The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

by Jonathan Lethem

  “You are searching everyone’s home?” her father asks.

  The two officers shift uncomfortably.

  “Mr. Gelashvili, would you mind telling us what you were doing at the open house?” the older officer says, looking around the kitchen, taking it all in: the ancient refrigerator chugging to itself in the corner, the contact paper on the countertops, the water stains on the ceiling. “Are you in the market for an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar home?”

  “I’m studying for my real-estate license,” he says.

  “Then would you care to explain why you are in the guest book under a false name?”

  Her father stares at the woman for a moment before speaking. His face is pale. Nino can tell he’s afraid of the officers. Back in the Soviet Union you were afraid of the police, he’s told her. But not here. Americans are honest people. This is why he left Tbilisi and came to this country.

  “It was a game,” he says, and then, when this seems insufficient, he tries to explain their Saturday-morning tradition. His voice is shaky, and nervousness makes his accent stronger. The story comes out sounding absurd; even her father seems to hear how improbable it all sounds, and his voice grows fainter and more halting. A police radio suddenly burbles, something about a child reported missing but now found. The older officer unclips the radio from his belt, still looking at her father, and turns down the volume. After a moment, the woman speaks.

  “Mr. Gelashvili, have you been in touch with ICE?” she says. “Your visa expired some time ago.”

  Her father sags against the doorframe. “I am currently working with an immigration lawyer,” he says in a voice that sounds as though he is reciting the words from an index card. “You may contact the offices of S. Ramachandran in Somerville, Massachusetts.”

  “Okay,” the older officer says. “We’re going to have to conduct a search. And get a record of your prints.”

  “The Saudi prince was a joke,” her father says, visibly floundering. He looks to Nino, who is still standing near the outside door, for help.

  “Your fingerprints,” she says, in a voice hardly above a whisper.

  The woman, Officer Laramie, tells her father to take a seat. When he does, she sets a briefcase on the kitchen table and takes out a photocopied form and an ink pad. The older officer snaps on a pair of blue latex gloves and starts opening cupboards and drawers. Her father watches him as Officer Laramie takes his hand and moves it from ink pad to paper and back again, one finger at a time, as if he were a child. He does not resist. When all fingers have been inked, he stares at the record of them on the paper with seeming disbelief, as if these marks could not have been made by his hands. He looks up at the officer.

  “If the names in the book were false,” he says, “then how did you know who I am? How did you know where I live?”

  The policewoman puts the sheet of paper in the briefcase, then snaps the ink pad shut. “You wrote your address in the book,” she says.

  Nino, hovering uncertainly near the door, makes a sound in her throat. Her father looks up at her.

  “Nanuka, go home,” he says. “Go to your mother’s.” He turns to the police officer. “Can she?”

  The officer waves to show she has no objection.

  “Don’t say anything to your mother, she will worry,” her father says to her. “Everything will be all right. This is nothing,” he says, waving his hand to show how little it all means.

  Nino puts on her coat and boots. She looks back in the kitchen before she steps outside. The officer in the latex gloves is digging through the kitchen trash, while her father sits in his chair with his eyes closed. He’s touched his forehead and left a smudged fingerprint above his left eyebrow, as if a gray moth has settled lightly on his forehead without him noticing.

  “You’re home early,” Shane, her stepfather, says from the couch when she comes in from riding her bike home. He’s got a towel around his shoulders and his dark hair is spiky from the shower.

  “Yes,” she says, unwinding the scarf from around her neck and taking off her jacket.

  Shane tosses the running magazine he’s reading onto the coffee table.

  “How’s your father?”

  “Good,” Nino says. Shane always asks her this when she gets home, and her answer is always the same. She knows he’s asking only because he doesn’t really care that much. Her father rarely asks anything about Shane—the name sounds like “Shame” when he says it—because he actually does care. Shane married her mother when Nino was six, which is how her mother got herself legalized in the U.S. Shane is the owner of three mall stores that sell nothing but vitamins, and drives a white Lincoln Navigator with THE VITAMAX EMPORIUM stenciled on the back window. In her conversations with her father, she tries never to mention Shane, but then she worries that he might notice that she never mentions her stepfather and decide that she is protecting his feelings by never bringing him up, which could then make her father think that she actually believes that he has something to feel bad about in regard to Shane, which he doesn’t.

  “Your mother’s out shopping for dinner,” he says. He stands up and cracks his back. He turns and sees her in the hallway, standing frozen at the door, and notices for the first time the look of distress on her face.

  “Everything okay?” She looks at him, a feeling of panic hollowing her stomach. She wants to tell someone what she’s done, but can’t bring herself to open her mouth. He’s good to her, Shane is, and even loves her in his Shane way, but he isn’t her father.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Where are you going now?” he says, when he sees her putting on her coat again. “You just got in.”

  “Something I forgot to do,” she says, and goes out.

  But she doesn’t go to her father’s house. Instead she cuts through the park and heads toward the west end of town, where the open house was the previous day. She’s going there because she already knows that her father took the things from the bureau in the upstairs bedroom. She also understands why he did it. She knows that he needs money to pay his debt to the immigration lawyer. He needs money to pay her child support to Shane and her mother, even though they told him it was okay if things were tight, they could wait. No, it was a matter of pride for him. Better to take something from someone wealthy, who didn’t need the money. He didn’t think he would get caught.

  And maybe he wouldn’t have, if she hadn’t put down his address in the guest book.

  Outside the house a group of boys are playing street hockey with a tennis ball. They pause to let a car pass by, then resume their game, not paying her any attention. The sun is setting through the trees, casting long shadows across the lawns, which are spongy and still matted down from last week’s snow. She goes up the walk. Lights are on inside. She hesitates for a few seconds, then rings the bell.

  The door is answered by a woman. She’s trim, late forties, maybe, with variegated blond hair. “Yes?” she says, looking down at Nino with surprise. Nino’s legs are shaking, and her voice breaks as she starts to explain: the police, her father, the fact that he would be sent away from her if they didn’t do something to help. Hearing this, the woman’s tanned face registers distress. “Come on inside,” she tells Nino, ushering her through the door.

  Inside, the house smells of fish sticks and baked potatoes. A dishwasher rumbles in the kitchen. The woman, who introduces herself as Jan, gets her a Diet Coke and pours it in a tall glass for her, and Nino sits at the bar stools at the stone counter. Jan’s husband, a big man with a rosaceous bloom on his cheeks and a dark beard that looks somehow out of place on his face, comes into the kitchen and Nino tells the story all over again. “I was thinking that maybe if he returned everything and apologized, you would tell the police to stop,” she tells Jan.

  “Oh my,” Jan says. She looks at her husband.

  “What are you looking at me for?” her husband says.

  “Come on, sweetie,” Jan says to Nino, after a moment of strained silence. “I think you s
hould call your father and tell him where you are, he’s probably worried.”

  Nino doesn’t dare ask if this means they have agreed to her plan. Instead she dials her father. He picks up on the fifth ring. She tells him she’s at the open house. “Where?” her father says. She tells him again. “Oh, Nino,” he says, but then, after making a muffled sound of cupping the phone with his hand, he tells her that he’s on his way.

  While they are waiting for Nino’s father to come, Jan cracks and pours herself a can of Diet Coke and starts talking about the house, about the problems with trying to sell it in this market. Their property, Jan tells her, is underwater. For a moment Nino has an image of a wave engulfing the house and them all having to fight against the rush of water to get out, rise up to the surface. But now Jan is telling her all the details of their finances, speaking in a defensive tone that Nino doesn’t understand. Until recently, Jan tells her, Richard—that’s her husband, Richard—was the owner of a small business that designed and manufactured safety equipment for lacrosse players. The business went bust after a high schooler was injured wearing a helmet made by their company and they were sued by a personal-injuries lawyer. Richard has tried to start a new company, one that is now filing for bankruptcy protection, and Jan herself, who has a degree in sociology from Stetson University in Florida but has no professional experience, now has a job as a cashier at the Shaw’s in neighboring Newton, where she’s working for minimum wage under the keen-eyed supervision of her son’s ex-girlfriend from high school, a young woman named Summer.

  “I had a friend in first grade named Summer,” Nino says, unsure of what she should say. “She was nice.”

  “Not this one,” Jan says. “This one is a real piece of work.”

  The doorbell rings. Jan goes to get it. Nino’s father comes into the kitchen. She sees his mournful face, his weary eyes, the shaving cream on his collar, and she feels such an intense surge of love, the feeling pressing against the inside of her chest like a balloon, that she starts shaking all over.

  “Nino,” he says. “What are you doing here? I told you to go to your mother’s.”

  Nino gestures helplessly at the kitchen, the house. “I came here.”

  Her father nods to Richard, who is standing with a drink in his hand against the stove. “Well, now we can go,” he says to Nino. “I’ll walk you back. Thank you for calling,” he says to Jan.

  “Wait,” Nino says. They can’t go yet; now that she’s gotten her father together with the owners of the house, they need to discuss what they can do. But first, she knows, her father has to tell them that he did it and ask them for forgiveness. That’s how it works. “Don’t you have something you want to say to them?” she says.

  Her father looks at her. His eyes are meshed with capillaries. He is breathing through his nose.

  “Yes, I do,” he says. He turns to Richard. “Why do you leave jewelry lying around during an open house?”

  Richard sets down his glass.

  “Why did you write a fake name with a real address in our book?” he says.

  Nino feels the situation slipping out of her grasp. In a moment, any hope of reconciliation will be gone. Richard’s face is already brightening with anger. She knows that she has to act. She has no choice but to rescue this situation in any way that she can.

  “I did it,” she says. “I stole your things.”

  All three of them now turn to her.

  Her father is the first to speak. “You?” he says.

  She looks at him in confusion. There’s unfeigned surprise in his voice, as if he actually might believe she’s telling the truth. For a moment no one says anything. The ice in Richard’s glass groans and cracks.

  “No, you didn’t,” Jan says.

  “Jan,” her husband says.

  “What? She didn’t do it, so why is she telling us she did?” Jan says.

  Now her father turns his bloodshot gaze to Jan. “How do you know?”

  Jan glances away, looking out the window. The streetlights have just flickered on outside.

  “I see,” her father says.

  “We are good people,” Jan says.

  “Maybe you should explain that to the police officers at my home,” her father says, taking Nino’s arm. “Or allow me to explain it to your insurance company. Can a person go to jail for this, writing a false claim?”

  “Hold up there,” Richard says. He moves quickly to stand between them and the exit.

  Her father and Richard face each other in the narrow doorway of the kitchen. Nino can smell sweat and alcohol on the man’s body. “Hey Jan, you see what you’ve done?” Richard says over their heads. “Any more great ideas?”

  Jan uses the side of her finger to wipe mascara from her eyes. “Maybe they’ll take money,” she says, sniffing and then digging in her purse to pull out a checkbook.

  “Of course,” Richard says to his wife. “I thought you might say something like that.” He turns to Nino and her father. “So you want a piece of the action?” It’s an absurdly gangsterish thing to say, and he says it with all the awkwardness you might expect of a man in his late forties who has weathered two bankruptcies and fears losing his home.

  Her father looks at Richard and says nothing, just holds the man’s gaze for a drawn-out moment, jaw muscle pulsing. And then Richard turns to the side, waves his hand in the air, lets them through. “Go on then, screw it, whatever,” he says. “What makes you think they’ll believe you?”

  Father and daughter go out. The neighborhood is quiet. When they reach the sidewalk, her father almost trips on something in the dusky light. A tennis ball. He bends down, picks it up. Then he turns around and hurls it with all his strength at the house, letting out a strangled sound. The tennis ball bounces off the brick facade, then rolls into the ornamental shrubs at the edge of the lawn.

  “Come on,” Nino says, and takes his hand, leading him along the sidewalk. They cross the street and continue on to the next intersection, heading for home.

  Suddenly her father stops short. “Stupid, stupid,” he says, hitting his head.

  He sits down abruptly on the curb. Nino sits down beside him. “I should have taken the money.”

  The pavement still retains faint heat from the day’s sun. Overhead, bats fly past, emitting faint cries. Her father hides his head in his hands.

  Nino stands up and starts walking back to the house. It feels like a long way—somehow longer returning than going. She rings the doorbell, surprised how suddenly calm she’s feeling, and when Jan opens the door, she tells her that she’s come for the money.

  Jan goes to get her checkbook while Nino waits silently in the kitchen. Returning, Jan fumbles the checkbook open, presses it flat against the counter, uncaps a pen; Nino observes that her hands are trembling, and she experiences an odd satisfaction in the woman’s discomposure. “How much?” Jan says.

  “Five hundred dollars,” Nino says. It’s a number that she plucks from the air, one that sounds large to her ears. She watches as Jan writes the amount, leaving the “pay to” field blank, then signs it and tears it out of the book. When she hands the check to Nino, the woman avoids making eye contact.

  “Was that the doorbell?” Richard calls to his wife from the other room.

  Nino goes out the door, holding the check in a damp hand. Her father won’t want to take it from her at first, she knows, but he will eventually; what else can he do? It might be enough to cover the costs of the immigration lawyer.

  She turns onto the sidewalk. A breeze stirs the tops of the trees. Transformers hum on telephone poles. A few stars shine dimly overhead. When was the last time she’d actually stared up at the night sky? She’s remembering how her father had bought her a telescope for her tenth birthday, how impatient he’d been for darkness to try it out. He’d spent almost an hour getting it set up for her, slapping mosquitoes, making tiny adjustments of the lenses, while she’d read a book on the couch. Come quick, he’d said, running back into the apartment. So she�
��d followed him outside, into the narrow gravel lot at the rear of the building beside the trash bins. Look, he’d said: Jupiter. She bent down and put her eye to the lens but saw only darkness. In the time between them, the earth had kept turning, and the planet had fallen away from view. But she’d kept looking through the lens, imagining it hanging like an earring in the velvet of outer space. Do you see it? he’d asked. I do, she’d told him. I see it.

  ARTHUR KLEPCHUKOV

  A Damn Fine Town

  from Down & Out

  A little boy in a red cape whooshes past me on the early-morning train. He’s dead set on flying down this musty subway car headed for the airport. Kid Cape.

  Heh, I must’ve had a costume like that for Halloween. Probably wore it too long too.

  No one I scouted paid any attention to me thanks to this nondescript jacket in this indifferent pose with this vague stare. But this kid spins around, runs back, and eyeballs me. He’s my daughter’s age.

  “POW!” Kid Cape says with a grimace and a tiny, hairless fist pointing at my nose. “I stopped you!”

  I look around. The tourists are still asleep in the daze of the early train rocking us all from side to side. Good.

  He wants a reaction like I used to. But I can’t give him one. Another disappointed kid.

  Go away, little man. This is cute, but I can’t even smile. I need you to go away.

  Kid Cape stares at me, not budging. His little fist trembles. The gray, uncorrupted eyes behind that cheap mask are intent on not being polite. He knows what I am. We all know what I am.

  But I promise, I’ll only do this as long as necessary. So just go.

  I raise my hands, bow my head, and almost close my eyes.

  “Whoosh!” The kid makes his own sound effects.

  I glance up and Kid Cape’s farther down the train car. He stops under one of those hanging hand straps—nooses for the nine-to-five crowd.

  Kid Cape tries the same pow trick with a seated fella daydreaming in our car. A funny suitcase separates him from the hero. He smiles, and the kid takes off giddy, downright inspired.