The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  “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 cigar. 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.

  As the don had spoken, Burke had felt an unease ripple through him. So far he had avoided any cases that touched on slaves. He was no slave hunter, and he couldn’t abide the thought of such cruel work. But there was his livelihood to consider. Don Hernán could ruin him. And so he clenched all feeling from his heart and said, “I am at your service.”

  Marcita, Burke learned, had disappeared in the Calle O’Reilly while marketing in the company of two slave boys, Domingo and Miércoles. They were out on an errand, so he arranged to have the boys meet him in the city at five. Then, before leaving the don’s villa, he made an inspection of Marcita’s quarters. She lived in a small room near the kitchens. One wall was decorated with an advertisement for an Italian soprano who had appeared on the stage two years before, and another with a collection of Honradez cigarette labels from a series depicting the progress of a pollo, a fop, from prince of the ball to beggar. Another series of labels, these for a Villargas brand, lay on her bedside table. They showed each of the islands of the Antilles as ladies, Cuba regal and bedecked with pearls and tobacco leaves, sprinkling sugar onto a globe, Santo Domingo a weeping negress with torn skirts. In a plain earthen jar Burke found a bundle of feathers and dried leaves, of the kind you could buy from the guinea women in the night markets for good luck, and beneath a loose tile he discovered a burlap sack filled with coins. He paused over this last item before he left, wondering what might have compelled Marcita to forget the sack when she ran—perhaps it meant she had fled on impulse.

  Burke didn’t return to the Calle del Sol, where the old mansion his rooms were in stood, until past one. The midday heat had already blanketed the city, and after a light lunch he isolated himself in his bedroom and rested. At three he woke to the call of a water vendor in the street below. The city was not yet stirring—the water vendor’s cry was the only noise that came from outside—and he moved to his study and remained there while the heat lifted. He tried to compose a letter to Don Hernán, regretting that he c
ould not finish the case and begging the don that it would not cost him his esteem, but he could not find the right words. No matter the phrasing, the don would be disappointed and insulted. Besides, Burke had already given part of his fee to Fernandita to pay off the butcher. He had no choice now, and when his clock struck four forty-five he rose and left his rooms and went out the courtyard gate to keep his appointment with the don’s two slave boys.

  The sky was high and blue, and with the worst of the day’s heat finally past, the city had spilled once more into the streets. Gentlemen in broad-brimmed straw hats walked together speaking of business, Capuchins delivered alms, a company of soldiers marched in seersucker uniforms, a lottery ticket seller cried out that his numbers were blessed. Burke had to pass through this throng as he crossed the Plaza de Armas, skirting Ferdinand VII on his pedestal, then going along the university walls and into the Calle O’Reilly. There he found the street, as usual, blocked with volantas. Pale ladies shaded by umbrellas sat in the carriages while shopkeepers came out of their shops to present them with their wares. Burke picked his way around them and after a block found the two boys waiting for him by the sweet shop. They were dressed in the don’s blue livery and engrossed in a game of punching each other in the arm. Burke introduced himself, then took them aside from the bustle and asked them to show him where Marcita had disappeared.

  Miércoles, who was the older of the two boys, pointed toward a row of shops past the Calle Habana intersection. “She tole us to get some oysters, so we were loadin’ up the baskets, and when we done, she was gone.”

  Domingo, the smaller and darker-skinned of the two, nodded.

  “And you saw nothing?”

  Miércoles said he’d been watching the road while he held his basket and hadn’t seen her come back past. He thought she’d gone farther up the street.

  Burke put his hands on the boys’ shoulders and walked them closer to the shops. The first shop off the Calle Habana intersection was the oyster stall, and next was the narrow stall of the Gallitos brand’s tobacco shop, and after that a bookseller’s. A corpulent, red-bearded fellow was dressing the Gallitos window with rolls of cigarettes. The prices were absurdly high, even for Havana standards, and the shop looked empty. Next door the bookseller was doing a brisk business selling copies of David Copperfield. He sat beside his crate and handed copies up to passing volontas, catching the coins in his palm, all without looking up from the newspaper in his lap. Burke asked what the boys had done after Marcita disappeared, and Miércoles told him that they waited a half-hour, then returned to the don’s villa on the horse trolley.

  “And you didn’t worry?”

  “Not on Tuesdays,” Domingo said.

  Miércoles glared at Domingo, and Domingo clapped his hand over his lips.

  “What happened on Tuesdays?” Burke asked.

  Domingo kept his hand over his mouth, and Miércoles looked at his feet.

  “I’d hate to have to tell Don Hernán you were uncooperative,” Burke said.

  The boys needed little time to think this over. Miércoles nodded to Domingo, and Domingo said, “That’s when she met her man.”

  “Her man?” Burke asked.

  “But last time she didn’t give us any money,” Miércoles added.

  “What money?”

  “She always gave us money to keep quiet,” Miércoles said.

  Burke had the boys lead him to the lover’s rooms. They took him up the block to the Calle Compostela, turned right and past the Church of Santa Catalina, then walked north two blocks, then turned again, toward the city walls. They stopped finally before a dingy, mud-daubed building in the Calle Villegas. Burke asked which room was the lover’s, and the boys pointed toward a window on the top floor, the one farthest to the right. Leaving the boys in the street, Burke walked into the courtyard, up the stairs and onto the interior veranda, found the lover’s door, and knocked. There was no answer. Beside the door someone had tacked a piece of paperboard that read Enrique López, Merchant—a grand title, Burke thought, for one who lived in one of the poorest buildings in the city. He waited and knocked again. Still no answer. Burke wasn’t sure what to do—this was his first case of this kind—and at last he took his card, wrote Marcita’s name on it, and slid it under the door. Then he came out and walked the boys back to the sweet shop, where he bought them sugar sticks and sent them on their way.

  The case, it seemed, was already shut—Marcita had absconded with her lover. That was an explanation he could give Don Hernán. Tomorrow morning he could send him the man’s name. Surely that would be enough—he couldn’t see himself tracking the two further, clamping Marcita in irons.

  He sat in a café and drank a horchata. As he sipped the cool drink and watched the street, he remembered what his mother had last told him. Burke had been brought up in the plantation house by his father, taught to read the books in the library, and allowed to range freely over his father’s land with his own gun to shoot birds in the marshes. There was no white wife—Burke’s father had been a bachelor—and so Burke’s mother was allowed to come spend evenings with him every month or so. “You sure make me proud,” she’d told him that last time, pulling on the sleeves of his little velvet coat. He was eleven. “And you’re gonna keep making me proud. You’re gonna grow up and do good and be good to people.” She’d died two weeks later, when fever spread up the bayous.

  When he’d stumbled on detective work, he’d thought again of his mother’s words. It was all he’d wanted, to do good, and here was his chance—he eased troubled minds, rooted out wrongs.

  Later, hours past supper, Burke lay down to sleep and found he couldn’t. A thought had come to him and refused to leave. Sending the lover’s name to the don—would it be any different from putting the irons on Marcita himself?

  The next morning Fernandita brought him coffee and a buttered roll and set them on his desk. As he ate the roll, he watched the tangle of masts outside his window and considered whether he could write the letter. Then he heard a shout below. He was so lost in thought that it came twice again before he caught it. “Murder!”

  Burke leaned his head out the window and looked down. It was a beggar in a tattered hat, looking to sell his news to the street.

  Burke whistled and the man looked up. “What murder?” Burke asked.

  “Toss me a roll and a real and I’ll tell you.”

  Burke did so, and the man told how some soldiers had been drinking in a field outside of town when they found a slave’s body.

  “Where?” Burke asked.

  “Between the Paseo de Tacón and the railroad.”

  “Man or woman?”

  The beggar shrugged.

  Burke crossed the study to the door, and once in the street he hailed a carriage, a hack with a negro driver. It was a stretch, but it gave him an excuse to delay writing to the don. “Take me to the Paseo de Tacón,” Burke said, and the driver began weaving out of the city, moving his carriage skillfully through the crowds.

  Twenty minutes later they came to a field scattered with soldiers. An army lieutenant and two government clerks stood at the back of the field, beside a grove of bushes, smoking, and behind them an orderly tended a coffee urn. When Burke got out of the hack, he made for them. As he approached, one of the clerks, a short man with gray sideburns and the flat, bland face of a sheep, stepped forward.

  “You have no business here,” he said.

  “I might,” Burke answered, and offered the man his card. “I’m in the employ of Don Hernán Vargas y Lombillo.”

  The man broke into a grin and thumped the card with his forefinger. “I know of you,” he said. “You solved the case of the false pirates for Braganza. My name is Galván. You are most welcome.”

  “Thank you. I only want to see the body.”

  “Ah, that is a problem,” Galván said, looking across the field, where soldiers and policemen in brown holland uniforms were beating the grass with sticks. “We haven’t yet found the body. All we ha
ve is the head.”

  “Only the head,” Burke said, then asked, “May I look?”

  “Of course.” Galván spread his arm. “It’s just over there.” He pointed to the grove. “Forgive me if I don’t join you. I’ve had my fill.”

  Burke thanked the man, then went over to the grove, parted the branches, and saw the head. His heart sank. The head belonged to a dark-skinned man with a scar running from his forehead to his cheek. He’d not admitted it to himself, but he’d hoped to find Marcita here and so be free of his burden. He thought to leave, but then decided to take a closer look. As he knelt and examined the head, all the noises behind him—the lieutenant’s guffaw, the policemen’s and soldiers’ complaints, the sush of their sticks against the grass—fell away. The head lay face up, the skin ragged with gore along the neck where it had been severed. But no blood had drained onto the soil—a fact Burke found curious. The head must have been severed at some other place. He looked at the eyes, felt a chill when their gaze seemed to catch him, and wondered why the body was not here as well. He stood and went over to Galván.

  “What’s near here?” he asked.

  “Only the railroad tracks, the woods, the field, and those factories.”

  Burke looked around the area. The tracks divided the field from the woods, and the factories—three of them, a nail factory, a cigarette factory, a snuff mill—stood on the field’s western end. Any evidence of the killer’s path had been destroyed by the soldiers beating through the field with their sticks.

  He had no business with the murder, but he found himself interested. “Would you mind sending me word once the body is found?”

  “It’d be a pleasure,” Galván answered.