The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

by Otto Penzler

  Furious, Szabo took this in with a false thoughtful air. Karen had said almost exactly the same thing. But her words had been motivated by a wish to replace the property with a winter home in San Luis Obispo, a town that had ranked number one in a Times survey of residential contentment.

  “I trust you told Dr. Barney Q. Shitheel that you were not interested.”

  “I didn’t tell him that, Dad.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  David smiled at his father. “I told him I wasn’t welcome there.”

  “You could have come there anytime you wanted.”

  “Right.”

  “What’s this? Dave, why are you crying?”

  David wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and spoke with odd detachment.

  “I knew I would never understand business, but I worked on a lot of ranches in high school. I was good at that.”

  Not all the fight was gone out of Szabo. Nor had he given up on the story he’d been telling himself. But even as he asked his derisive question he was reminding himself how he might have been absent for his own child. “Did you think selling drugs was a way of learning business?”

  David looked weary. He didn’t want to play anymore. “You’re right, Dad. What was I thinking?”

  “I’m not saying I’m right.”

  “No, Dad, you’re one hundred percent right.”

  “Well,” he said, “I’m right some of the time.”

  This exchange, more than anything, troubled Szabo. Here was David, broken down, imprisoned, soon to be released with his stigma. And Szabo was only adding to his insecurity, instead of trying to make the situation better.

  There was plenty to do when he got home. And there was something to learn when he visited his mother: Barney had absconded with the Charlie Russell painting. The next morning Szabo met the detective who was interviewing his mother while fanning away the smoke with his clipboard. She only glanced at Szabo, crestfallen, defeated. From the detective, a handsome fellow in a short-sleeved shirt, too young for his mustache, Szabo learned that his ranch hand’s name wasn’t Barney; it was Ronny—Ronny Something. Ronny’s gift was for slipping into a community with one of his many small talents: the sculptural woodpile had taken him far. The painting would go to a private collector, not likely to be seen again. “This isn’t Ronny’s first rodeo,” the detective said. “The only thread we’ve got is the PhD. There is no actual PhD, but it’s the one thing Ronny drops every time. There’s been a string of thefts and they all lead into the same black hole. I don’t know why everyone is so sure that Ronny wants to help them.”

  When Szabo repeated this to Melinda and saw her wide eyes, he just shrugged and shook his head. Maybe to change the subject, she asked after David, and Szabo told her that he would soon be coming home.

  NATHAN OATES

  Looking for Service

  FROM The Antioch Review

  AS SOON AS they called the first-class passengers I stepped to the head of the line, hurried down to my seat, and braced myself for the crowd that came slumping past minutes later with their loose, swollen bags. Any of them could stop, pretend to cough or adjust a strap, and a runty hand could pull out a cobbled-together shank which he’d stick into my chest, my neck, my cheek, where it would clatter against my teeth, again and again, sinking through the soft meat of my eye. I left my seatbelt unbuckled, ready to fly up and fight my way back to American soil. When the stewardesses began their pantomime of safety, I was able to relax a little, probably only because by that time I’d finished two vodka tonics. I was hoping to drink myself to sleep, but as we reached cruising altitude and the ice in my drink tumbled under the collar of my shirt, I knew I wouldn’t be so lucky this time.

  When I was first told they were sending me to this country to do an accounting of the Canadian mining firm’s books, I told them I couldn’t. I said, “My wife is sick.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line, and I was suddenly unsure if I’d ever met the man to whom I was speaking. I’d assumed he was the same Steve we’d had over for dinner a few years earlier. My wife had made enchiladas with mole sauce. Steve had picked around the plate, ate half his salad and a few scoops of refried beans, leaving two perfectly formed enchiladas like a big old fuck-you to his hostess, who’d spent hours in the kitchen, lifting the skin off broiled peppers.

  The man on the phone eventually said, “I’m sorry to hear about that.” Another pause, as though this made what came next acceptable. “Your flight’s tomorrow, at seven.”

  “Seven?”

  “A.M.,” he explained.

  As turbulence wobbled the plane, I leaned my head into the oily leather seat and breathed deep, but this made the pressure in my chest expand into a lead weight.

  Halfway through the flight the woman beside me turned and grinned until I stopped pretending to be asleep. She was an American, a Mississippian, she clarified, and was going down to visit her daughter, who was about to marry a young man from the country’s elite. She wore a beige suit like an ill-fitting exoskeleton. Every inch of exposed skin—face, neck, hands—was layered with foundation and powder, so a smell of petroleum oozed out from beneath gusts of perfume. Her eyes were small and a beautiful blue, startling to find rooted in that puffy, twitching face.

  “They’re very nice people,” she said, then admitted that in fact she’d never met them. “But they own three coffee plantations. The wedding is going to be at one of them.”

  Despite her grin, she was clearly horrified that her daughter was about to be swallowed up by a family of brown people, no matter how rich they might be, no matter how comforting the word plantation.

  “You know, they’re not actually Hispanic, they’re Spanish. I mean, they have no Indian blood at all.”

  Eventually she left me alone and began searching through her cavernous plaid handbag, setting off an incessant clinking of lipstick cases against her cell phone, wallet, makeup case, the tinny rattle of loose change. At one point she pulled out a photograph in a gaudy metal frame. In it a beautiful young woman in a tight-fitting white dress leaned against a stone wall. The woman stared for a few minutes then, with an elaborate sigh, dropped the frame back into the purse.

  I’m sure I looked like a compatriot, an overweight, middle-aged man with thinning hair gone white except for a few strands of black that looked permanently wet. The starched collar of my button-down shirt, the faint pinstripe on my suit pants, and the shine of my black shoes all suggested not only that we were both Americans, but that back home we might even have been friends, would’ve invited each other over for dinner parties where we’d drink too much, flirt clumsily at the fridge, then turn our energies to moaning about our ingrate children, the awfulness of youth in general, and the folly of anyone who disagreed with us about anything. And, I knew, we were compatriots of a sort, but I was too tired, too angry at being on that plane when I should’ve been home with Joyce.

  I’d promised no more trips after she got sick. I told her I’d work from home, or at least from the American headquarters of the firms I audited. But it turned out this wasn’t possible, and so every few months I was off again—Zimbabwe, Peru, Bolivia, South Africa—in each place working to make sense of the tangle of fraud that constituted the local office’s financial records. I had a particular talent for this, an ability to see through bureaucratic madness and to articulate a legally defensible financial record. Typically I went down to the capitals of these godforsaken places and took a limo to my hotel—the nicest in the country, holdovers from colonial days—and the next morning another limo would ferry me to the offices that were always staffed half with gringos who looked like they’d had too much local rum and half by locals who hadn’t quite learned how to smother their bitter scent. I was given my own office, usually that of some recently fired executive, and I would make sense of the confusion they’d all bred in their frenzy to pull minerals from the earth.

  We descended through a scrim of clouds. The city clung to a t
angle of ravines at the foot of sheer black mountains, the lower slopes of which were smothered with shantytowns. The downtown was marked by dull gray buildings and a few half-finished concrete towers. Our plane touched down with a jolt, the seatbelt cut into my gut, then we seemed to be rising again before slamming down a second time, the engines whirring, the smell of burning rubber filling the cabin. Then we were there, trembling on the runway.

  None of the three men holding name signs were waiting for me when I came through customs. The glass doors weren’t tinted and the near-equatorial sun set off a pulsing headache behind my eyes. When I checked my cell phone, set up with worldwide access, it said, Looking for Service.

  Maybe it was my exhaustion, my hangover, or the soldier who stepped away from the wall, eyeing my bag, but I felt suddenly weightless and lost, as though waking from one dream into another when I should’ve been back in the real world, not caught in this greasy airport with the high, rising scream of a woman at the customs point as soldiers tossed her underwear, her socks, her shirts to the floor, then held up a pair of blue jeans and scythed them in half with a knife. Whatever the reason, I panicked and joined a clump of passengers heading for the glass doors.

  “Excuse me?” an American voice said. There beside me were two young hippie travelers, a boy and a girl, both grinning like idiots. They wore loose, dirty clothes that might’ve been hemp and stank of patchouli and sweat. Loose leather sandals showed off filthy feet, toenails blackened with grime, feet they surely planned to tan before going back home with dysentery and a few snapshots of indigenous kids atop a trash heap.

  “Do you know which way the train is?” the girl asked.

  “There’s no train,” I said, hurrying after the crowd.

  As we rushed along, the tall, thin boy held up a travel guide and said, “No, it says there’s one that goes into the city center.” He said this with a kind of desperation, which was understandable. Stretching out around the airport was a dead zone of warehouses with metal shutters pulled over the doors. Power lines sagged from leaning poles. All this made it look as if there had once been a city here, but it had long ago been abandoned.

  “No,” I said, “the book’s wrong. There’s no train.” I quickened my pace, hoping in their confusion they’d fall away.

  “So how do we get to the city?” the girl asked, scurrying to keep up.

  “Take the bus,” I said, pointing at the crowd ahead of us, which bulged around the doors before squeezing out, like a clot of blood from a narrow wound. “Or a taxi.”

  “Dude, isn’t that expensive?” the boy said.

  “Depends on what you think of as expensive,” I said.

  The girl was still smiling, bobbing her head as though we were listening to a good, thick reggae beat. Then we were outside in the too-bright light. Sitting at the otherwise empty curb was a black SUV and in it were two men wearing sunglasses. They leaned forward, and though it was possible they were just trying to get a better glimpse of the American girl’s thin white shirt, I felt sure they were waiting for me and so I started walking faster, pushing through the crowd. Behind me the American kids were shouting. I hunched down and jogged to the orange bus. In that SUV a rifle could be sliding up between the men, scope swirling out of focus before sharpening in on the white hairs at the back of my head.

  The bus driver was leaning in the open door, and for a moment my Spanish abandoned me. I gestured at the door and nodded. I glanced back at the SUV. One of the men was standing in the street, pointing. Finally I found the word, “Abierto.”

  “Lo siento,” the driver said, stepping aside. I sank into a narrow green seat, my legs pinched up against my gut, suitcase and briefcase piled to my chin.

  At that moment, I finally paused to wonder what in the hell I was doing. My limo driver was probably inside right now, he’d probably just gone to the bathroom, but here I was, in the open, jammed into this bus, which was already filling up with peasants hauling bags of all shapes and sizes they’d managed to smuggle past the driver, who screamed at everyone to toss their luggage onto the roof.

  “Is this taken?” The American girl was smiling at me, pointing at the empty six inches of seat.

  Once settled, her leg pressing against mine, she held out a hand. “I’m Allie.”

  “Robert,” I said. Her hand was slim and cool, and in the midst of my confusion I held on too long, until she was forced to pull back with a pitying smile.

  Soon every seat was full and the aisle was packed. The American boy, Billy, was pinned between two fat ladies, his spiky blond hair brushing the ceiling as the bus lurched away.

  “Is this your first time here?” Allie said, leaning across me to look out the window so her breast rested on my arm. I tried to see the road behind us, to see if the SUV was there, but the angle was wrong.

  “No,” I lied, because it was easier.

  “It’s mine. But I was in Mexico last year for a couple months. In the Yucatán.”

  I tried to smile, though my mouth was so dry my lips stuck against my teeth.

  We passed a few dozen warehouses and pulled up onto a truck-clogged highway. Men bent beneath enormous piles of sticks, or stones, walked along the road, their faces gray with the diesel and dust kicked up. We passed a line of auto-body shops where cars sat stripped and piles of tires leaned toward the street. Mangy dogs and naked children scampered in and out of the open garages while shirtless men hefted greasy tools and wiped their sweating faces with handkerchiefs.

  “Dude,” Billy shouted, leaning toward our seat. “Have you ever been to Tonterrico? I hear the waves are awesome.”

  I didn’t answer, all my energy focused on ignoring the puddle of what was possibly piss sticking my shoes to the floor.

  At the bus station, I paid for my ticket and those of the kids, who patted their pockets as though they’d lost their wallets. I’d hoped this generosity would be enough to get rid of them, but they followed me to the hotel shuttle. There was no sign of the SUV, and as I was ushered to a plush red seat by a man in a tuxedo shirt and bow tie, I felt a measure of calm returning. While the driver stood in the door to see if there were other passengers—there weren’t—I noticed that neither of the kids had backpacks or, for that matter, bags of any kind. They looked tired and unwashed, though that, I knew, might be an affectation.

  “Are you staying at the Palacio?” I said. These kids were pretending to be vagabonds, and so I knew they’d never put up the cost of the room, which was, considering the general destitution of this entire region, extravagant. But now that my confusion had receded, I felt sorry for them. They were scared and lost and I could help them out, a little.

  Allie said, “We don’t have a reservation, but maybe. Is it nice?”

  I said it was unquestionably the best.

  “Well, so maybe we will,” Billy said, plastering his face against the window.

  As the shuttle pulled away, Allie started telling a story about the time she’d traveled to St. Petersburg and ended up getting in a cab whose driver promised to take her to a club.

  “He said it was the hip new place. Then we got off the road and were driving through these warehouses and I got pretty nervous. I mean, I thought he was going to rape me or something, but then we turned a corner and there was this one warehouse, with lights and techno music. I guess I was just relieved, so I didn’t think it was so weird when the driver got out of the car. The music was so loud it was like shaking your head apart, and he opened the door for me. I didn’t step inside. I could see that the place was empty, I mean, almost empty, except this huge speaker stack and these towers of strobe lights and then I noticed like four or five guys, all holding baseball bats, and on the ground in front of them was this guy, all beaten up. The guy on the floor looked up and shouted, ‘Help!’ He was American. I started running. If I’d been wearing sandals, I’d be dead. I ran and ran and that fat fuck of a cabbie couldn’t keep up and eventually I hid in this empty warehouse. I could hear the men go by, looking for me,
and they came by again later. I was hiding behind this stack of metal barrels, but if they came into the warehouse they totally would’ve seen me. It was the middle of the night, you know, but I ran out and went to another warehouse, in case they decided to search that first one, and I heard them shouting, a ways off. When it was light I snuck out and walked back to the city along the train tracks. It was pretty goddamn scary, though.”

  In all likelihood this was a myth she’d heard while traveling, or one she’d read on the Internet. That it wasn’t true didn’t matter; what mattered was telling the story and the practice this gave her. In a few months she’d come down from the remote mountains to get drunk in gringo bars on the coast and talk about all the crazy stuff she’d seen. It wouldn’t matter if anything she said was true, because facts weren’t important; what was important was the idea of herself that traveling confirmed: she was brave and adventurous and open-minded and now she could go home thirty pounds lighter and filthy, which would frighten her parents enough to allow her to live off their money for a few more years.

  “That’s totally fucked up, man,” Billy said, his face up against the window as we pulled past the gray government buildings. “Hey, isn’t that the Department of Interior?”

  “So are you traveling or what?” Allie said, picking at the dirt ground under her nails.

  “No, I’m here for work.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “I’m a consultant.”

  “For what, the government?” From the hardening of her consonants it was clear she had me figured out: I was a bad guy and she was more than eager to judge, not all that different from my daughters, both of whom fancied themselves world savers. They had the security to use their educations and opportunities however they saw fit—one was an assistant DA in New Jersey and the other was a schoolteacher in Brooklyn—all because I’d worked my entire life to make enough money so they could attend Columbia and Brown.