Blood on Their Hands (Mystery Writers of America Presents: MWA Classics)

by Brendan DuBois

  “Get money on it without going to jail.”

  “Where they gonna call, One-Eight-Hundred-Sand?”

  Buddy’s face falls. “Oh, yeah.”

  I ask, “You find the fancy clothes too?”

  JoJo’s wavy hair had recent water on it. All along I’d figured he was sweet on Cindylee. He was sure looking sprite this morning, and his eyes were clear as the wink of a dime.

  “Lady in a alley tossed ’em out a window,” he says. “Seen me passing by, said, ‘Now there’s a fella’d look good in these.’ Whoosh, plop!, I get a new wardrobe.”

  “Right,” Cindylee says, “and I am from Par-ee.”

  “Don’t argue what the Lord provides,” Buddy says, his face open to the wonder of it all.

  “This female philanthropist toss out the Rolex too?” Cindylee said.

  “I told you,” JoJo says with a hurt look, “I found it on the beach.”

  And that was all he was going to say. He turned his face so that from the side he looked like a real mad cat.

  We walked up the sidewalk to the bakery near the hotel and bought two chocolate-chip cookies.

  Next day, no JoJo.

  Day after that, no JoJo.

  He wasn’t at the Methodist church where they give out soup and sometimes even a room so you can take a nap. He wasn’t on the bench at Forest Avenue. He wasn’t at The Place, anytime we saw. At dusk, after the neckers went home, when we might find him scanning the rolled-around-in sand for pocket booty, he was nowhere to be seen.

  The day after that. Buddy stopped a cop who was already stopped, really. The officer was out of his squad car, sitting on a wall near steps that go down a full story to the beach. Buddy said he guessed the cop was looking for bad guys out on the flat green sea. For Buddy to stop a cop was a brave thing to do, because Buddy is shy as a bill in the breeze. He got up the gumption to ask the police officer about JoJo. The cop knew who JoJo was, even down to his last name, which, if I didn’t mention it, was Waverly, a fact I was not apprised of till the moment Buddy told me.

  Well, among other rude things the cop said, this is how he answered Buddy: “Guess your pal took a midnight dip after one too many Thunderbirds.”

  Buddy says, “Whaddya mean?”

  And the cop says, “He bobbed up yesterday near Three Arch Bay.”

  We couldn’t believe it, JoJo drowned.

  Cindylee said no way would that man take a swim and forget to come up—he didn’t like the water. No way would he be in it of his own free will. She wanted us to go talk to this cop herself. I said I’d as soon watch, thank you, from across the street.

  But I tagged along, me behind Buddy, behind Cindylee. While she walked, she lifted the edge of her pink skirt to her nose and eyes, sniffling at the news about poor JoJo. Beneath her skirt were long green pants and beneath those ankles thin as net poles. Meanwhile, I’m thinking about JoJo’s metal detector and that golf bag I could use because pardon me but my duffel’s ripped.

  We found the cop same place Buddy did, one hand and one foot on the low rock wall and his elbow propped on his thigh so his fist could hold his chins up. He wasn’t facing the water this time, but looking down-beach, along the row of houses hanging over the sand, where JoJo found his watch.

  The three of us coming toward the fella that way, I’m surprised he didn’t get shook up, but he barely glanced at us until Buddy spoke. “Officer,” Buddy said, “these are my friends here, Cynthia Lee and Harley Boone. Harley wants to ask you something.”

  I gave Buddy a look to kill but found my voice. “Uh, did JoJo Waverly have, like, a instrument for metal detection upon his whereabouts?”

  Cindylee’s eyes were asking what wave I washed in on.

  The officer shook his head and looked us up and down, each one.

  “Was there a golf bag, uh, recovered from the area of the happening? It would be white with green flaps and green stitching.”

  “I don’t believe so,” he said, blue eyes reading me.

  Cindylee was on him like a terrier on a mouse. She even moved up to his inner space, if you know what I mean, and the man leaned so far away I thought he might tumble off the wall.

  “You found him where exactly?” she demanded, a quiver in her voice. “In the water, out of the water, on the rocks, where?”

  The cop stood up then and pointed southward. “Spread-eagled on the sand,” he said, “crabs crawling on him.”

  I thought I saw satisfaction on his face. I could have shoved him over the wall.

  It flashed on me about how it must have been there for JoJo, cold and alone on the sand, and I had to change my thoughts to a picture of JoJo when the gulls came walking up to look in his face and he thought he was in Tahiti. Maybe he was in Tahiti, if Heaven or Tahiti takes men who think doors left open are meant for them.

  Then I remembered the gold watch on his wrist and asked the officer, “How about his, you know, clothes?”

  “The victim’s clothing is available for those who furnish him burial, but far as I know, there are no relatives of record,” the Mr. Blue said. “You know of any relatives?” He looked at me in a way made me want to see what was on down the road.

  “No, sir.”

  “Then I guess we’re done here.”

  Buddy rolled his eyes at me.

  We moved along. Back on the sidewalk, we passed by people eating. JoJo told us once that in Japan it’s impolite to eat and walk at the same time. I don’t know about that. I just wait for somebody to leave a half a sandwich on top of the trash, and I don’t care if he’s walking, chewing, and smacking the top of his head at the same time when he does.

  We slowed down at the Whaling Wall, which is where these big blue whales used to be painted on the side of a building by the hotel parking lot. The whales were smiling, headed out to sea. At first they used to head inland till somebody told the artist better and he did it over. Now they’re gone the way all things go, painted over for good, voted down by a city council that is supposed to know a wiser way. That morning though, when the whales were still there, Buddy moved under the baby one, and we all leaned there soaking up a cloud-peep of sun, while the hotel parking lot attendant glared at us but kept his distance.

  I said, “You notice that officer’s skunned-up knuckles?”

  “No ma am. I didn’t.” Buddy calls me ma’am sometimes. He is getting stranger all the time. I think he needs Vitamin B.

  “Did you notice that cop’s wrist, what he had on it?” This from Cindylee. Her eyes were bright as boat lights. She unknotted her sweater-arms from around her neck and fought her fists through them as the wind came up from the beach. “You should pay attention. You too, Harley.” She smelled like hotel soap pieces the Mexican boy sets out the backdoor. “JoJo’s gold,” she said. “Right there on his wrist.”

  “Gosh,” Buddy said.

  “Son-of-a…” is all I could say.

  “JoJo told me he saw somebody leave out those hangover houses with stolen stuff in a trash bag, twice,” she said. “I go, ‘It’s not you, is it, JoJo, taking that stuff?’ He’s like, ‘I may be ugly, but I’m not dumb.’”

  “You never told us that. About JoJo,” I said, “seeing somebody.”

  “Just ’cause I practically sit in your lap all day don’t mean I have to tell you every blasted thing.”

  “What else he say?”

  “He knew where the thief stashed the stuff. I’m all: ‘You stay away from that, JoJo. Don’t be poking around now.’ And he goes...you know what he goes?” She was looking at Buddy, a big-eyed baby if babies had a fringe of hair below the ears and needed an afternoon shave. “He goes, It’s an officer of the law, but don’t you be tellin’ nobody. An officer of the law who had found himself a way to finance his retirement.’ Then he says, ‘How’d you like to accomp’ny me to the City of Lights in the great state of Nevada, all the way in a limousine with your feet up on the seats and me pourin’ champagne?’” Two tears rode down her cheeks like steam drips on a restaur
ant window. “JoJo’s gold, that Roll of Decks come outta that cop’s stash,” she said.

  “No way!” Buddy cried out.

  “Don’t be lookin’ to a brass shield for justice, Buddy, nor God neither,” she said.

  My heart was throwin’ horseshoes. “I’d sure like to get my hands on that metal detector,” I said. “First off, maybe I’d use it to brain some certain body.”

  Cindylee tore away up to the sidewalk when the parking lot attendant came strolling our way. We followed.

  In a little bit, she said, “I knew that cop in vocational school. He was a noodle then, and he’s a noodle now. He made pipe bombs in his parents’ garage.”

  Buddy and I tossed glances. It’s hard to know sometimes. We walked on, and after a block we went on our separate routes.

  After that, I didn’t see Buddy or Cindylee for two whole days, and I figured they’d marched off for better pickin’s, but I was lonely and sorry they’d just take off without a goodbye. It was harder getting along without splitting the spoils, you might say.

  I stopped in to a little Unity church for breakfast the third day. The woman there has extra bagels a lot of times. Then I went back to The Place. Lo and behold, Cindylee and Buddy were there. And Buddy had JoJo’s golf bag.

  I said, “Where the heck you get that thing?”

  “Asked for it,” he said. “I spotted it in the officer’s car the other day when he had the trunk open, and I just asked for it. Imagine. Buddy, the one who’d wet his pants before asking could he use the rest room. JoJo’s metal detector was in the bag, he said, but it was broken. The plate thing was gone off the bottom, and it sure couldn’t detect itself. Since then, Cindylee had been using the handle to turn over trash, so she wouldn’t have to bend so much. Her cheeks were rosy and she had on a new dark sweater.

  Buddy offered me the golf bag, and I took it with genuine thanks. “But what are you going to use?” I asked.

  “Holy crackers,” he said, “what am I going to do with that clumsy thing when I’m sittin’ in Tahiti?”

  “It’s Tahiti now, huh? And just how you going to go about that?”

  The world is full of bounty,” he said, “and we are obliged to partake of it.” He was wearing a pretty good bomber’s jacket he’d found by the restaurant where all the waiters wear bow ties. I shook my head and looked at them both real close, but if there were tales to tell, the two of them had a bad case of laryngitis.

  Buddy started acting really different after that day: smiling at Cindylee all the time, spitting out more words than crackers have crumbs. Once I came upon him and Cindy eating chocolate-chip cookies all by themselves. I was hurt, but didn’t let on. Cindylee had on red pants and men’s socks with a diamond pattern that made her ankles look thicker. Maybe that gain was from all the cookies, I can’t say.

  Then last week I’m looking at the front page of the local paper through a news rack, and at first I couldn’t be sure because of a split running down the middle of the plastic shield that was all yellowed from sun, but then I make out it’s a picture of our Mr. Officer Blue. I put real money in the newsstand slot and took out the paper. For good measure I took out a couple other copies, too, and left them on top for those less fortunate than I.

  It seems Mr. Blue had reached the end of his days upon the rocky shoals. That is to say, Mr. So-Sure-of-Himself was not as surefooted as he might have liked to be. He fell off the very same wall upon which he formerly gazed at pirates on the sea. That sorry man suffered a plenitude of head wounds. In a tidelet below, he was found face down.

  The paper said he was last seen conversing with a woman in dark clothes and a beret. That was two weeks ago.

  Myself I’ve only tried on one beret, the one I recently took ownership of. I don’t know why people wear them. They seem like only half a hat to me. I keep meaning to give this one to Buddy for his cold noggin, but it’s hardly any good because it only covers one ear at a time. It works okay to put my small stuff in if I have a rubber band to twist it off with. But I definitely should offer it back to Buddy. It was in the golf bag, down the bottom, when he gave the bag to me, so I guess he came upon it first. Maybe it’s the one that woman who the paper said was talking to Mr. Blue before he took a Humpty-Dumpty fall off the wall, who knows? All I know is, it still has sand in it no matter how I beat it out, like someone used it for a bucket for booty, just like me.

  Come to think of it, that beret just might look good on Cindylee. It’s been a while since I seen those eyes a-glitter. Maybe I’ll truck on down to The Place and see if Buddy and her are still stuck up or maybe, shoot, stuck together. Yesiree.

  Black Heart and Cabin Girl

  Shelley Costa

  Here is how the story ends: he buys an ax. It’s a Sears Craftsman ax and it feels right in his hands, smooth and heavy, and he has always been satisfied with his Craftsman table saw and belt sander. Affordable and reliable tools, that’s what he’s always liked. Chopping yourself some wood? the salesman asks, whose name pin says Jimmy Thirteen Years Outstanding Service. Yes, chopping some wood, he tells Jimmy, who smiles. As he signs the Visa charge slip, it strikes him that at some point a man starts to shape what he says to please. If he had started sometime before the final two days of his life, he wonders whether the story would end differently. Would he, for instance, be buying this ax? When he gets home, he stands the ax in the corner of the bedroom, then decides to move it to the basement because it seems cruel to alarm Diane, the woman he married four years ago after he drove Jo Verdyne forever from the lake. In a dark corner behind the furnace, he stands the ax against the cinder block foundation, next to the small wooden stool he had set there just yesterday to hold the straight razor that had once belonged to his father, who used to enjoy stropping it into a kind of fatal perfection. When he turns the blade softly against his hand, he marvels how, with the merest touch against his skin, a line of blood suddenly springs, and where that line begins is Black Heart, and where it ends is Cabin Girl.

  Jo sat alone on the port side of the water taxi, where she’d be able to see up the north arm of Lake Temagami on her first trip back in sixteen years. Seal Rock, Devil Bay, Point of No Return—even Stone Maiden Cliff. Places where the wind would kick up suddenly and churn the water into threatening white caps, places where the steep rock discouraged casual climbers before they discovered the warm, breezy lookouts at the top, scented with mats of brown fallen pine needles. She knew the taxi would turn west and head across the wide channel by Bear Island, the Indian Reserve, before the landmarks from her childhood would come into view, but she liked the idea that Temagami had gone on without her all these years. Half her life had been spent elsewhere, after all. Despite what she thought when she was a barefoot eleven and learned to clean fish and run the skiff almost as well as old Will Stanley, the caretaker at the lodge. Despite what she thought when she was twelve and the Hackett boy had kissed her one night on the main dock only she wasn’t sure she liked it very much, even though she told him she did.

  The water taxi Doral, with an outboard the size of a doghouse, sputtered through the No Wake zone at the landing, then flew her through the gap where the lake opened up, veering around shoals in a path rippled by a light wind from the southwest. The lake water, in some places hundreds of feet down to boulders left behind by the last Ice Age, was blue and green and gray, all the colors of clean and cold. She was five hours north of Toronto—and twelve hours north of Baltimore, where she taught baby chemistry for nine months a year at Johns Hopkins and had a townhouse she called home for want of a better term. It was May twenty-ninth, and according to Ellroy, the driver, who had the words skateboarding is tattooed on one chunky bicep and not a crime on the other, the ice had gone out late just two weeks ago. He smirked at her, like the information was sexy somehow, and turned back to his windshield.

  Three years ago, her grandfather Carl Verdyne had died and left her the lodge Wendaban—a grand old two-story log building with eighteen rooms and a wraparound porch—whi
ch had been in the Verdyne family since 1904. Jimmy Stewart had fished there. Carole Lombard had lounged there. It had hosted titans and famous runaways and wonderful, wealthy derelicts who were looking for good food, drink, and a bed in a wilderness setting for a week. Those were the days of the great passenger boats that glided up and down the lake in a kind of ephemeral elegance. The days of fish crematoria, where all the uneaten bass and pickerel and lake trout were heaped and burned, days when an abundance of all things created only festive kinds of problems there in the Canadian Northwoods. Jo only heard about those days. By the time she was growing up, the movie stars were gone and the fish were an event, middle-class families from upstate New York were the guests, and the only wealthy derelicts who still came were completely uncelebrated.

  For the first year after her grandfather’s death, she denied the place, let the employees go, and paid the taxes. For the second year, she howled silently at the pain of the inheritance, fretted about the former employees, and wondered just how much longer the one-hundred-year-old logs of Wendaban could stand without any human attention. There were a couple of faceless offers to buy, during this time, and it was only the possibility of letting Wendaban go out of the family forever that made Jo realize she could never do it. She was no lodge keeper, but maybe the beautiful Wendaban was no longer a lodge. In the third year after her grandfather left her the property where she had spent the first thirteen summers of her life—until the accident—or what she called the accident, the thing she could never name without capsizing into her own doubts—she gave up and hired a Toronto lawyer with expertise in setting up nonprofit organizations, a couple of Wendaban’s former employees, and twenty minutes ago, Ellroy the water taxi driver, who, according to his tattered business card, also provided firewood and laundry service: we get you there, then keep you warm and clean.

  She moved into her grandfather’s old room on the first floor of the lodge because it got the morning sun, and she took the handle “Cabin Girl.” When we’re all grown up, Christine had said when they were twelve, we’ll have our own VHF radios, and you’ll be Heiress and I’ll be Cabin Girl and we’ll call each other all the time. Cabin Girl was all that was left of Christine, so Jo took it, though no one else knew why.