The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Don’t just put four of the same color,” I said. “It’s too easy.”

  “Don’t tell me how to play. Now, look away while I do this.”

  He set four pegs behind the shield and awaited my first guess.

  Across the street from our school lived a man with a broken face. He hadn’t always lived there, but for the past three days, freed by the final bell, we’d walk past the yellow buses idling along the driveway and there he’d be, sitting in a window, an X of bandages across his nose, a gauze skullcap held in place by a chinstrap of medical tape. Just two eyes and some nose holes. A mummified king, silent and cryptic, scowling at everything beneath him.

  Theories of his injury abounded.

  “Race-car driver,” said Benny Silver, my best friend. “Formula One would be my guess. And that is the result of one hell of a crash. Multiple flips, no doubt.”

  “What would a race-car driver be doing here,” I said, “in that dump?”

  The man smoked a cigarette in the third-floor window, two stories above Val’s Barbershop and King Pizza, side-by-side establishments that shared the storefront at 1608 Chickering Road.

  “He’s in that dump,” said Benny, “convalescing.”

  Benny gathered and hoarded vocabulary words from his mother’s grad school textbooks, words he planned to deploy in a courtroom one day, when he became a hotshot attorney.

  “No, I mean, wouldn’t a race-car driver rather convalesce,” I said, letting Benny know he hadn’t lost me, “in, like, an Italian villa, or a Back Bay brownstone, or a seaside mansion up in Newburyport? Those guys are loaded.”

  “The car owners are loaded,” said Benny. “Drivers are like jockeys, hired help on the payroll.”

  “Maybe he’s a boxer,” said Mike Walden, with his bowl cut and wristbands.

  “Maybe he is pilot of fighter jet,” said Nader Al-Otabi, whose father had brought his family here from Saudi Arabia as part of some top-secret air force contract that Nader couldn’t seem to shut up about. “Maybe seat ejects but cockpit remains closed.”

  “Again with the fighter pilots?” said Benny.

  “Yeah, we get it, man,” I said. “You know jets.”

  “And parachutes,” whispered Nader.

  The mummy’s head swiveled toward us and we bolted like impalas spooked by a lion.

  After school the next day Benny dragged me to Hanover Public Library. He’d seen something on the news the night before that demanded immediate follow-up. “I’ve had something of an intuition,” he said.

  “You sure it was on the news? Sounds like you’ve been watching Dr. Who.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with Dr. Who.”

  “What’s at the library?” I said.

  “Shh.” He put his finger to his lips. “Not until we get there.”

  Benny’s sense of showmanship required a visual aid, and he said nothing further until we strode up the library’s front steps and requested several rolls of microfilm from the librarian and commandeered a viewing machine. Even then I had to wait for him to shuttle back and forth across two of them before he finally pointed at the screen and said, “There.”

  The headline, dated July 22, 1982, read “Mickey Thutston Escapes from Walpole,” above a pair of mug shots of the notorious bank robber himself.

  “That was like three months ago,” I said.

  “Precisely,” said Benny.

  “Precisely what?”

  “Oh, Oliver. Don’t you see?”

  I hated when he did this. We were in the same grade. We’d been friends since we were toddlers. But Benny was four months older than me, and whenever he found himself in the know he tended to treat me more like a nephew with a learning disability than a friend.

  “See what?” I said, way too loud for the library’s hushed confines. An oil painting of one of Hanover’s founding fathers scowled at me from a gilt-edged frame. Any second the librarian’s head would peek around the corner to reprimand me.

  “Plastic surgery,” whispered Benny.

  I looked at the mug shot on the screen. Mickey Thurston was a handsome guy, there was no denying it. As in those old black-and-white photos of Paul Newman, Thurston’s eyes looked chiseled from diamonds, the kind of eyes that made a woman’s knees buckle. I’d heard stories about Mickey from both my father and my uncle Stan, who was a Hanover cop. Ladies’ man. Folk hero. Blue-collar guys loved him in a Robin Hood kind of way. He only stole from banks, and everybody, even the cops, knew that the banks were the real criminals. According to the article, Mickey Thurston robbed over forty of them, never used a gun, and was arrested, convicted, and locked up in the early seventies. Then, back in July, he and four other Walpole inmates crawled out of a hole in the ground at the end of a two-hundred-foot tunnel and made a break for it. Three of them had been recaptured by lunchtime the next day. A fourth by sundown. And that left Mickey, out there somewhere. Presumably out of the country. There were more rumors about Mickey Thurston’s whereabouts than theories about the broken man’s face.

  “Why would he hide here? We’re only like fifty miles from Walpole,” I said.

  “Fifty-two, to be precise.”

  “Fine. I see you’ve done your research. Wouldn’t you want to get farther away from the prison you’d escaped from?”

  “Unless that’s where everyone was looking for me. All I’m saying is that nobody would be looking for him this close to home.”

  Could this be the man in the window across the street from the school, wrapped in gauze? The eyes might have told me, but we hadn’t gotten close enough.

  “I don’t know, Benny. Maybe.”

  “There’s something else,” he said. “They’re offering a ten-thousand-dollar reward for any information leading to his capture.”

  That same fall, my mother began nursing school. The local community college offered a two-year RN program and she’d spent the summer reading anatomy and physiology textbooks in the same way my father read true crime and Stephen King in the living room recliner. Naturally, Benny considered her a medical expert worthy of consultation.

  After she rubber-stamped Benny’s extra place setting for dinner, we began our homework at the kitchen table. With half of our math problems completed, Benny locked eyes with me and jerked his head toward my mother, preparing food at the counter. This, evidently, was my cue.

  “So, um, how does plastic surgery work?” I asked her.

  “What?” she said.

  All Benny required was an opening. “What Ollie means is reconstructive surgery.”

  I decided that I’d slap him in the mouth if he corrected me again.

  She cocked an eyebrow. “Why?”

  Though we hadn’t discussed it, Benny was prepared. “You know Mark Hamill?” he said.

  My mother spun around and put a hand on her hip. “I’ve heard the name once or twice.”

  “Well, between filming Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, Mark Hamill got in a car accident and needed reconstructive surgery. Hence, his altered appearance in Empire.”

  “And this is why you’re interested in plastic surgery?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” said Benny.

  “Sorry, boys, but we’re still on the respiratory system. Trachea to bronchi to lungs, then on to matters of the heart. Tell me what you want to know and I’ll see if I can find it out.”

  I pretended to pull the question out of my ass. “How long, say, would someone have to wear bandages after having plastic surgery on their face?”

  The sliding glass door flew open. “Smells good in here!”

  My father worked at an electroplating shop. The chemical process, he explained to me, was a galvanic cell—in other words, a battery—in reverse, where the cathode of the circuit was the part to be plated and the anode was the metal to be plated upon it. Through the door he carried with him the odor of thousand-gallon vats of acid lining the plating shop floor beneath clouds of vapor that threatened all passersby with a fatal sickness. He crossed the k
itchen and kissed my mother and opened the refrigerator to fetch a beer. Over a greedy first sip he surveyed Benny and me sitting there, pencils and graph paper and math textbooks scattered on the table. Which was when he noticed the fourth place setting.

  “Whoa, hold on. Master Silver will be dining with us? You do realize,” he said in his best old-money accent, “that we will be serving a mere chicken this evening. A most pedestrian bird, I’m afraid, but the butcher was plum out of pheasant, duck, and partridge.”

  One of my father’s chief enjoyments in life was mocking Benny’s improbably sophisticated adolescent palate, loudly and at great length. Over at the Silvers’ apartment, Benny reveled in a paradise of exotic foods: cheeses pungent as gym socks; spicy brown mustards full of cracked seeds that stung your sinuses; venison and goose and even mutton on special occasions. My father threw a dishtowel over his forearm and pranced around in parody of a fancy restaurant’s bow-tied waiter. “Mayhaps the master would like to see a dessert menu?”

  “Moving on,” said Benny, “the reason we’re curious about facelift recovery periods is that Shoemaker’s is selling a picture of Mark Hamill with his head wrapped in gauze, taken, they claim, in August of 1977, even though the accident occurred way back in January. If I can call the photo’s date into dispute I might be able to haggle them down on the price.”

  Benny really had thought this through. Shoemaker’s Hobby Shop was a killer toy-slash-comic bookstore where he and I spent pretty much all our allowance money. I couldn’t be sure if this picture of Mark Hamill indeed existed, of what portion—if any—of Benny’s story could be corroborated later by my mother or father, though it seemed unlikely that they would cross Shoemaker’s threshold of their own volition.

  Either way, Benny’s deflection worked. At the mention of anything Star Wars–related my father’s eyes glazed over. “I’m gonna go change out of these clothes.” He left the kitchen, beer in hand, trailing fumes.

  “I’ll see what I can find out from my professor,” said my mother.

  Standing by the window of Ms. Hannum’s English classroom and grinding a No. 2 pencil in the sharpener bolted to the sill gave you a clear view across Chickering Road to our fugitive’s hideout. Benny and I spent the entire class breaking lead and alternating visits to the sharpener to see if he’d make an appearance. We’d each made three trips to the window and seen nobody, and I knew we were pushing our luck. The last time I got up Ms. Hannum said, “Mr. Zinn, you’re not carving the words, merely inscribing them onto paper.” I nodded and smiled, feigning embarrassment, knowing that the next time Benny or I got up she would lose her shit.

  But then—the snap of graphite behind me.

  “Yes, Mr. Al-Otabi?” said Ms. Hannum.

  “My pencil has broken,” said Nader. “I request permission to make pointed the tip.”

  “What sort of bargain-basement stationer is supplying you children with writing instruments?” she said. “Make it brief.”

  Nader tiptoed across the room and Ms. Hannum continued a lecture on Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” that had endured far too many interruptions already.

  “The first word of this story is . . .”

  Without raising his hand, Benny said, “True.”

  “Very good, Mr. Silver. What do you make of this? Someone else.”

  While she scanned the room, Benny whispered to Nader on his way past.

  “Psst. While you’re at the—”

  At full volume Nader said, “Benjamin, you must not distract me from my errand!”

  “That’s it! That’s it! That’s it!” cried Ms. Hannum. “What in blazes is so interesting by the pencil sharpener?” She crossed the room to see for herself.

  Benny shrugged and Nader held up his broken pencil.

  She turned to me. “What about you, Mr. Zinn? Anything to say?”

  “Well, you see, there’s this—”

  Benny cut me off again. “Ms. Hannum, as long as you’re over there, you see that building across the street? The one with the pizza place and barbershop? Do you by any chance see somebody over there?”

  If he finished another one of my sentences I would lay him out cold.

  “Mister Silver, the town of Hanover does not pay me to conduct surveillance at the behest of my students. With your permission, I would like to finish with Mr. Poe’s story.”

  Despite her reprimand, Ms. Hannum harbored a soft spot for Benny. Back on the first day of school he’d marched in the room and alerted her to the fact that his interest in law school demanded a comprehensive vocabulary and literary wherewithal, and he’d be damned if he’d settle for anything less than a straight A. I got the sense, ever since, that she considered him a scoundrel of the best possible sort, that if Benny were only thirty-five years older, she’d be all over his jock. On her way back to the chalkboard, she said, “For your information, Mr. Silver, there is no one in that building but a poor man recuperating from some grave injury, his head wrapped in gauze, smoking a cigarette in a lonely third-floor window.”

  Benny turned to me, wide-eyed, and held up six fingers. If our calculations were correct, the bandages would come off tomorrow.

  One of my mother’s professors had sketched a loose timeline for us: bandages for a full week, face swollen for another two, the bruised eye sockets of a raccoon for another month. On Saturday, with the whole afternoon at our disposal, Benny and I sat on a bench in front of the middle school, directly across the street from the fugitive’s apartment, shooting the shit. Benny owned Atari and my parents had bought me Intellivision, and we argued about their various merits and drawbacks. Benny conceded that Intellivision’s graphics boasted better resolution but maintained that the volume of Atari’s game cartridge library far outweighed the crisper picture.

  “It’s about having fun, Ollie, not simulating anything real.”

  “I guess.”

  “If we were after realism, then we might as well—”

  Benny froze and clutched my knee. Across the street a city bus pulled from the curb to reveal our fugitive, minus the bandages. I slapped his hand away.

  “Try to act cool,” I said.

  “So,” Benny said, way too loud, “like I was saying . . .”

  “Keep it together, man.”

  Benny shouted, “Graphics are a thing, but variety, I think, naturally is the thing . . .”

  Unable to conduct surveillance while speaking cogently, Benny tossed a word salad while our fugitive lit a cigarette and paced in front of Val’s and King Pizza. It was our guy, no doubt about it. Bruises rimmed eyes that were like glittering gems, as if he’d snatched the mask clean off the Cheeseburglar’s face. He looked up Chickering Road, awaiting something’s arrival, and then he flicked his cigarette butt into the street and went inside the building.

  “You know what this means?” said Benny.

  “This’ll be good,” I said. “And you can stop yelling. He can’t hear you anymore.”

  “Someone’s coming to get him,” he whispered. “If we’re going to collect that reward, we need to act fast. He’ll be in the wind before you know it.”

  “Maybe we should get Nader and Mike involved. We can cover more bases.”

  “Oliver, allow me to explain the concept of division,” said Benny. “Ten thousand divided by two equals five thousand, correct?”

  “Fine, then,” I said. “If you’re worried about your cut of the reward, then why get me involved? You could keep it all to yourself.”

  “Ollie, please. We’re best friends.”

  It delighted me to hear him say this aloud. Within the dynamics of our quartet, I had always cast myself as Benny’s right-hand man, the Chewbacca to his Han Solo, but there were times I wasn’t so sure. Sometimes I’d catch wind of sleepovers I hadn’t been invited to, and when we hung out the following week, I would find myself squinting with confusion at new terms that had entered the group’s private lexicon in my absence, phrases like douche chill, inside jokes with me on the outside. Hearing hi
m call me his best friend made my ribcage swell.

  That is, until he continued, “Plus, we’ll need to get your uncle involved.”

  Uncle Stan. My connection to the Hanover Police Department. That’s all it was.

  Uncle Stan lived on Beech Street, a couple of miles from our apartment complex. We decided to approach him at home the next day, while he was off-duty, instead of marching into Hanover PD and whipping the entire force into a lather and, as Benny put it, “gathering investors along the way.” Every person we told, Benny said, would want in on the reward money.

  “Not sure investors is accurate,” I said.

  “Irregardless,” said Benny. “We only tell your uncle, and if he can slap cuffs on Thurston by himself, we’re still talking thirty-three hundred apiece. Not too shabby.”

  We strolled beneath maples and sycamores and hemlocks in various stages of corduroy explosion, the sky gunmetal and threatening rain. I had managed to find out from my father, through a little code-making of my own, that Uncle Stan was off-duty on Sunday.

  “How’d you get his schedule,” said Benny, “without tipping off your dad?”

  “You’re gonna like this,” I said, and I told Benny about the NFL players’ strike and the Wide World of Sports and our game of Mastermind.

  I had just arranged my first guess.

  “Nope,” said my father.

  “You can’t just say nope,” I said. “You have to, like, illustrate where I went wrong.”

  “You were totally wrong,” said my father.

  “None of my pegs were right?” I said. “That’s barely even possible.”

  My father shrugged, and I got an idea.

  “Uncle Stan knows how to play.”

  “How nice for Uncle Stan.”

  “It is nice. He’s really good, too.”

  “Maybe I should call him up and congratulate him on his skill with shitty children’s games.”

  “Maybe you should, you know, unless he’s at work?”

  My father snorted.

  “It’s hardly a children’s game. Look. It says six and up on the box.”