The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  “My mom asked me to say hi.”

  Judy didn’t know why she was sitting in Mary Lynn Whalen’s living room. She barely remembered driving there, ringing the doorbell, stumbling over “Hello, I’m Judy Harmon, and you used to be my babysitter.” Maybe I want a babysitter right now, she thought. Maybe I want somebody to take care of me and sing me a lullaby and tell me I’m not a horrible person.

  “Well, that’s so nice of her.”

  Mary Lynn looked a little confused as she sat at the opposite end of her very nice couch. Sidney must have done all right over the years, Judy thought, thinking of how her own parents had been upwardly mobile, too. In her own generation, people were only moving on down.

  Mary Lynn said, “How are your folks?”

  “Dad died ten years ago. Mom lives in Arkansas, and really likes it. I’m in Detroit. I had a job in accounting with General Motors.”

  “I can’t believe a girl I babysat is old enough to be retired.”

  Judy didn’t correct the impression. She wondered if she looked as wild-eyed, shocked, and besieged as she felt. Probably not, or this woman, this stranger now, wouldn’t have let her inside. “What about your family?”

  “Oh, Sid and I are okay, I guess. We lost our daughter—I doubt you’d know about that.”

  “Sue? No, oh, I’m so sorry. When did she die?”

  “Oh, not that kind of lost, although honestly sometimes I think it might be better. I mean lost as in meth addict, all kinds of problems, prostitution, in and out of jail.”

  “Sue?” This time the single syllable held a new world of shock.

  “I know, who’d have suspected she would turn out like this . . .” She trailed off, stared down at the carpet.

  “I’m so sorry, Mary Lynn. I had no idea.” After a moment she said, abruptly enough to feel rude, “I want to ask you about one of the times you babysat for me.”

  “Okay.” Mary Lynn looked up, clasping her hands in her lap.

  “I came in late one day, from Bible school. It was raining really hard, and I’d lost my umbrella. And I told you that a man had scared me. That I’d run away from him because he tried to get me to go inside his church.”

  “What?” Her hostess seemed to pull herself together, and then she startled Judy by laughing. “Oh my gosh, I do remember. Didn’t I tell you not to worry?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Well, I should have, because that was just Sue’s uncle.”

  “Sue’s uncle?”

  “No, wait, I wouldn’t have told you that, come to think of it.”

  “Excuse me. It was some man I’d never seen before.”

  “No, I suppose you hadn’t ever met him, but yes, that was my husband’s brother. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you. I should have, so you wouldn’t be scared. He was custodian at that church, and we didn’t like to tell people that. So silly. We should have been open about it, but we were embarrassed. If we’d only known the humiliating things we’d have to tell people about our own daughter later . . . Sue wasn’t supposed to tell anybody about him, either.”

  “About him?”

  “That he was a janitor.”

  “Are you sure we’re talking about the same man? What was his name?”

  “Well, it still is his name, though he has forgotten it.” She shook her head. “James Marway was, is, his name, because he had a different father from my husband. Sidney’s dad died in World War II and his mom got remarried to Jim’s dad. I never liked him very well, to tell you the truth. Jim, I mean. There was just something about him, you know? He always loved children, though. So that was a point in his favor. His own kids are incredibly screwed up, though, so it wasn’t just us that ruined our kid.”

  Her eyes had endless regret and bafflement in them. “I think that’s why Sue didn’t come home with you that day, wasn’t that right? I think she stopped off to help her Uncle James with something.”

  “Changing a light bulb,” Judy said, her mouth dry.

  “Was that what it was?” Sue’s mother smiled, breaking Judy’s heart. “You really do have a good memory, to be able to recall a little thing like that.”

  Judy told her everything else she remembered of that day.

  She had to see him.

  “I’m his niece,” she told the nurse in his room.

  The overhead light was on, making the room unpleasantly bright, but it allowed her to see clearly the old man under the sheets. He wore white pajamas, and the blanket and sheets were tucked up neatly under his armpits, as if the nurse had just performed that service and then placed his long arms over the top of them. He looked grizzled, with white whiskers and long strands of white hair over his skull. “He needs a shave,” the nurse said, sounding apologetic.

  “Don’t worry,” Judy said, thinking of straight-blade razors.

  The nurse walked out of the room.

  Judy went up to the bed and stared down at him. His eyes were closed, and she wanted him to open them, so she said his name several times.

  “James. Jim Marway!”

  When he didn’t respond, she raised her hand and slapped his face so that his eyelids popped open and he looked around, confused.

  “That was for your niece,” she told him.

  He seemed to peer into her face without seeing her.

  “Sue,” she repeated.

  She was shocked at herself, and then momentarily scared that somebody might have seen her slap him. She turned to check if anybody was in the hallway and shielded her eyes from the overhead light. The part of her that was still scared and reticent felt as if it was crawling to the back of her being, and a new, bolder, furious Judy seemed to be taking over.

  She let it in, let it flood her with confidence.

  “I hate this light,” she said, and then walked over and flipped it off, throwing the room into dimness, and closed the door. “Oh look!” she exclaimed in a mocking little-girl voice. “The bulb has gone out! I think this light bulb needs changing, don’t you? Don’t you want to help me change this bulb, little boy?”

  The old man’s eyes cleared for a moment, and he stared at her with panic. She crossed back to his bed and jerked a pillow out from under his head and then put it onto his face and pressed.

  “And this is for the other children.”

  Just northwest of downtown, where the Kaw River flows into the Missouri and they start riding on east together, there is an overlook that wasn’t there when Judy was a child. If it had been there in the early ’50s, it would have been underwater. She stood with her arms crossed over a railing to watch the rush of muddy water below.

  She thought she remembered the river as having been busy with barges and tugs, but there were none that she saw now. It was as treacherous-looking as she recalled, however, full of rough current and dangerous eddies. She watched a big log pop up and down, get caught, sucked under, and then turn up again downstream. It made her stomach feel funny, like being on a roller coaster, as if she’d ever been brave enough to actually ride one.

  I’m braver than that now, she thought.

  She leaned harder against the railing so she could stare deeper down into the river. In the back of her mind she heard her own scared, childish self, yelling, Back up, Daddy! Back up!

  Judy put her right foot on the lower bar of the railing.

  “I swear that river could shoot us all the way to St. Louis!” her mother had exclaimed that day in the Chevy, during the great flood in Kansas City.

  Judy climbed to the top rung and brought her legs over until she could sit on the railing. The bar was slick with moisture, and it was easy to lose her grip.

  BILL PRONZINI

  Gunpowder Alley

  FROM Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

  FROM WHERE HE SAT propped behind a copy of the San Francisco Argonaut, Quincannon had an unobstructed view of both the entrance to the Hotel Grant’s bar parlor and the booth in which his client, Titus Willard, waited nervously. The Seth Thomas clock above the back bar
gave the time as one minute past nine, which made the man Willard was waiting for late for their appointment. This was no surprise to Quincannon. Blackmailers seldom missed an opportunity to heap additional pressure on their victims.

  Willard fidgeted, looked at the clock for perhaps the twentieth time, and once more pooched out his cheeks—a habitual trick that, combined with his puffy muttonchop whiskers, gave him the look of a large rodent. As per arrangement, he managed to ignore the table where Quincannon sat with his newspaper. The satchel containing the $5,000 cash payoff was on the seat next to him, one corner of it just visible to Quincannon’s sharp eye.

  The Argonaut, like all of the city’s papers these days, was full of news of the imminent war with Spain. The Atlantic fleet had been dispatched to Cuban waters, Admiral Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron was on its way to the Philippines, and President McKinley had issued a call for volunteer soldiers to join Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Quincannon, who disdained war as much as he disdained felons of every stripe, paid the inflammatory yellow journalism no mind while pretending to be engrossed in it, and wondered again what his client had done to warrant blackmail demands that now amounted to $10,000.

  He had asked Willard, of course, but the banker had refused to divulge the information. Given the fact that the man was in his midfifties, with a prim socialite wife and a grown daughter, and the guilty flush that had stained his features when the question was put to him, his transgressions likely involved one or more young and none-too-respectable members of the opposite sex. In any case, Willard had shown poor judgment in paying the first $5,000 demand, and good judgment in hiring Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, to put an end to the bloodletting after the second demand was made. The man may have been worried, frightened, and guilt-ridden, but he was only half a fool. Pay twice, and he knew he’d be paying for the rest of his life.

  Quincannon took a sip of clam juice, his favorite tipple now that he was a confirmed teetotaler, and turned a page of the Argonaut. Willard glanced again at the clock, which now read ten past nine, then drained what was left of a double whiskey. And that was when the blackmailer—if it was the blackmailer and not a hireling—finally appeared.

  The fellow’s entrance into the bar parlor was slow and cautious. This was one thing that alerted Quincannon. The other was the way he was dressed. Threadbare overcoat, slouch hat drawn low on his forehead, wool muffler wound up high inside the coat collar so that it concealed the lower part of his face. This attire might have been somewhat conspicuous at another time of year, but on this damp, chilly November night, he drew only a few casual glances from the patrons, none of which lingered.

  He paused just inside the doorway to peer around before his gaze locked in on his prey. Out of the corner of one eye Quincannon watched him approach the booth. What little of the man’s face was visible corroborated Willard’s description of him from their first meeting: middle-aged, with a hooked nose and sallow complexion, and average to small in size, though it was difficult to tell for certain because of the coat’s bulk. Not such-a-much at all.

  Titus Willard stiffened when the fellow slipped into the booth opposite. There was a low-voiced exchange of words, after which the banker passed the satchel under the table. The hook-nosed gent opened it just long enough to see that it contained stacks of greenbacks, closed it again, then produced a manila envelope from inside his coat and slid it across the table. Willard opened the envelope and furtively examined the papers it contained—letters of a highly personal nature, judging from the banker’s expression. They would not be the sum total of the blackmail evidence, however. Finding the rest was one part of Quincannon’s job, the others being to identify and then yaffle the responsible party or parties.

  While the two men were making their exchange, Quincannon casually folded the newspaper and laid it on the table, gathered up his umbrella and derby hat, and strolled out into the hotel lobby. He took a position just inside the corridor that led to the elevators, where he had an oblique view of the bar entrance. His quarry would have to come out that way because there was no other exit from the bar parlor.

  The wait this time was less than two minutes. When Hook-nose appeared, he went straight to the swing door that led out to New Montgomery Street. Quincannon followed twenty paces behind. A drizzle of rain had begun and the salt-tinged bay wind had the sting of a whip. It being a poor night for travel by shanks’ mare, Quincannon expected his man to take one of the hansom cabs at the stand in front of the Palace Hotel opposite. But this didn’t happen. With the satchel clutched inside his overcoat, the fellow angled across Montgomery and turned the far corner into Jessie Street.

  Quincannon reached the corner a few seconds later. He paused to peer around it before unfurling his umbrella and turning into Jessie himself, to make sure he wasn’t observed. Hook-nose apparently had no fear of pursuit; he was hurrying ahead through the misty rain without a backward glance.

  Jessie was a dark, narrow thoroughfare, and something of an anomaly as the new century approached—a mostly residential street that ran for several blocks through the heart of the business district, midway between Market and Mission. Small, old houses and an occasional small business establishment flanked it, fronted by tiny yards and backed by barns and sheds. The electric light glow from Third Street and the now steady drizzle made it a chasm of shadows. The darkness and the thrumming wind allowed Quincannon to quicken his pace without fear of being seen or heard.

  After two blocks, his quarry made another turning, this time into a cobblestone cul-de-sac called Gunpowder Alley. The name, or so Quincannon had once been told, derived from the fact that Copperhead sympathizers had stored a large quantity of explosives in one of the houses there during the War Between the States. Gunpowder Alley was even darker than Jessie Street, the frame buildings strung along its short length shabby presences in the wet gloom. The only illumination was strips and daubs of light that leaked palely around a few drawn window curtains.

  Not far from the corner, Hook-nose crossed the alley to a squat, dark structure that huddled between the back end of a saloon fronting on Jessie Street and a private residence. The squat building appeared to be a store of some sort, its plate-glass window marked with lettering that couldn’t be read at a distance. The man used a key to unlock a door next to the window and disappeared inside.

  As Quincannon cut across the alley, lamplight bloomed in pale fragments around the edges of a curtain that covered the store window. He ambled past, pausing in front of the glass to read the lettering: CIGARS, PIPE TOBACCO, SUNDRIES. R. SONDERBERG, PROP. The curtain was made of heavy muslin; all he could see through the center folds was a slice of narrow counter. He put his ear to the cold glass. The faint whistling voice of the wind was the only sound to be heard.

  He moved on. A narrow, ink-black passage separated R. Sonderberg’s cigar store from the house on the far side—a low, two-storied structure with a gabled roof and ancient shingles curled by the weather. The parlor window on the lower floor was an uncurtained and palely lamplit rectangle; he could just make out the shape of a white-haired, shawl-draped woman in a high-backed rocking chair, either asleep or keeping a lonely watch on the street. Crowding close along the rear of store and house, paralleling Gunpowder Alley from the Jessie Street corner to its end, was the long back wall of a warehouse, its dark windows steel-shuttered. There was nothing else to see. And nothing to hear except the wind, muted here in the narrow lane.

  A short distance beyond the house Quincannon paused to close his umbrella, the drizzle having temporarily ceased. He shook water from the fabric, then turned back the way he’d come. The woman in the rocking chair hadn’t moved—asleep, he decided. Lamp glow now outlined a window in the squat building that faced into the side passage; the front part of the shop was once again dark. R. Sonderberg, if that was who the hook-nosed gent was, had evidently entered a room or rooms at the rear—living quarters, like as not.

  Quincannon stopped again to listen, and ag
ain heard only silence from within. He sidestepped to the door and tried the latch. Bolted. His intention then was to enter the side passage, to determine if access could be gained at the rear. What stopped him was the fact that he was no longer the only pedestrian abroad in Gunpowder Alley.

  Heavy footsteps echoed hollowly from the direction of Jessie Street. Even as dark and wet as it was, he recognized almost immediately the brass-buttoned coat, helmet, and handheld dark lantern of a police patrolman. Hell and damn! Of all times for a blasted bluecoat to happen along on his rounds.

  Little annoyed Quincannon more than having to abort an investigation in midskulk, but he had no other choice. He turned from the door and moved at an even pace toward the approaching policeman. They met just beyond the joining of the saloon’s back wall and the cigar store’s far side wall.

  Unlike many of his brethren, the bluecoat, an Irishman in his middle years, was a gregarious sort. He stopped, forcing Quincannon to do likewise, and briefly opened the lantern’s shutter so that the beam flicked over his face before saying in a conversational tone, “Evening, sir. Nasty weather, eh?”

  “Worse coming, I expect.”

  “Aye. Heavy rain before morning. Like as not I’ll be getting a thorough soaking before my patrol ends.”

  Quincannon itched to touch his hat and move on. But the bluecoat wasn’t done with him yet. “Don’t believe I’ve seen you before, sir. Live in Gunpowder Alley, do you?”

  “No. Visiting.”

  “Which resident, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “R. Sonderberg, at the cigar store.”

  “Ah. I’ve seen the lad a time or two, but we’ve yet to meet. I’ve only been on this beat two weeks now, y’see. Maguire’s my name, at your service.”

  Before Quincannon could frame a lie that would extricate him from Officer Maguire’s company, there came in rapid succession a brace of muffled reports. As quiet as the night was, there was no mistaking the fact that they were pistol shots and that the weapon had been fired inside the squat building.