The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17

by Lisa Scottoline

  Then her next thought, before she could stop it: But if he had, someone would come for him. Someone would take him away.

  Charlie and Bennie, smelling like men, sat on the couch half watching the Red Sox beat the Yankees. The two of them overwhelmed the room. Their flopping arms and spread-eagle. Their vile mouths, open and chewing. Their uproarious stink.

  Jo’s son was on full blast: “Man, you hear about that crazy nigger killed his mother? And his sisters? With a razor, then burned them up. Nigga got some balls though. Cut his own throat, too. Gotta give him credit for going out tough like that. Musta not liked his mama. Bitch musta been ridin’ his fuckin’ nerves. He took her out.”

  Bennie snorted as Charlie pointedly met his mother’s eyes and grinned. He raised a dirty glass of something clear.

  Whenever he was home now, which was less and less, Jo folded herself into the smallest corner of the place, stitched her lips shut, and learned to nod. She fried huge slabs of fatty meat, mashed mounds of potatoes, and became a regular at Mexico Supermarket. (She couldn’t shop at the Port Richmond store anymore because of the light-blue bags.) She crammed her basket with honey buns, jalapeño chips, taquitos, powdered doughnuts, Red Bull, ice cream, cigarettes, pork rinds, and moon pies, then slathered everything with butter and served it up to her ravenous ass of a son.

  She wouldn’t give him time or room to want for anything. She didn’t want him to realize that she’d already served her purpose. She wouldn’t give him reason to open her throat, burn her down.

  All Charlie did was eat, sleep off highs, and grow taller and wider. His pores leaked poison and stained the walls. Jo cooked and nodded, answered promptly to “Hey, bitch,” and hid her new notebook, a smaller one, behind a row of vases on a high shelf in her room. When she was sure that Charlie was out, she wrote poems to her new dead friend Leisa, who had a son who killed her.

  When they are done with us

  When they are done with us

  When there is no longer a road

  From our blood to theirs

  All we do is remind them

  of need

  And it is us who taught them

  never to need

  anything

  Suddenly there is no river deep enough

  for us

  No fire blue enough to strain for our bone

  No love

  at all

  Jo tried not to imagine what Charlie would do if he found this notebook, if he saw how she held whole conversations with a woman she did not know. She had lived for years just across the street. Jo wished she had spoken to her past the occasional nod, wished she hadn’t assumed they’d have nothing in common because the woman was black and Jo was white.

  No. Not the woman. Leisa.

  They could have shopped together at the market, waddling home laden with light-blue plastic bags filled with cans of tuna, spongy white bread, brown fruit. And when the moment was right, Jo could have taken Leisa’s hand and said, gently, Describe your son’s eyes.

  They could have saved each other.

  One morning Jo copied a poem she’d worked on the whole day before, trying to make it perfect.

  Leisa, it is hard to admit

  the poison that burned through our bodies

  and became them

  Hard to recite this crooked alphabet

  Hard to know we can no longer

  circle them with our arms

  and contain their whole lives

  Their horrible secret is how they

  burst like flowers from our bodies

  They damn us for remembering

  They damn us for wanting

  to sing

  that story

  It still wasn’t perfect, but there was something Jo felt she needed to do.

  She pulled the page carefully from the notebook, folded it four times, and wrote Leisa in her best flowing cursive. Then she crossed the street to the makeshift altar, a raggedy explosion of blooms and mildewing stuffed animals in front of 302 Richmond’s scarred shell. There had been people milling around the altar every day, but now there was no one. She studied it for a minute, then tucked the poem beneath a bug-eyed duck. She whispered a run-on sentence that may have been prayer.

  Then she walked down to the bodega to pick up coffee and copies of the Advance and the Post. Reading both the Staten Island and NYC papers was her entertainment, akin to watching Maury and Springer in the mornings. Wallowing in the grime and drama, she was reminded that she lived both in and close to a cesspool.

  The place was packed with people, which was unusual for the hour. There was that tragic hum again, that sad tangle of different languages in stages of disbelief. Jo wondered if something had happened during the night.

  At the newspaper rack, she read the headline and the first graph of the Post’s front-page story before she even picked it up.

  IT WAS MOM IN STATEN ISLAND MASSACRE HORROR

  The mother did it. The horrific murder-suicide that ended in an arson on Staten Island was committed by the deranged mom, who slit three of her kids’ throats before she killed herself and her baby in the blaze, law enforcement sources said yesterday.

  Autopsies showed that C.J., Melonie, and Brittney had pills in their stomachs. They were dead before the fire. They hadn’t just lined up and waited to be killed. They’d been drugged first.

  And the note: they’d found Leisa’s diary and compared the handwriting. She had written am sorry. She had left the note close to her son’s body, which was like putting a smoking gun in his hand.

  Jo felt a needle traveling in her blood. She picked up the paper and left, without talking to anyone, without paying. She didn’t remember her walk back home, but when she looked up, she was there. And so was Al, the ex-cop, hovering around her door, grinning like a Cheshire and, as always, leading with his zipper.

  “Hey, Jo-bean,” he hissed. “Been thinkin’ about you like craaaazzy. Came by as soon as I got a break.” His chapped lips brushed the side of her face, then his tongue touched. Jo thought maybe the heat of another body would burn away the rest of the day. Wordlessly, she let him in. Then, as soon as the door was closed, she blurted her usual fears, the fears a man was supposed to take care of. The fears were Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.

  “You know, that kid needs a father to keep his ass in line.” That was always Al the ex-cop’s first suggestion, although he never hinted at who that father might be. “You want, I’ll have some of the guys pick him up, scare the shit out of him.”

  Al seemed to have forgotten again that he was an ex-cop for a reason. Al seemed to have forgotten that once, sick with drink and aimlessly speeding in his cruiser, he’d scraped a sizable stretch of concrete barrier along the entry ramp from 440 to 278, stopped, and was promptly hit from behind by a grandmother in a Subaru station wagon. Two squad cars showed up to sort through the mess. They secured the silence of the terrified granny, scrubbed the scene clear of Al’s airplane miniatures, and concocted a cover-up tale that would move a hardened judge to tears.

  But later, when Al was oh-so-vaguely pressed on the details, he caved and admitted... well, everything. Swilling in his cruiser. Shooting sparks as he hugged the barrier. Getting rammed from behind. And being helped by his pals in blue. Babbling, he even named the pals.

  Of course, he was fired. Even cooled his heels in the slammer for a bit.

  So none of “the guys” he spoke of so lovingly would be inclined to do any favors for good ol’ Al. Jo didn’t bother reminding him about the circumstances of his ex-ness. He liked playing cop, so she let him.

  He even fucked like one. Like he was alone. Everything he said to Jo—at Jo—was addressed to Al, the ex-cop: “Oh, you’re hitting that pussy today, boy.” “She’s gonna remember this.” “She’s gon’ be calling your name for days.”

  Jo had hoped that a body against hers would blur the day, dim the smell of fire. But not this body.

  When he left, her room smelled like his deluded monologue, his mise
rable spurt. The newspaper sat on the bedside table. The mother did it. Leisa had killed herself and her children. Tell me why, Jo tried to beg her dead friend. But what came out was Tell me how.

  Maybe the smiling C.J. she’d seen playing with his siblings and lugging home groceries was just another kind of Charlie, one who’d learned to paint his snarling face with light. Maybe Leisa was crazy, out of her mind, her head crammed with the kind of wounding Jo was beginning to know.

  Jo started to cry. She wept from bone, from memory, from loss. She wept for Leisa, for C.J., for the stranger who’d escaped her body and named her Bitch. She wept from lack of love, unleashed wracking sobs that hung wet in the air. She wept for the shadows that were Staten Island, the prison she lived in. She wept past the pushing open of her bedroom door, the brash boy who suddenly stood there.

  “Fuck you cryin’ for?”

  Jo’s head drooped as Charlie filled the door, swaying, smelling like he’d drunk something with blades. “It smells like ass in here,” he slurred. “Like your ass mixed with somebody else’s ass.” He laughed then. “Was the dick that good? It made you cry? Hell, if it wasn’t nasty sick, I’d hit that. Make you call my name. Give you some shit to cry about.”

  He lumbered off. Jo heard him fall into bed in the other bedroom, still laughing, snorting. Soon he would rock the house with snotty snores. He would sleep deep into the night as poison spilled from his pores. He would wake up hungry, snarling, looking to be fed up in this bitch.

  She pulled the notebook down from its hiding place, found her pen, and wrote another poem for Leisa, the mother, the murderer.

  Where did it seep into you,

  the ghost of the only answer?

  How did you pull it in,

  breathe it in, own it?

  How did you find the teeth

  you needed to take back your

  own body, to build a revolution

  in darkness? And how brave

  of you

  to take all of them

  with you

  There was more she wanted to say, but Jo was afraid that writing more would lead her to a road she couldn’t travel. Not the why, but the how. She craved Leisa’s strength (the how), not her weakness (the why).

  She went to the kitchen and pulled down a note Charlie had written and taped to the fridge months ago: DAMN GO BY SOME FOOD. Already she could hear his drunken snoring. She took the note back to her room, sat down, and began her work.

  Going back and forth between her son’s scrawled note and a page in her notebook, she worked for hours to get it right. The fat O. The swirl of the S. The strangely elegant Y. She felt Leisa gently guiding her hand as she traced the letters, traced the letters, mirrored the letters.

  Down the hall, Charlie sang razors. But in Jo’s room, he was writing an apology for what he was about to do. He was saying, I’m sorry, finishing with that strangely elegant Y.

  This time the dead boy would sign his name.

  BEN STROUD

  The Don’s Cinnamon

  FROM Antioch Review

  When burke returned to his rooms from his morning visit to the sea baths, Fernandita, his maid, was shaking the bugs out of his mosquito net. He lived in cramped quarters, on the second floor of an old mansion between the wharves and the post office. The mansion’s ground floor was given over to a molasses warehouse, and its top floors had been cut into apartments. Burke occupied one of these, an old bedchamber in the back of the building that was partitioned into three rooms and looked over the harbor. One room served as his bedroom, its neighbor as his small study and parlor, and the third room, barely a closet, was Fernandita’s.

  “Your food is on the desk,” Fernandita said, giving the net one more vigorous shake before sweeping the loosed mosquitoes and other insects onto a scrap of newspaper. A skinny, toothless, yellow-skinned woman past middle age, Fernandita was Burke’s only companion in the city.

  Inspecting his breakfast, Burke picked a green beetle from his eggs and tossed it into the grate, where Fernandita had lit a small flame, then he sat and ate as he read again the letter he’d received from Don Hernán Vargas y Lombilla. My business is most delicate, Don Hernán had written, giving no further clue to the nature of his problem. Burke hoped for a challenge, and let his mind wander once more, imagining all the possible conundrums the don might present him.

  He was at the start of his life, twenty-two, a free gentleman of color who had left his home in the lower Brazos not a year before. His mother had been a slave, his father a Texas sugar planter, and Burke had come to Havana after his father died, freeing him, thinking that here he might make use of his Spanish and his knowledge of the sugar business. But his various inquiries at those trading houses open to negroes met only with vague promises of later openings, and within four months he was down to his last pennies. It was then he’d read an account of a mystery baffling the city: a nun in the Convent of Santa Clarita had been poisoned, yet she seemed to have no enemies and the walls of the convent were most secure. Puzzling over the story and the details of the nun’s life, Burke had soon figured out how it must have been done. The dentist who visited the convent had mixed her toothpowder with arsenic. Burke wrote the captain-general with the solution, and the dentist, taken by the police, confessed to the crime. Unknown to the nun, she had been named in the will of a wealthy coffee grower, an uncle, and were she to die the legacy was to pass to a distant cousin—the man who’d bribed the dentist.

  At a loss for income and facing mounting debts, Burke had seen then how he might support himself. What’s more, he found he enjoyed the work. After the small fame he earned from the Case of the Poisoned Toothpowder came another, and soon he began to be approached at least once a week by habañeros burdened with seemingly insoluble problems. He took any case offered him, stringing together enough money to pay his creditors while slowly, steadily establishing his reputation.

  After he finished his breakfast, Burke was fetched by one of the don’s volantas. It was driven by a negro postilion and fitted out with soft leather seats, a Turkish rug, and, lodged in a teak case, a brass lorgnette for observing passengers in other carriages. As he rode, Burke tried the lorgnette but, feeling foolish, soon put it away, sitting for the rest of the trip with his hands in his lap. Within twenty-five minutes he was delivered to a sprawling estate near the top of the Jesús del Monte. The postilion stopped at the front door, and Burke alighted and was immediately led by another negro down a marble-floored hallway, into a courtyard with a tinkling fountain encircled by orange trees, and then into the don’s office, where gilt-framed ancestors stared down from the walls and old account ledgers filled the bookshelves. For fifteen minutes Burke sat alone. Then, at ten precisely, the don strode into the room. Burke had worn his dark coat, white waistcoat, and white drill trousers, the uniform Havana fashion demanded of its gentlemen, but Don Hernán, a stout man with gray, slicked hair and a waxed imperial, was in his silk dressing gown. He snapped at the liveried slave, who then stepped forward and presented two plates piled with eggs and sausages of the plump red variety they’d lately begun selling in the markets.

  “No, thank you, I’m quite full,” Burke said, refusing his plate with an apologetic smile. The don snapped again at the slave, and the slave transferred Burke’s servings to the don’s plate.

  Don Hernán did not speak as he ate, and Burke remained silent. He watched as the don cut each sausage into three pieces and shoved the pieces into his mouth, grease dribbling into his imperial. Now that he was here, Burke was nervous about the meeting. One of the island’s wealthiest sugar planters, Don Hernán held more sway in Havana than any other creole and could, with a single whisper, ruin Burke’s career before it had even begun. A man in his sixties who looked younger than his years—he was childless and a carouser—he was known to be fickle and demanding. Whatever the don’s request, Burke couldn’t afford to fail him.

  When the don finished eating, he shoved the plate away, dabbed at his lips, then lit a ciga
r. Once he had the cigar going, he eased back in his chair. “A month ago,” he said, “the manager of my Santo Cristo estate sent up a load of fruit along with two slaves to work in the house. The next day the mules, still bearing the fruit, were found grazing in a field off the Infanta highway, three miles outside the city. The two slaves were gone without a trace.”

  The don paused. Burke waited, uncertain if he was supposed to speak.

  “That was a month ago. A week ago I lost my treasure, my Marcita.” The don fumbled in the pocket of his gown and pulled out a gilt-framed daguerreotype and passed it to Burke. “My cinnamon,” the don said. “She is most precious to me.”

  Burke examined the photograph. A mulata in a muslin dress, her hair curled and tied with ribbons, stared out from the photographer’s painted landscape—a wooded hill, a distant temple. Her face was soft-featured, her eyes heavy-lidded, her mouth drawn into a coquette’s half-smile. Her skin, from the picture’s tint, indeed seemed a bronze, cinnamon hue. Burke gave the picture back to the don, who returned it to his pocket.

  “I’m not the only one with losses. It has been the talk of the Planters’ Club for weeks. Don Sancho is missing four slaves, Don Nicasio is missing five. And these just from the city. It seems to be the season of runaways.” He took a puff of his cigar, let out the smoke. “I have put her description in the papers with the offer of a reward, and I’ve had two of the city’s best slave hunters watching for her. All to nothing. So now I try you.” He put his hand on his desk and leaned forward. “I want you to find Marcita. It is hard, without my cinnamon here to comb my hair and soothe me.” In that moment, the man seemed truly distraught.