The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

by Jonathan Lethem

  “If a seven-year-old can play it, then the goddamn cat can probably play it.” But then something twinkled behind my father’s eyes. “He does have today off, though. I should call and see if he wants to pop on down to the Chalet.” My father waggled his fingertips in anticipation of a frothy pint at his favorite nearby tavern.

  My mother came out of the bedroom, holding a dress on either side of her.

  “No one’s going to the Chalet. We’re having dinner with the Marklesons. Which one of these should I wear?”

  It was as if someone had opened a valve and let all the air out of my father. He deflated back into the couch as, onscreen, a tetrahedron of swimmers kicked their legs in unison.

  “The one on the left.”

  “Really?” my mother said. “I like the other one.”

  Making eye contact with me, he said, “So then why did you ask?”

  “I just wanted my opinion confirmed. Which you’ve done. Thank you.”

  My father shook his head as if to say, You see what I have to deal with?

  Dodging puddles down Beech Street, it occurred to me that our predicament with the reward money was not unlike that of the NFL players trying to get a proportionate slice of the financial pie they risked injury, week after week, to produce.

  Benny said, “I give your performance a B.” He paused and added, “Minus.”

  “What? We know he’s home.”

  “We know he’s not working. Why, in the name of Yoda, did you not simply call him?”

  “You’re like the mayor of duplicity! I’m following your lead.”

  Benny shook his head and we climbed the front steps of Uncle Stan’s house and rang the doorbell. “If he’s not home I don’t know what we’re gonna do.”

  But Uncle Stan opened the door.

  “Well, if it isn’t my favorite nephew and Little Lord Shortpants! Come on in.”

  Still a bachelor, Uncle Stan’s place suffered, both decoratively and olfactorily, from a lack of female inhabitance. Wrinkled pants lay jettisoned across furniture. Mismatched shoes rested wherever they’d been kicked off. Across from the couch, a recliner was aimed directly at the television instead of at an angle that promoted conversation. The whole place smelled as if someone had just prepared French onion soup, in bare feet, while farting nonstop. Benny, who was accustomed to a meticulous organization of toys and regularly vacuumed rugs and a rigidly charted rotation of Minuteman Candle Company fragrances at his apartment, now walked into my uncle’s house and sat down and said nothing. It took me a moment to realize he was holding his breath.

  Uncle Stan fell into the recliner. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  I said, “We’ve got some information. Kind of a lead.”

  “Go on,” said Uncle Stan.

  Not sure how to proceed, and getting no help from Benny, I said, “Well, there’s this house across the street from our school.”

  My uncle said, “I’m with you so far.”

  I turned to Benny, who only nodded.

  “The one with the pizza place and barbershop.”

  “I’m familiar with it,” said Uncle Stan.

  Beside me, Benny began to turn blue.

  I said, “We think Mickey Thurston is hiding out there.”

  Benny’s withheld breath exploded in a great salivary wheeze.

  “No! Not like that!” he cried.

  “Take it easy!” I said.

  Benny let out an animal wail as if his brain had short-circuited. “Goddamn it! You dangle the information! You don’t come right out with it!”

  He gasped for air and said, “Mr. Zinn, are you running a dog kennel in here? Or maybe you’ve got a barrel of vinegar fermenting in the kitchen?”

  “Well, well, well,” said Uncle Stan. “If it isn’t Woodward and Blowhard. What makes you think it’s him? I mean, hiding out this close to Walpole seems reckless, even for ol’ Mick.”

  “That’s what I said!”

  But then we told him about the bandages and the raccoon eyes and the lingering in a third-floor window all day and pacing the sidewalk as if his getaway were imminent. Uncle Stan scratched his chin and got up to fetch a beer from the kitchen and Benny lunged for the window and sucked the outdoor air. When he came back into the room Uncle Stan told us to run on home, that he had some things to look into.

  We were in English class the next afternoon when we heard the sirens.

  “And so our unnamed narrator attempts to tell us not that he is innocent of murdering the old man, but what?” Ms. Hannum surveyed the room.

  Generally speaking, I took a casual approach to reading assignments. I’d skim the material or buy CliffsNotes and wing my essays with an above-average degree of success. But “The Tell-Tale Heart” was like four pages long, and I enjoyed it, so I raised my hand.

  Before Ms. Hannum could call my name Benny said, “That he’s not crazy.”

  “Very good, Benjamin,” said Ms. Hannum.

  I said, “If you cut me off one more time I will knock you the fuck out!”

  Everyone froze. Ms. Hannum’s jaw hung slack. Dead leaves rattled outside the window.

  “Mister Zinn. I, for one, am shocked by your vulgar tongue.” Beside me, Benny snickered at her choice of words. “Apologize to Mr. Silver this instant.”

  “Me? He’s the one who didn’t raise his hand. What about protocol?”

  “Broken protocol is no cause for profanity. Apologize.”

  “It’s okay, Ms. H. Ollie’s a little on edge today,” said Benny. “Speaking of protocol, I have a question of my own.”

  She gripped the bridge of her nose. “Proceed.”

  “The guy put the body parts ‘under the floorboards.’ Wouldn’t the cops have smelled something?”

  Ms. Hannum sighed. “The police arrived very shortly thereafter.”

  “Okay, fine. But let’s say he managed to keep it together for the interview. He still would’ve had to live with the smell for a while. Why didn’t he just bury him? And how, in eighteen-whatever-year-this-was, did he get all those body parts from the tub to the living room without leaving a trail of blood? It’s not like he had trash bags or a plastic tarp.”

  “Mr. Silver, literature needn’t always be taken literally.”

  Ms. Hannum turned to erase the chalkboard, which was when the police cruisers arrived out on Chickering Road with much fanfare, shattering any plans she might have had for the rest of the period. We craned our necks to see over the windowsill from our seats, until finally she said, “Go,” and we dashed to the windows.

  The cops surrounded the building, backs to the wall, guns drawn, beacons blazing atop the cruisers. One of them kicked in the door and they raced up the stairs. Now that he was on the verge of capture, I wanted Mickey Thurston to burst from the third-floor window and leap to a power line and swing safely into a convertible and outrun the cops all the way to the border. I didn’t care about the money. I now realized that we were more like the greedy NFL owners than the underpaid gladiators on the field. Mickey was the real hero here, stealing from the fat-cat bankers, and Benny and I had to go and rat out Robin Hood just so we could buy more Star Wars figures than we’d ever need in three lifetimes. We were wrong, I mouthed to him, and he squinted at me, misunderstanding, but when we turned back to the window, the cops came out of the building empty-handed, scratching their heads.

  The following Friday night, Benny and I were in my living room watching TV, my mother squeaking her highlighter over the pages of her anatomy textbook, when the sliding glass door flew open.

  “Weekend’s here! Who wants to go out for pizza?”

  My father rarely entered rooms quietly. He preferred to burst into them as if streamers and balloons followed closely behind.

  My father’s car was a 1973 Saab Sonett, a weirdly esoteric limited-edition car. By the early ’80s it had acquired a cult status among its owners—and its owners alone, one of those clubs that absolutely no one but its members even remotely give a shit about. His
Sonett was a very singular shade of red-orange, three parts ketchup to one mustard, and that, coupled with its peculiar nose-heavy contour, didn’t so much turn the heads as furrow the brows of pedestrians, as if the car’s presence suddenly made people question what country they were in. The point is that my father’s two-seater would never accommodate the four of us—though this isn’t really the point, is it? I’ve gotten so far off point with board games and bank robbers and human anatomy and Star Wars and the body under Poe’s floorboards, a shield I’ve erected to block the thing I’ve been trying so hard not to look at directly this entire time—so he climbed behind the wheel of my mother’s car, a brand-new Oldsmobile Delta 88, and she and Benny and I piled in. Gone are the days, I’m afraid, when a plating line manager and his nursing student wife could get a loan for a brand-new sedan, gleaming white, with a plush velour interior. As far as I was concerned, it was the stretch limo of a country music star.

  I should have seen what was coming when we pulled up in front of King’s Pizza.

  “King’s?” I said. “We always go to Star Pizza.”

  My parents exchanged a look I could not decipher.

  Inside, we gazed up at a menu that was nearly identical to Star’s and yet all wrong and foreign-seeming, like my father’s Saab. He mused, loudly, to the guy behind the counter, “Thought I saw a FOR RENT sign outside. You got a recent vacancy upstairs?”

  The guy shrugged. “I just work here. I don’t own the building.”

  At dinner my father managed to drop the words bank, rob, escape, and even fugitive into our conversation. As we awaited the falling ax, my father chomped joyously on pizza crust, loving every minute of it.

  Afterward, back in the car, he said, “Anyone feel like swinging by . . . Shoemaker’s?”

  Before I could answer, Benny said “I do!”

  Goddamn him. What did he care, anyway? A lecture from somebody else’s parents was meaningless, irrelevant as a Belgian tax schedule. My father dragged us all down there to witness an obvious burlesque of his being very interested in a black-and-white photo of the actor Mark Hamill, encased in bandages. Naturally, they had never stocked nor heard of such an item.

  “Oh, really?” He turned around to face Benny and me while my mother leafed through the latest issue of Wonder Woman. “What do you two have to say for yourselves?”

  “Sorry,” we said in unison, and he led us back out to the car. Statistically speaking, it was more likely that our mysterious bandaged man was a race-car driver, or a boxer, or a fighter pilot, or any number of other possibilities, rather than one specific bank robber on the lam. But we believed what we believed. We manufactured certainty out of thin air and headlines and wishful thinking. My father thought he could teach us a lesson, something about deception, about how you weren’t supposed to lie to people in order to get something you wanted. Especially your family. But we didn’t learn not to lie; we learned where our lies had met resistance. We got better at it. And that night we drove away from Shoemaker’s, safely contained in the Oldsmobile’s interior of cornflower blue.

  Like a shuttled roll of microfilm, thirty years would scroll past with shocking speed and have their way with all of us, leaving rapidly growing masses in my father’s lungs.

  On the same coffee table beside the same couch, I set the same board game down between my father and me, the one with the colored pegs and the plastic shield and the guesswork. Twelve moves to get it right. It’s not enough. You could have a thousand moves and still get it wrong.

  An oxygen tank helps my father breathe. My mother naps in the bedroom, exhausted, her professional expertise now called upon at great length in the home. Clear plastic tubes loop over each ear. The periodic aerosol burst of the tank keeping the oxygen saturation in his lungs above a specific threshold. The rhythmically identical coughs lighting up his chest from the inside.

  “This time I’m code-maker,” I say.

  “Fine.” He coughs and says, “Let me ask you something. Remember that house?”

  “What house?”

  He shakes his head. “You know what house. Who was in it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You told your uncle it was Mickey Thurston.”

  “I told him I thought it was.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Certainty?”

  “You were certain enough to call the cops.”

  “There was a big reward. That kind of cash, what’s the harm in a shot in the dark?”

  “No harm for you, but for the potentially innocent guy upstairs . . .”

  “Everyone’s potentially innocent,” I say.

  He chuckles, which induces another coughing fit. “Don’t make me laugh.”

  “Sorry. Besides, they never found ol’ Mick.”

  “That’s not the point. My point is, the reward made it okay for you to take a leap of faith, as long you didn’t have to absorb the risk if it turned out you were wrong.”

  “Why are you asking me this?”

  “I think you know.”

  We look at each other over the coffee table, the clean slate of Mastermind’s pegboard between us. This time I can see the answer but my father cannot. Or maybe neither of us can. Maybe nobody can. The word regret comes from the Old French, fourteenth century, “to lament someone’s death; to ask the help of.” An impossible contradiction, asking for help from the last person on earth who can provide it. Right now I want invisible strings to yank my father up off the couch just so he can burst through the sliding glass door again, accompanied by his high-decibel cacophony, freed from the workday’s vaporous confines to prance around the apartment, loudly in charge again. I want to do the whole thing differently this time, without all the puzzles and deception. Nothing would slow the passage of time, but the time might be better spent.

  Still awaiting his first move, I say, “I don’t know the answer.”

  And my father laughs again. And coughs.

  And says, “Anyone who says they do is full of shit.”

  ANNE THERESE MACDONALD

  That Donnelly Crowd

  from False Faces

  I wanted peace of mind. I took the rattle and bang of cocaine. I wanted to be an English scholar. I traded stocks and bonds. I wanted the gentle rain of my Washington coast. I took the deadly smog of West LA. I wanted out. I stayed in. The year was 1983. President Reagan had our backs. We were young and rich. I needed to pay attention, watch my backside and know where I was headed. I needed God not to find me.

  I tiptoed through the upmarket wedding gifts scattered about the floor, past the white-satin wedding gown hanging on the door. I stopped at the three-tiered wedding cake, destroyed its fluffy white texture by burying the bride deep inside, and quietly, at two in the morning, I sneaked to the parked Audi with my new tapestry suitcase, a suitcase more elegant than the wedding dress, more 1980s than my future husband, more with-it than my wedding, more cool and fashionable than my crowd. The wedding, meant to take place the next day, Christmas Eve, was off. The drugs were done. I swore to live only in hushed rains and sleep with gentle people. I wanted a life shielded by the veil of a not-so-perfect existence. I needed God not to find me.

  I met Bridget Donnelly before I met Joe. She was a witch of a spinster who ran the only Dublin B&B open on Christmas Eve. She was a tall, thin woman in a straight black skirt and white blouse, a Dickensian crone in a long black dress and sweeping cape. I had hopped on the first overseas flight available. Once in Dublin, I hooked up with an American tour, a pretentious crowd of the retired and leisurely bored. We sat around a heavy oval table in flickering candlelight. Bridget’s hair was short and permed, her face small and round with a pointed nose and a receding chin, a chin in constant judgment of others. With bulging eyes of no apparent color—because no one ever cared to look at her eyes—Bridget Donnelly huddled in the corners of life. I hated Bridget Donnelly.

  Her brother, Joe, walked in. The story of my life. My narrative.
My history. Light as a breeze, he exuded a laughter that diminished every other man I had ever known, every golden penny I had ever earned, every rec-drug I could have afforded. A divorced man, an international computer specialist with an apartment in Germany, a house in London, an ex-wife in Sweden, a spinster sister in Dublin, an IRA brother buried in a rebel’s grave. How dangerously romantic. His dark auburn hair reflected strands of red in the firelight—his lightly freckled face, darting blue eyes, his tall, rough build.

  Our Christmas tour went to midnight mass. I dawdled behind until the chemistry shot across the room, landed on Joe, and two beings meant to be more than a blink of the eye sauntered into the church. We talked through the service, through the tour’s after-mass breakfast, through the quiet slumber of the old people. At four in the morning, after extraneous, superfluous, and diversionary banter about Ireland, the Troubles, his life as an international computer specialist, how he was back in Ireland to purchase land for some factory, I steered the conversation on to me. I told him how I came to Dublin, my quick escape from my own wedding meant to take place in LA on Christmas Eve.

  Joe put down his whiskey. “The thing I don’t understand, Colleen, is why wouldn’t you just marry him? Why would you run away?”

  Until that moment, I had thought it quite amusing—leaving my man at the altar, sneaking out of LA, secret savings stashed. What would have been funny among my very trendy LA crowd didn’t seem so clever that early Christmas morning, in a Victorian B&B, during a dark and rainy night, on an economically troubled and insignificant island. His seriousness sobered me.

  “It stopped being fun, I suppose.”

  “You ought to think about what you’re running from. Life is serious, you know. You’ve got to pay attention.”

  But I was too busy that Christmas morn to pay attention. I loved how he pronounced Colleen with the long o. My goal was to rein in this good-looking, sophisticated man. I needed to impress him with my worldliness, my experience, money, trading in stocks and bonds with commissions out my wazoo, with the fact that the major partner in my firm would soon be mayor of Los Angeles, so my crowd would not only be among the wealthiest young professionals around, but we’d be the most politically connected. Joe remained unimpressed.