The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

by Otto Penzler

  “Jaime? Is that you?”

  “Yes, Mom.” She slammed the door and fell against it. She twisted the deadbolt and peered around the curtain. There was no movement outside.

  “Don’t slam the door, Jaime.”

  “Mom, I think there’s something going on. There’s a guy sitting in a car across the street. It’s kind of creepy.”

  The pause before her mother answered alerted the girl to her mother’s complicity, to a web of knowledge and causality that stretched far past where she was standing now.

  “Stop it. Jaime, you stop it right this minute. You’re scaring me half to death. You know how I am.”

  “Yeah, Mom. I do.” It occurred to her then that she ought to leave well enough alone, that she was going to become as crazy as her mother if she wasn’t careful.

  The kitchen was a wreck. Pots and pans were climbing out of the sink, and the gray, stagnant water smelled like roadkill. A week’s worth of plates and dishes were stacked on the counter. And her father hadn’t been home in three days. He’d called her a slut, which was so far from the truth, she wanted to laugh. If her father only knew how hard she’d worked to curb her desire, to preserve the upper hand.

  She managed to clear off a corner of the counter, enough room to make herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and she poured herself a glass of the chocolate soymilk they bought just for her before she carried her sandwich upstairs on a paper towel.

  6

  He’d finally decided he was going to have to take matters into his own hands. That had been his only mistake. Trusting anyone else to do his dirty work, to take care of his business.

  After three days, he’d sobered a little. Enough. The idea came with sudden, vicious clarity. He hadn’t wanted to get blood on his hands, but life was like that. Sometimes you had to do things you didn’t want to do. He thought of Clint Eastwood; he thought of Sean Connery; he thought again of Pacino in Scarface. They were cowards, weak men. Then he thought about Smilin’ Jack in The Shining. Now there was a man who could take care of business.

  He left his dirty socks in the sink. He didn’t bother to check out. He wasn’t coming back, but he guessed they’d figure that out soon enough. Walking through the lobby, he saw the implements arrayed beside the fireplace, which was nonfunctional, strictly ornamental. There was the shovel; there, the broom. There were the giant tongs, and yes, the poker. The kid behind the desk was staring at his computer like he’d been shot up with Thorazine—eyes glassy, jaw slack. Probably stoned, Marsh thought. It was impossible to find reliable help anymore.

  He swooped through the lobby like a bird of prey, catching hold of the poker as he passed the hearth and whisking it from the rack, carrying it out the door like a cane. The kid didn’t look up. Marsh started laughing. His breath came in whinnies and grunts, hurting his side. He swung the poker once, twice, listening to the whistling sound it made on the chilly air. The elderly couple coming in the door steered clear, giving him wide berth. He made a beeline for the car, stopping only once, to vomit.

  7

  He scarfed a cold cheeseburger from the glove box. He had three more; he could make it another night. They weren’t so bad once you got used to them. He washed it down with some flat Pepsi and belched, tasting pickle.

  The girl started up toward the corner at a quarter of ten. She did it every night. Up to the bus stop before ten, and she’d sit there and have two, maybe three cigarettes, then she’d walk back.

  The car stunk. It smelled like French fries and animal fat, like dirty sweat socks and musty sneakers, like unwashed, unshaven Irish ex-cop. After three days of sleeping behind the wheel and waking in his clothes, three days of waiting for the answer, he was through. Nothing had come to him, and nothing, so far as he could tell, had happened. And nothing, he’d decided, was going to happen, either. He considered ringing the doorbell, but dismissed the idea as soon as it occurred to him. He didn’t know which was worse—stalking the woman, staking out her house and scaring her children half to death, or ringing her doorbell and announcing himself: I know you don’t know me, Mrs. Marsh, but my name is Mickey Walsh, and your husband hired me to kill you.

  If he thought his life was in the shitter a week ago, he could just imagine. He’d go from metro section to the front page.

  He realized he’d been expecting something to happen, that he’d been keeping his vigil half hoping and half fearing Marsh would turn up and try to do the deed himself. If it came down to his word against Marsh’s, he knew where he stood. Even with twenty years on the force, he’d be on the losing end, and that seemed to him the story of his whole sad and shoddy existence on the earth, all forty-three years of it. What would he do if Marsh came home? Was he protecting the woman? Did he need to? He didn’t know. Should he have gone to the departmental psychiatrist years ago like everyone had told him to? Probably.

  He’d gone through his life doing whatever the crowd did. When they rode around in squad cars looking for drunks to roll, he’d done it. When they’d gone whoring, when they’d beaten up the homeless or the Mexicans or rousted the blacks for conglomerating on street corners, he’d done that, too. On his own, he didn’t know the first thing. He didn’t even know how to behave around his wife or his daughter.

  He started the car. The old Pontiac still turned over on the first try. He had $125,000 in a briefcase in the trunk, and he was going to South America. He’d read it in a book. That was what people did when they wanted out—out of the country, out of the life. He was taking early retirement, a permanent vacation.

  He’d just put the Pontiac in gear when the green Jaguar came screaming around the corner at the top of the hill, hopping the curb and narrowly missing the bus shelter on the corner. Marsh swerved across his lawn and plowed into the side of his wife’s Mercury. He lurched out of the car, waving something in his hands. Mickey reached over, fumbling in the glove box, digging under the cold cheeseburgers for the .38 he’d been carrying for twenty years, since he was a rookie on the force, the spare piece he’d carried for two decades without firing it. Once he’d thought about using it to plant on a suspect. Now, watching Marsh stumbling across the moonlit yard, hacking at the philodendron bushes as he tottered up the steps to his front door, Mickey only hoped it still worked.

  PETER S. BEAGLE

  The Bridge Partner

  FROM Sleight of Hand

  I WILL KILL YOU.

  The words were not spoken aloud, but silently mouthed across the card table at Mattie Whalen by her new partner, whose last name she had not quite caught when they were introduced. Olivia Korhanen or Korhonen, it was, something like that. She was blond and fortyish—Mattie was bad with ages, but the woman had to be somewhere near her own—and had joined the Moss Harbor Bridge Group only a few weeks earlier. The members had chosen at the very beginning to call themselves a group rather than a club. As Eileen Berry, one of the two founders, along with Suzanne Grimes, had said at the time, “There’s an exclusivity thing about a club—a snobby, elitish sort of taste, if you know what I mean. A group just feels more democratic.” Everyone had agreed with Eileen, as people generally did.

  Which accounted, Mattie thought, for the brisk acceptance of the woman now sitting across from her, despite her odd name and unclassifiably foreign air. Mattie could detect only the faintest accent in her voice, and if her clothes plainly did not come from the discount outlet in the local mall, neither were they so aggressively chic as to offend or threaten. She had clear, pleasant blue eyes, excellent teeth, the delicately tanned skin of a tennis player—as opposed to a leathery beach bunny or an orange-hued tanning bed veteran—and was pleasant to everyone in a gently impersonal manner. Her playing style showed not only skill but grace, which Mattie noticed perhaps more poignantly than any other member of the Bridge Group, since the best that could have been said for Mattie was that she mostly managed to keep track of the trumps and the tricks. Still, she knew grace when she saw it.

  I will kill you.

  It mad
e no possible sense—she must surely have misread both the somewhat long, quizzical lips and the intention in the bright eyes. No one else seemed to have heard or noticed anything at all unusual, and she really hadn’t played the last hand as badly as all that. Granted, doubling Rosemarie’s bid could be considered a mistake, but people make mistakes, and she could have pulled it off if Olivia Korhonen, or whoever, had held more than the one single miserable trump to back her up. You don’t kill somebody for doubling, or even threaten to kill them. Mattie smiled earnestly at her partner, and studied her cards.

  The rubber ended in total disaster, and Mattie apologized at some length to Olivia Korhonen afterward. “I’m not really a good player, I know that, but I’m not usually that awful, I promise. And now you’ll probably never want to play with me ever again, and I wouldn’t blame you.” Mattie had had a deal of practice at apologizing, over the years.

  To her pleasant surprise, Olivia Korhonen patted her arm reassuringly and shook her head. “I enjoyed the game greatly, even though we lost. I have not played in a long time, and you will have to make allowances until I start to catch up. We’ll beat them next time, in spite of me.”

  She patted Mattie again and turned elegantly away. But as she did so, the side of her mouth repeated, clearly but inaudibly—Mattie could not have been mistaken this time—“I will kill you.” Then the woman was gone, and Mattie sat down in the nearest folding chair.

  Her friend Virginia Schlossberg hurried over with a cup of tea, asking anxiously, “Are you all right? What is it? You look absolutely ashen! ” She touched Mattie’s cheek, and almost recoiled. “And you’re freezing! Go home and get into bed, and call a doctor! I mean it—you go home right now!” Virginia was a kind woman, but excitable. She had been the same when Mattie and she were in dancing school together.

  “I’m all right,” Mattie said. “I am, Ginny, honestly.” But her voice was shaking as much as her hands, and she made her escape from the Group as soon as she could trust her legs to support her. She was grateful on two counts: first, that no one sat next to her on the bus; and, secondly, that Don would most likely not be home yet from the golf course. She did not look forward to Don just now.

  Rather than taking to her bed, despite Virginia’s advice, she made herself a healthy G&T and sat in the kitchen with the lights on, going over and over everything she knew of Olivia Korhonen. The woman was apparently single or widowed, like most of the members of the Moss Harbor Bridge Group, but judging by the reactions of the few men in the Group she gave no indication of being on the prowl. Seemingly unemployed, and rather young for retirement, still she lived in one of the pricey new condos just two blocks from the harbor. No Bridge Group member had yet seen her apartment except for Suzanne and Eileen, who reported back that it was smart and trendy, “without being too off-puttingly posh.” Eileen thought the paintings were originals, but Suzanne had her doubts.

  What else, what else? She had looked up “Korhonen” on the Internet and found that it was a common Finnish name—not Jewish, as she had supposed. To her knowledge, she had never met a Finnish person in her life. Were they like Swedes? Danes, even? She had a couple of Danish acquaintances, a husband and wife named Olsen . . . no, they were nothing at all like the Korhonen woman; one could never imagine either Olsen saying I will kill you to so much as a cockroach, which, of course, they wouldn’t ever have in the house. But then, who would say such a thing to a near stranger? And over a silly card game? It made no sense, none of it made any sense. She mixed another G&T and was surprised to find herself wanting Don home.

  Don’s day, it turned out, had been a bad one. Trounced on the course, beaten more badly in the rematch he had immediately demanded, he had consoled himself liberally in the clubhouse; and, as a consequence, was clearly not in any sort of mood to hear about a mumbled threat at a bridge game. On the whole, after sixteen years of marriage, Mattie liked Don more than she disliked him, but such distinctions were essentially meaningless at this stage of things. She rather appreciated his presence when she felt especially lonely and frightened, but a large, furry dog would have done as well; indeed, a dog would have been at once more comforting and more concerned for her comfort. Dogs wanted their masters to be happy—Don simply preferred her uncomplaining.

  When she told him about Olivia Korhonen’s behavior at the Bridge Group, he seemed hardly to hear her. In his usual style of picking up in the middle of the intended sentence, he mumbled, “. . . take that damn game so damn seriously. Bud and I don’t go yelling we’re going to kill each other”—Bud Gorko was his steady golf partner—“and believe you me, I’ve got reason sometimes.” He snatched a beer out of the refrigerator and wandered into the living room to watch TV.

  Mattie followed him in, the second G&T strengthening a rare resolve to make him take her seriously. She said, “She did it twice. You didn’t see her face.” She raised her voice to carry over the yammering of a commercial. “She meant it, Don. I’m telling you, she meant it.”

  Don smiled muzzily and patted the sofa seat beside him. “Hear you, I’m right on it. Tell you what—she goes ahead and does that, I’m going to take a really dim view. A dim view.” He liked the phrase. “Really dim view.”

  “You’re dim enough already,” Mattie said. Don did not respond. She stood watching him for a few minutes without speaking, because she knew it made him uncomfortable. When he got to the stage of demanding, “What? What?” she walked out of the room and into the guest bedroom, where she lay down. She had been sleeping there frequently enough in recent months that it felt increasingly like her own.

  She had thought she would surely dream of Olivia Korhonen, but it was only in the sweet spot between consciousness and sleep that the woman’s face came to her: the long mouth curling almost affectionately, almost seductively, as though for a kiss, caressing the words that Mattie could not hear. It was an oddly tranquil, even soothing vision, and Mattie fell asleep like a child, and did not dream at all.

  The next morning she felt curiously young and hopeful, though she could not imagine why. Don had gone off to work at the real estate office with his normal Monday hangover, pitifully savage; but Mattie indulged herself with a long hot shower, a second toasted English muffin, and a long telephone chat with a much-relieved Virginia Schlossberg before she went to the grocery store. There would be an overdue hair appointment after that, then home in time for Oprah. A good day.

  The sense of serenity lasted through the morning shopping, through her favorite tea-and-brioche snack at La Place, and on to her date with Mr. Philip at the salon. It ended abruptly while she was more than half drowsing under the dryer, trying to focus on Vanity Fair, as well as on the buttery jazz on the PA system, when Olivia Korhonen’s equally pleasant voice separated itself from the music, saying, “Mrs. Whalen—Mattie? How nice to see you here, partner.” The last word flicked across Mattie’s skin like a brand.

  Olivia Korhonen was standing directly in front of her, smiling in her familiar guileless manner. She had clearly just finished her appointment: the glinting warmth and shine of her blond hair made that plain, and made Mattie absurdly envious, her own mouse-brown curls’ only distinction being their comb-snapping thickness. Olivia Korhonen said, “Shall we play next week? I look forward so.”

  “Yes,” Mattie said faintly; and then, “I mean, I’m not sure—I have things. To do. Maybe.” Her voice squeaked and slipped. She couldn’t stop it, and in that moment she hated her voice more than she had ever hated anything in the world.

  “Oh, but you must be there! I do not know anyone else to play with.” Mattie noticed a small dimple to the left of Olivia Korhonen’s mouth when she smiled in a certain way. “I mean, no one else who will put up with my bad playing, as you do. Please?”

  Mattie found herself nodding, just to keep from having to speak again—and also, to some degree, because of the genuine urgency in Olivia Korhonen’s voice. Maybe I imagined the whole business . . . maybe it’s me getting old and scared, the way peop
le do. She nodded a second time, with somewhat more enthusiasm.

  Olivia Korhonen patted her knee through the protective salon apron, plainly relieved. “Oh, good. I already feel so much better.” Then, without changing her expression in the least, she whispered, “I will kill you.”

  Mattie thought later that she must have fainted in some way; at all events, her next awareness was of Mr. Philip taking the curlers out of her hair and brushing her off. Olivia Korhonen was gone. Mr. Philip peered at her, asking, “Who’s been keeping you up at night, darling? You never fall asleep under these things.” Then he saw her expression and asked, “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Mattie said. “I’m fine.”

  After that, it seemed to her that she saw Olivia Korhonen everywhere, every day. She was coming out of the dry cleaners’ as Mattie brought an armload of Don’s pants in; she hurried across the street to direct Mattie as she was parking her car; she asked Mattie’s advice buying produce at the farmers’ market, or broke off a conversation with someone else to chat with Mattie on the street. And each time, before they parted, would come the silent words, more menacing for being inaudible, “I will kill you.” The dimple beside the long smile always showed as she spoke.