the room. “I’m not an editor, I’m a . . .”

  “You’re a what?” When Tenpenny didn’t respond, Scholl said, “You’re an arrogant piece of shit.” He grabbed his briefcase and headed to the door. “And by the way, the Saturday night before Easter Sunday is not a nothing date. It’s the day that Jesus descended into hell before His resurrection.” Scholl pushed out a smile. “And now that day is here for you.”

  After the door slammed and the echo had died, Tenpenny turned to Sheehan. “Did he just call me Jesus?”

  * * *

  There’s a reason that convicts find religion, besides the obvious winning-over-the-parole-board motive. After the scathing news stories, the daily lashings by judge and prosecutors, and an aggressive abandonment by everyone close to him, Tenpenny was finally humbled, and this humility brought him closer to what he imagined could only be “God.” This, however, did not happen overnight. His first weeks in prison were angry and bitter, as he loudly proclaimed his innocence over a hellish playground of smirks and angry stares. This was an American tragedy, he said. He’d been set up and the authorities didn’t care. The real villain was running happily free somewhere and no one—absolutely no one—was trying to right this wrong.

  Alone in his cell, Tenpenny wracked his brain to the point of nausea trying to figure out what had happened. Who would target him? Why would anyone want to target him? Or maybe he hadn’t been targeted at all. Maybe it was random—somebody saw an opportunity and took it. This made no sense either. What did the Brit stand to get out of all this? And who the hell was he?

  One night he sprung out of bed, suddenly remembering the bottle of rum the kid had given him. Tenpenny had taken it out of a brown paper bag, and Beresford had returned the bag to his backpack. That’s how he’d done it! He must have used the bag to wrap the manuscript, which is how Tenpenny’s fingerprints had ended up on it. But again, why? What was Beresford’s endgame? In what way could he have possibly prospered from Roger’s nightmare? Unfortunately, Tenpenny had never had the patience or mind-set to complete even a crossword puzzle, and if this were one, he would have needed giant thematic clues such as WELLSY and KARMA and FAMILY and REVENGE to come even close. Eventually he just accepted it, and learned to live with the eerie feeling that he’d been framed by some invisible force, a ghost as such, which was as close to the truth as he’d ever come.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  LaShonda Katrice Barnett is the author of the novel Jam on the Vine and a story collection, and is the editor of two volumes on music and the creative process: I Got Thunder and Off the Record. Her short fiction has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Guernica Magazine, New Orleans Review, Juked, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City. For more information visit www.LaShondaBarnett.com.

  Thomas Cobb is the author of Crazy Heart, which was made into an Academy Award–winning film, along with Shavetail and With Blood in Their Eyes, both of which won Spur Awards, and the forthcoming novel Darkness the Color of Snow. He lives in the woods beyond Providence.

  Bruce DeSilva’s hard-boiled crime novels featuring investigative reporter Liam Mulligan are set in Providence. He has won the Edgar and Macavity awards and has been a finalist for the Anthony, Barry, and Shamus awards. Previously he worked as a journalist for forty years, editing investigative stories that won virtually every major journalism prize including the Pulitzer. He has reviewed books for numerous publications including the New York Times and Publishers Weekly.

  Peter Farrelly grew up in Cumberland, Rhode Island, and is a graduate of Providence College and Columbia University. He has written and directed several movies and is the author of the novels Outside Providence and The Comedy Writer, as well as the children’s book Abigail the Happy Whale. He and his brother Bobby were inducted into the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 2002.

  Amity Gaige is the author of three novels, O My Darling, The Folded World, and Schroder. A New York Times Notable Book, Schroder has been translated into eighteen languages, and in 2014 it was short-listed for the Folio Prize. Her short stories, reviews, and essays have appeared in numerous publications. A graduate of Brown University, she lived in Providence and Cranston for a combined ten years. She currently lives in Hartford, Connecticut, and is a visiting writer at Amherst College.

  Ann Hood is the author of the best-selling novels The Obituary Writer, The Knitting Circle, An Italian Wife, and Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine. Her memoir Comfort: A Journey Through Grief was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and chosen as one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly.

  Hester Kaplan’s books include the story collections Unravished and The Edge of Marriage, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and the novels The Tell and Kinship Theory. Her work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories series. Recent awards include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the McGinnis-Ritchie Award. She lives in Providence, the noirest city of them all.

  Marie Myung-Ok Lee is a graduate of Brown University, where she taught for fifteen years. She is the author of the novel Somebody’s Daughter (Beacon Press). Her next book is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Slate, the Guardian, the Nation, the Atlantic, and Salon. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University and is a founder and former board president of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

  Robert Leuci worked for twenty years as an NYPD detective assigned to narcotics and organized crime. Since retirement, he has published six novels and one memoir, and has written various TV scripts, book reviews in the Providence Journal, and magazine pieces. Leuci is currently an adjunct professor in the English department of the University of
Rhode Island, and in 1998 won a Rhode Island State Council on the Arts award.

  Taylor M. Polites lives in Providence with his Chihuahua Clovis. His first novel, The Rebel Wife, was published by Simon & Schuster. His work has appeared in Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting, as well as Provincetown Arts and the New York Times Disunion blog. He received his MFA from Wilkes University, where he was awarded the Norris Church Mailer Fellowship. He teaches at the Wilkes University MFA program, Roger Williams University, and the Rhode Island School of Design.

  Dawn Raffel is the author of four books, most recently The Secret Life of Objects. Her next book, The Strange Case of Dr. Couney, will be published by Blue Rider Press. She has a degree in semiotics from Brown University.

  Luanne Rice is the New York Times best-selling author of thirty-one novels that have been translated into twenty-four languages. The author of The Lemon Orchard, Dream Country, Cloud Nine, and Beach Girls, Rice often writes about love, family, nature, and the sea. She is an avid environmentalist and advocate for families affected by domestic violence. Rice lived in Fox Point in Providence, and now divides her time between New York City and Old Lyme, Connecticut.

  Pablo Rodriguez is chair of the Women & Infants Health Care Alliance and a clinical associate professor at the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University. He is a past chairman of the Rhode Island Foundation, the Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island, and the Latino Political Action Committee. He currently hosts a daily call-in radio show on Latino Public Radio.

  John Searles is the author of the best-selling novels Help for the Haunted, Strange but True, and Boy Still Missing. His essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other publications. Help for the Haunted won the American Library Association’s Alex Award and was named a Best Crime Novel of 2013 by the Boston Globe and a Top 10 Must Read by Entertainment Weekly. Searles appears frequently on NBC’s Today show to discuss his favorite book selections.

  Elizabeth Strout is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge, as well as The Burgess Boys, a New York Times best seller, Abide with Me, and Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. Her short stories have appeared in various publications, including the New Yorker and O, The Oprah Magazine. She lives in New York City.

  BONUS MATERIAL

  Excerpt from USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series

  Also available in the Akashic Noir Series

  Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition

  INTRODUCTION

  WRITERS ON THE RUN

  From USA NOIR: Best of the Akashic Noir Series, edited by Johnny Temple

  In my early years as a book publisher, I got a call one Saturday from one of our authors asking me to drop by his place for “a smoke.” I politely declined as I had a full day planned. “But Johnny,” the author persisted, “I have some really good smoke.” My curiosity piqued, I swung by, but was a bit perplexed to be greeted with suspicion at the author’s door by an unhinged whore and her near-nude john. The author rumbled over and ushered me in, promptly sitting me down on a smelly couch and assuring the others I wasn’t a problem. Moments later, the john produced a crack pipe to resume the party I had evidently interrupted. This wasn’t quite the smoke I’d envisaged, so I gracefully excused myself after a few (sober) minutes. I scurried home pondering the author’s notion that it was somehow appropriate to invite his publisher to a crack party.

  It may not have been appropriate, but it sure was noir.

  From the start, the heart and soul of Akashic Books has been dark, provocative, well-crafted tales from the disenfranchised. I learned early on that writings from outside the mainstream almost necessarily coincide with a mood and spirit of noir, and are composed by authors whose life circumstances often place them in environs vulnerable to crime.

  My own interest in noir fiction grew from my early exposure to urban crime, which I absorbed from various perspectives. I was born and raised in Washington, DC, and have lived in Brooklyn since 1990. In the 1970s and ’80s, when violent, drug-fueled crime in DC was rampant, my mother hung out with cops she’d befriended through her work as a nearly unbeatable public defender. She also grew close to some of her clients, most notably legendary DC bank robber Lester “LT” Irby (a contributor to DC Noir), who has been one of my closest friends since I was fifteen, though he was incarcerated from the early 1970s until just recently. Complicating my family’s relationship with the criminal justice system, my dad sued the police stridently in his work as legal director of DC’s American Civil Liberties Union.

  Both of my parents worked overtime. By the time my sister Kathy was nine and I was seven, we were latchkey kids prone to roam, explore, and occasionally break laws. Though an arrest for shoplifting helped curb my delinquent tendencies, the interest in crime remained. After college I worked with adolescents and completed a master’s degree in social work; my focus was on teen delinquency.

  Throughout the 1990s, my relationship with the urban underbelly expanded as I spent a great deal of time in dank nightclubs populated by degenerates and outcasts. I played bass guitar in Girls Against Boys, a rock and roll group that toured extensively in the US and Europe. The long hours on the road not spent on stage gave way to book publishing, which began as a hobby in 1996 with my friends Bobby and Mark Sullivan.

  The first book we published was The Fuck-Up, by Arthur Nersesian—a dark, provocative, well-crafted tale from the disenfranchised. A few years later Heart of the Old Country by Tim McLoughlin became one of our early commercial successes. The book was widely praised both for its classic noir voice and its homage to the people of South Brooklyn. While Brooklyn is chock-full of published authors these days, Tim is one of the few who was actually born and bred here. In his five decades, Tim has never left the borough for more than five weeks at a stretch and he knows the place, through and through, better than anyone I’ve met.

  In 2003, inspired by Brooklyn’s unique and glorious mix of cultures, Tim and I set out to explore New York City’s largest borough in book form, in a way that would ring true to local residents. Tim loves his home borough despite its flagrant flaws, and was easily seduced by the concept of working with Akashic to try and portray its full human breadth.

  He first proposed a series of books, each one set in a different neighborhood, whether it be Bay Ridge, Williamsburg, Park Slope, Fort Greene, Bed-Stuy, or Canarsie. It was an exciting idea, but it’s hard enough to publish a single book, let alone commit to a full series. After we considered various other possibilities, Tim came upon the idea of a fiction anthology organized by neighborhood, each one represented by a different author. We were looking for stylistic diversity, so we focused on “noir,” and defined it in the broadest sense: we wanted stories of tragic, soulful struggle against all odds, characters slipping, no redemption in sight.

  Conventional wisdom dictates that literary anthologies don’t sell well, but this idea was too good to resist—it seemed the perfect form for exploring the whole borough, and we got to work soliciting stories. We batted around book titles, including Under the Hood, before settling on Brooklyn Noir. The volume came together beautifully and was a surprise hit for Akashic, quickly selling through multiple printings and winning awards. (See pages 548–550 for a full list of prizes garnered by stories originally published in the Noir Series.)

  Having seen nearly every American city, large and small, through the windows of a van or tour bus, I have developed a deep fondness for their idiosyncrasies. So for me it was easy logic to take the model of Brooklyn Noir—sketching out dark urban corners through neighborhood-based short fiction—and extend it to other cities. Soon came Chicago Noir, San Francisco Noir, and London Noir (our first of many overseas locations). Selecting the right editor to curate each book has been the most important decision we make before assembling it. It’s a welcome challenge because writers are often enamored of their hometowns, and many are
seduced by the urban landscape’s rough edges. The generous support of literary superheroes like George Pelecanos, Laura Lippman, Dennis Lehane, and Joyce Carol Oates, all of whom have edited series volumes, has been critical.

  There are now fifty-nine books in the Noir Series. Forty of them are from American locales. As of this writing, a total of 787 authors have contributed 917 stories to the series and helped Akashic to stay afloat during perilous economic times. By publishing six to eight new volumes in the Noir Series every year, we have provided a steady venue for short stories, which have in recent times struggled with diminishing popularity. Akashic’s commitment to the short story has been rewarded by the many authors—of both great stature and great obscurity—who have allowed us to publish their work in the series for a nominal fee.

  I am particularly indebted to all sixty-seven editors who have cumulatively upheld a high editorial standard across the series. The series would never have gotten this far without rigorous quality control. There also couldn’t be a Noir Series without my devoted and tireless (if occasionally irreverent) staff led by Johanna Ingalls, Ibrahim Ahmad, and Aaron Petrovich.

  * * *

  This volume serves up a top-shelf selection of stories from the series set in the United States. USA Noir only scratches the surface, however, and every single volume has more gems on offer.

  When I set out to compile USA Noir, I was delighted by the immediate positive responses from nearly every author I contacted. The only author on my initial invitation list who isn’t included here is one I couldn’t track down: the publisher explained to me that the writer was “literally on the run.” While I’m disappointed that we can’t include the story, the circumstance is true to the Noir Series spirit.

  And part of me—the noir part—is expecting a phone call from the writer, inviting me over for a smoke.