The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  Behind Willard as he spoke, Pauline Dupree smiled and closed one eye in an exaggerated wink.

  “Winked at me!” Quincannon ranted. “Stood there bold as brass and winked at me! The gall of the woman! The sheer mendacity! The—”

  Always unflappable, Sabina said, “Calm yourself, John. Remember your blood pressure.”

  “The devil with my blood pressure. She’s going to get away with murder!”

  “Of a mean no-account as mendacious as she.”

  “Murder nonetheless. Murder and blackmail, and with her idiot victim’s complicity.”

  “Unfortunately, there’s nothing to be done about it. She was right—you have no proof of her guilt.”

  There was no gainsaying that. He muttered a frustrated oath.

  “John, you know as well as I do that justice isn’t always served. At least not immediately. Women like Pauline Dupree seldom go unpunished for long. Ruthlessness, greed, amorality, arrogance . . . all traits that sooner or later combine to bring about a harsh reckoning.”

  “Not always.”

  “Often enough. Have faith that it will in her case.”

  Quincannon knew from experience that Sabina was right, but it mollified him not at all. “And what about our fee? We’ll never collect it now.”

  “Well, we do have Willard’s retainer.”

  “It’s not enough. I ought to take the balance out of his blasted hide.”

  “But you won’t. You’ll consider the case closed, as I do. And take solace in the fact that once again you solved a baffling crime. Your prowess in that regard remains unblemished.”

  This, too, was true. Yes, quite true. He had done his job admirably, uncovered the truth with his usual brilliant deductions; the lack of the desired resolution was not his fault.

  But the satisfaction, like the retainer, was not enough. “I don’t understand the likes of Titus Willard,” he growled. “What kind of man goes blithely on making a confounded fool of himself over a woman?”

  Sabina cast a look at him, the significance of which he failed to notice. “All kinds, John,” she said. “Oh, yes, all kinds.”

  RANDALL SILVIS

  The Indian

  FROM Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

  HARVEY SHOVES OPEN the door of the bar and comes striding in the way he always does, walking fast, angry, lips moving as he mutters to himself. His brother Will, who owns the bar and at forty-one is two years younger than Harvey, reaches for an icy Schlitz at the bottom of the cooler, gives it a wipe with the bar towel, twists off the cap, and sets the bottle on the bar just as Harvey gets there. Harvey doesn’t reach for the bottle right away because he’s too angry to drink, too angry to do anything but stand there gripping the curved edge of the cool wooden counter. His fingers knead the scarred mahogany.

  “I swear to God I am going to kill that pasty-faced weasel once and for all,” he says.

  Will has been standing behind the bar with nothing much to do and thinking about Portugal. In his mind he has been standing on a bluff overlooking the glittering Atlantic, while behind him on a sun-bleached plateau lies a small, well-ordered city with wide clean streets and whitewashed buildings and the dome of a mosque glowing golden in the sun.

  It takes Will a moment to adjust to this sudden migration back to his bar and the heat of his brother’s anger. Then Howard down at the end of the bar clears his throat. Will takes a frosted glass out of the other cooler and fills it from the plastic jug of daiquiri mix he makes just for Howard, who comes in four nights a week and sits primly at the far end of the bar. Between six and eight each night he drinks four lime daiquiris without uttering a word unless another customer or Will addresses him directly. He is a small man who, according to Will’s wife, Lacy, looks the way Tennessee Williams might have looked had he lived to be seventy-eight instead of choking on the bottle cap from a bottle of eye drops. For thirty-seven years he worked at the local driver’s license center, where he failed both Harvey and Will upon their first attempts many years ago, Harvey for roll-stopping at an intersection and Will for bumping the curb while parallel parking.

  Tonight is a steamy Tuesday in baseball season, but the Pirates are off until Thursday, so the only other customers are four golfers, who came in for burgers and beer. Will is grateful for the golfers because on nights when there isn’t a televised sporting event he doesn’t sell enough alcohol to cover his electric bill. The big-screen TV at the rear of the room is only two years old, but unfortunately it hasn’t helped him to compete with the motel bars out by the interstate. He can’t compete with the live bands and free munchies and the college girls in their short skirts. All he has to offer is a clean, quiet place to spend an hour or so with friends without having to shout to be heard, a place where for $14 you can quietly submerge yourself in enough lime juice and rum to soften the edges on some undisclosed misery.

  Will looks toward the golfers now and asks with a lift of his eyebrows if they are ready for another pitcher. “We’re good,” a golfer says. The TV is tuned to CNN Headline News but nobody is paying any attention to it. The air conditioner is working hard to counteract the sticky August heat. There is something loose inside the air conditioner, and every once in a while Will can hear it rattling around in there.

  Harvey wraps both hands around his beer bottle but doesn’t take a sip. “I mean it,” he says, only loud enough for Will to hear. “So I need to borrow your .357 for a while.”

  Will fills a small wooden bowl with salted peanuts and sets it on the counter. “Stevie’s upstairs watching TV with Lacy,” he says. “Go ahead and go on up if you want.”

  “I mean it, Will. I am seriously going to do it this time.”

  Will would say something if he knew what to say. He isn’t exactly sure what his brother’s troubles are, and he suspects that Harvey isn’t sure either. All Will knows is that even in Harvey’s lighter moods there seems to be something eating away at him, some worm of bitterness gnawing at his gut. It might have to do with his job as a truck driver for Jimmy Dean Sausage, but Will doubts it. There can’t be much stress involved in humping sausage around to regular customers on a regular route. It might have to do with Harvey’s marriage, but Will doubts that, too. Harvey and Jennilee have been married for seven years, and Will knows for a fact that his brother is still madly, even desperately, in love with Jennilee.

  “I’m going to need that .357,” Harvey says again. Will flinches a little and looks toward Howard. Howard stares straight ahead at the bottles on the shelves, he sips his daiquiri, and he waits without complaint for a streetcar that will never arrive.

  Will tells his brother, “Hold on a minute.” He goes to the kitchen, checks the deep fryer, lifts out a basket of wings and another of fries, drains them, dumps each into a separate wicker basket lined with napkins, sprinkles them with salt. He carries these to the bar and hands them to Harvey. “Take these upstairs to Stevie, will you? I’ll be right behind soon as I check on those golfers. Lacy and me are splitting a pizza. You want anything?”

  Harvey says, “I’m not kidding this time. You might think I am, but I’m not.”

  “I’ll be up in a minute,” Will says.

  In the kitchen he tries to get back to Portugal, but Portugal has been burned away in the sizzle and stink of the deep fryer’s fat.

  At the top of the stairs Harvey kicks the door a couple of times. Five seconds later Stevie, his youngest brother, yanks open the door, reaches for the wings and fries, and says, “About time. I’m starvin’ to death here.” To Lacy he says, “Look who the delivery boy is tonight.”

  Lacy, seated on the sofa in the middle of the living room, looks over her shoulder. “Hey, Harvey, how ya doin’? Jennilee come with you?”

  Harvey doesn’t answer. There is a movie on the television, something with Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan, and Lacy’s police scanner on the mantel is crackling with static-filled voices. A floor fan in the corner of the room makes a constant clicking whir. After a moment Harvey asks, “Mo
lly around?”

  “At the library with some friends. Library closes at seven, so she’ll be home before long. Why do you ask?”

  Instead of explaining, Harvey glares at the TV. Even with all the windows open and the fan on high, the room pulses with damp heat. “It’s like trying to breathe through a wet towel in here,” he says.

  Lacy smiles up at him. “What has you so agitated?”

  “How do you guys even sleep at night? I can’t breathe in here.”

  “We take the fan into the bedroom. Molly’s got a little one of her own.”

  “Make Will buy you an air conditioner, for chrissakes.”

  Lacy blushes and looks away. “The heat only lasts a couple of weeks.”

  Stevie says, “I’d still like to know who you’re so pissed at.”

  “Wait for Will. I’m not telling this story twice.”

  “Whatever,” Stevie says.

  Harvey stands there beside the sofa and watches the color in Lacy’s cheeks, sees the way the rubied glow spreads down her neck when she blushes. What kind of life is this, Harvey wonders, when a man who works as hard as Will can’t even afford an air conditioner for his wife.

  Then Stevie says, “You ask around for me yet over at Jimmy Dean?”

  “I already told you. Nobody is ever going to hire you as a driver. Not with your record, they’re not.”

  Unlike his brothers, Stevie passed his driver’s exam on the first attempt and was even graced with a handshake from Howard afterward. But in the twenty years since that accomplishment Stevie has amassed several thousands of dollars in fines for various driving violations. He has twice had his license revoked, for three months each time. One more violation and he will lose his license for a year.

  For most of his adult life Stevie has made his living as the town’s handyman, shoveling snow in winter, mowing lawns in the summer, tilling gardens in the spring, raking leaves in the fall. During all seasons he digs graves for the Cemetery Association, hauls away garbage the trash contractor won’t accept, paints an occasional house, cleans out an occasional garage. He would like to have a girlfriend, but he is not anybody’s idea of an eligible bachelor, even by local standards.

  “I don’t see where it would hurt to ask,” Stevie continues. “I’d even work in Packing, I don’t care.”

  Harvey crosses to the police scanner and turns it down. “How can you even hear the TV with this thing blaring all the time?”

  “Harvey, please,” Lacy says. “If you don’t mind.”

  “I can’t even hear myself think.”

  “Well, how am I supposed to hear if there’s a fire or a car wreck or something?”

  “You’ll hear the siren, same as everybody else in town.”

  “But I need to get there with my camera before everybody else in town. So if you don’t mind . . .”

  To placate her, Harvey pretends to turn the volume up. He returns to flop on the chair by the window. Lacy gets up and crosses to the scanner and turns it to its original volume.

  Though nearly forty, Lacy is small and still as lithe as a gymnast. Stevie has to deliberately avoid looking at her ass when she stands up. Later, when he is back home at his trailer, he will think about her ass and probably about Jennilee’s, too, which is even better. He knows that afterward he will feel guilty and lonely, but he is seldom able to control his thoughts once they begin.

  Harvey stares at the TV. Nicolas Cage is standing at the top of a high building, the wings of his trench coat flaring as he peers down at the street far below. Jump, Harvey thinks. Go ahead and jump, you idiot.

  Lacy says, “So where’s Jennilee tonight?”

  Harvey squints hard and stares at the television.

  Stevie says, “I guess that’s another story he doesn’t want to have to tell twice.”

  Will enters his apartment carrying a pizza and a six-pack and a handful of napkins. He deposits them all on the coffee table and sits beside his wife. They open beers and steal glances at Harvey.

  Lacy says, “Have some pizza, Harvey.”

  Harvey remains motionless.

  After a while Will says, “Is this the movie where Nicolas Cage is an angel?”

  And Harvey says, “So are you going to lend me that .357 or not?”

  “Tell me how that would be in either of our best interests.”

  Stevie grins and asks, “Who are you going to shoot?”

  Harvey says nothing.

  Will says, “I only know of one person who can make him grind his teeth like that.”

  Stevie keeps grinning. “Kenny got your goat again, brother?”

  Jennilee’s brother Kenny used to be Harvey’s best friend in high school and every bit as carefree and wild as Harvey had been until, at the age of twenty, Kenny decided to sell his half of the modified Chevy to Harvey and to quit painting houses for a living, thereby dissolving what Harvey had thought of as their partnership. Six years later, Harvey was still churning up dust clouds on the local track and still scraping paint, but Kenny with his brand-new master’s degree was hired as the assistant principal at the junior-senior high school from which they had all graduated. By the time he was thirty he was the principal, and eight years later he was made the superintendent of schools.

  It was Kenny who had talked his sister Jennilee, by then a third-grade teacher, into going out on a date with Harvey, who, from skinned knees to sausage truck driver, had been reduced to a shivering puppy whenever in the presence of Kenny’s little sister. And against what Harvey thought of as all the laws of probability, she then went out with him a second, a third, and a fourth time, went out with him so many times that he finally asked her to marry him, and when she said yes he had to get away from her as quickly as possible so she would not see him quivering again, this time from the utter wonderment and thrilling mystery of life.

  Initially Kenny had been slated to be Harvey’s best man, but one day not long before the event Harvey asked Will to be his best man instead.

  Now Harvey sits forward in Will’s easy chair. “You think I’m kidding here? I am not freakin’ kidding. I am without a doubt going to blow that, that . . .”

  And Lacy tells him, “You can say asshole. If it’s Kenny you’re talking about, feel free to say it.”

  “I am going to blow that asshole to kingdom come.”

  Will turns to his wife. “Since when don’t you like Kenny Fulton?”

  “He’s all right. But he’s an asshole all the same.”

  To Harvey, Will says, “Have some pizza, why don’t you?”

  Harvey stands. “Fine. All I’ve got are deer rifles and shotguns at home, but don’t you worry about it a bit, little brother. Don’t worry about me at all. Just because I’m your older brother and by all the laws of the universe you should cut me some slack here, fine, who gives a shit? I’ll strangle him with my bare hands if I have to!”

  With that Harvey strides to the door, yanks it open, strides out, and slams the door shut. His footsteps pound down the stairway.

  Lacy and Stevie look at Will and wait.

  Will wipes his mouth on a paper napkin, drops it crumpled onto the coffee table, and follows Harvey.

  A while later, during a Visa commercial, Stevie asks, “You got any of those little hot peppers left you had last time I was here?”

  “In the refrigerator. Side shelf.”

  And she tries not to wonder about this life she has married into, these brothers and the secrets they share. She wonders instead how many car accidents and other tragedies she will have to photograph before she can afford an air conditioner.

  Downstairs, Harvey stands behind the bar, staring down into the beer cooler but otherwise not moving. He can feel his insides quivering, but he thinks that if he stands motionless he can keep his hands from shaking.

  Will comes up behind him, picks a glass off the rack, and draws himself a draft and takes a long swallow. He glances around the bar. Howard sits primly at the end of the bar, but the golfers have departed, leaving
several bills beneath an empty glass on their table.

  And Harvey says, still staring into the beer cooler, into the cold deep bottom, “I feel like I’m going under, Will.”

  Will is startled by the intimacy of this confession, its unexpected nakedness.

  As is Harvey, who adds with a soft laugh, feeling a fool, “Whatever the hell that means.”

  Will doesn’t want the unexpected intimacy of the moment to slip away. He says, “What do you say we get ourselves a little air.”

  Will touches Harvey’s arm, then turns away and goes into the kitchen and outside through the rear door. He stands there in the middle of the alleyway, breathing the dusky air. He used to love this kind of sultry evening and wonders when the heat started bothering him so much, wonders when it became such a chore just to take another breath, the way the atmosphere pulses with heat like a boiler about to blow. He used to love these summer evenings because they smelled like baseball. All through Little League and Pony League and American Legion ball, that was how every summer night smelled to him. The soft leather of his glove. The cool dirt of the infield. From his position six feet off third base he would watch between batters as the moths flung themselves at the powerful sodium lights, and their passion mirrored what he felt inside himself but never showed, an exuberance aching to burst free.

  These days the town’s Little League program cannot field nine players and has been forced to merge with a team fifteen miles away. The Pony League and American Legion divisions have disbanded. Scrub grass grows on the local infield now. People in passing cars toss bottles at the backstop.

  Will stands there in his alleyway and tries to see some stars in the narrow space between the buildings and thinks again about how nice it would be to have a house with a yard and a real piece of the sky overhead. He wonders again, as he has been doing more and more lately, each time he looks at Molly and thinks how tall she’s getting, how quickly she is growing up, he wonders again if maybe he should sell the bar and go back to running a dragline. He could work weekdays in West Virginia and come home on weekends. He likes having the bar and having nobody to answer to, but even with Lacy working as a photographer for the local paper they can barely keep their heads above water.