by The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021
“If this is going to be your life story, maybe you better give me that twenty after all.”
Jack reached into his hoodie with the hand not holding his list of wrongdoings, but Jamieson waved him off. “Joking.”
“Sure?”
Jamieson didn’t know whether he was or not. “Yes. But let’s not take too long. I’ve got an appointment at eight thirty.” This wasn’t true, and Jamieson reflected that it was good he didn’t have the alcohol problem, because according to the TV meetings he’d attended, honesty was a big deal if you did.
“Keep it speedy, got it. Here goes. In fourth grade I got into a fight with another kid. Gave him a bloody lip and nose. When we got to the principal’s office, I said it was because he’d called my mother a dirty name. He denied it, of course, but we both got sent home with a note for our parents. Or just my mom in my case, because my dad left us when I was two.”
“And the dirty name thing?”
“A lie. I was having a bad day and thought I’d feel better if I got into a fight with this kid I didn’t like. I don’t know why I didn’t like him—I guess there was a reason, but I don’t remember what it was. Only that it set a pattern of lying.
“I started drinking in junior high. My mother had a bottle of vodka she kept in the freezer. I’d swig from it, then add water. She finally caught me, and the vodka disappeared from the freezer. I knew where she put it—on a high shelf over the stove—but I left it alone after that. By then it was probably mostly water, anyway. I saved my allowance and chore money and got some old wino to buy me nips. He’d get four and keep one. I enabled his drinking. That’s what my sponsor would say.”
Jack shook his head.
“I don’t know what happened to that guy. Ralph, his name was, only I thought of him as Wretched Ralph. Kids can be cruel. For all I know, he’s dead and I helped kill him.”
“Don’t get carried away,” Jamieson said. “I’m sure you have stuff to feel guilty about without having to invent a bunch of might-have-beens.”
Jack looked up and grinned. When he did, Jamieson saw that the man had tears in his eyes. Not falling, but brimming. “Now you sound like Randy.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“I think so. I think I’m lucky I found you.”
Jamieson discovered he actually felt lucky to have been found. “What else have you got on that list? Because time’s passing.”
“I went to Brown and graduated cum laude, but mostly I lied and cheated my way through. I was good at it. And—here’s a big one—the student adviser I had my senior year was a coke addict. I won’t go into how I found that out, like you said, time’s passing, but I did, and I made a deal with him. Good recommendations in exchange for a key of coke.”
“As in kilo?” Jamieson asked. His eyebrows went up most of the way to his hairline.
“That’s right. He paid for it and I brought it in through the Canadian border, tucked into the spare tire of my old Ford. Trying to look like any other college kid who’d spent his semester break having fun and getting laid in Toronto, but my heart was beating like crazy and I bet my blood pressure was red-lining. The car in front of me at the checkpoint got tossed completely, but I got waved right through after showing my driver’s license. Of course things were much looser back then.” He paused, then said, “I overcharged him for the key too. Pocketed the difference.”
“But you didn’t use any of the cocaine yourself?”
“No, that was never my scene. I did a line or two once in a while, but what I really wanted—still want—is grain alcohol. When I got a job, I lied to my bosses, but eventually that gave out. It wasn’t like college, and there was nobody to mule coke for. Not that I found, anyway.”
“What did you do, exactly?”
“Massaged my sell-sheets. Made up appointments that didn’t exist to explain days when I was too hungover to come in. Jiggered expense sheets. That first job was a good one. The sky was the limit. And I blew it.
“After they let me go, I decided what I really needed was a change of location. In AA that’s called a geographic cure. Never works, but I didn’t know that. Seems simple enough now; if you put an asshole on a plane in Boston, an asshole gets off in LA. Or Denver. Or Des Moines. I fucked up a second job, not as good as the first one, but good. That was in San Diego. And what I decided then was that I needed to get married and settle down. That would solve the problem. So I got married to a nice girl who deserved better than me. It lasted two years, me lying right down the line about my drinking. Inventing nonexistent business appointments to explain why I was home late, faking flu symptoms to explain why I was going in late or not at all. I could have bought stock in one of those breath-mint companies—Altoids, Breath Savers—but was she fooled?”
“I’m guessing not,” Jamieson said. “Listen, are we approaching the end here?”
“Yes. Five more minutes. Please.”
“Okay.”
“There were arguments that kept getting worse. Stuff got thrown occasionally, and not just by her. There came a night when I came home around midnight, stinking drunk, and she started in on me. You know, all the usual jabber, and all of it was true. I felt like she was throwing poison darts at me and never missing.”
Jack was looking at his hands again. His mouth was turned down at the corners so severely that for a moment he looked to Jamieson like Emmett Kelly, that famous sad-faced clown.
“You know what came into my mind while she was yelling at me? Glenn Ferguson, that boy I beat up in the fourth grade. How good it felt, like squeezing the pus out of a boil. I thought it would be good to beat her up, and for sure no one would send me home with a note for my mother, because my mom died the year after I graduated from Brown.”
“Whoa,” Jamieson said. His good feeling about this uninvited confession took a hike. Unease replaced it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear what came next.
“I left,” Jack said. “But I was scared enough to know I had to do something about my drinking That was the first time I tried AA, out there in San Diego. I was sober when I came back to New York, but that didn’t last. Tried again and that didn’t last, either. Neither did the third. But now I’ve got Randy, and this time I might make it. Partly thanks to you.” He held out his hand.
“Well, you’re welcome,” Jamieson said, and took it.
“There is one more thing,” Jack said. His grip was very strong. He was looking into Jamieson’s eyes and smiling. “I did leave, but I cut that bitch’s throat before I did. I didn’t stop drinking, but it made me feel better. The way beating up Glenn Ferguson made me feel better. And that wino I told you about? Kicking him around made me feel better too. Don’t know if I killed him, but I sure did bust him up.”
Jamieson tried to pull back, but the grip was too strong. The other hand was once more inside the pocket of the Yankees hoodie.
“I really want to stop drinking, and I can’t do a complete Fifth Step without admitting that I seem to really enjoy . . .”
What felt like a streak of hot white light slid between Jamieson’s ribs, and when Jack pulled the dripping ice pick away, once more tucking it into the pocket of the hoodie, Jamieson realized he couldn’t breathe.
“. . . killing people. It’s a character defect, I know, and probably the chief of my wrongs.”
He got to his feet.
“Thank you, sir. I don’t know what your name is, but you’ve helped me so much.”
He started away toward Central Park West, then turned back to Jamieson, who was grasping blindly for his Times . . . as if, perhaps, a quick scan of the Arts and Leisure section would make everything okay.
“You’ll be in my prayers tonight,” Jack said.
* “The Fifth Step” is a hard story to talk about without spoiling it, so let me just say this: I’ve been a Friend of Bill, as we call ourselves at AA meetings, for over thirty years. It’s a wonderful, lifesaving program, but as my longtime readers know, I can find the dark side of almost anything. (E
ven that may be saying too much.) I’ve been doing this job for forty-five years, and as the old farmer up the road from me says, “I ain’t tired of it yet.”
Janice Law is an Edgar-nominated (for The Big Payoff) and a Lambda award–winning (for Prisoner of the Riviera) novelist. She has written two series of mysteries, as well as contemporary fiction and short stories that regularly appear in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Sherlock, and Black Cat. Her work has also been featured in a variety of anthologies, including Paraspheres (fantasy), Enter the Apocalypse, and Echoes of the Natural World (Sci-Fi), Best American Mystery Stories, Vengeance (MWA), and several Level Best editions. Her most recent novels are Mornings in London (mysteriouspress.com) and Homeward Dove (Wildside Press).
Besides fiction, she has published two history books, journalism pieces, and scholarly articles, the latter reflecting a twenty-year-plus career in college teaching.
THE CLIENT
Janice Law
Edith Wing lived in a three-story Victorian, a complicated business with porches and a turret and a lot of millwork that you couldn’t duplicate today for love or money. The street was once home to the upper management of the silk and linen mills. Now the relics of the comfortable and house-proud were subdivided into shabby apartments or under expensive and doubtless time-consuming repairs.
Not so Ms. Wing’s. She lived alone in the house, which was sound but well-worn and cluttered with an accumulation of mismatched furniture, family photos, and souvenirs. The wallpapers were yellowed but holding on, much like the owner. Though easily the oldest of my clients, Edith Wing was sharp and spry. I wouldn’t like to have bet on her age, which could have been sixty as easily as seventy-five or older.
She was eccentric in a number of ways, but I suspected loneliness was what brought her to Wilde Investigations and my employment. Understand that we don’t get a lot of complicated crime in our town. We’re more apt to have drunks motoring on a Saturday night, teens breaking windows, or family disputes that end in black eyes and broken noses. Generally, my clients want the goods on a straying spouse or a larcenous employee; they want to find a runaway child or a dropout sibling. Nothing really too different from the little jobs that Edith had given me over the last few years, such as the location of her strayed terrier—the dog pound one town over—and the fate of her black and white spotted cat—dead by the roadside.
There was also an occasion when she suffered petty harassment from some neighborhood kids—a visit to their parents and their school principal settled that, and overall, I believe Edith was satisfied. So was I. If the jobs she put my way were in the foothills of my profession, she paid promptly and sometimes put in a bit extra “as a little thank you for your time.” As far as I was concerned, she was a sweet old lady.
Lately, though, she’d branched out, tasking me with some Internet searches, supposedly looking up old friends and “interesting people.” It was such basic stuff that I hated to take her money, but when I pointed out that Google, Facebook, and the Internet Yellow and White Pages could do the job for free, she shook her head. “Oh, I can’t get used to all that computer business,” she said and added, “My eyes, you know.”
She did not even email me the names; either she dropped a note at the office or asked me to stop by on my way home. Mostly I stopped by. Edith might have trouble with her eyes, but she whipped up mean scones and muffins, and her brownies weren’t bad, either. But one afternoon I was so busy with a bona fide stakeout that I asked Robin to enjoy afternoon tea chez Wing for me. Robin is the bookkeeper at the big auto body shop, but she does my books and handles my billing on the side, and she gives me lots of good business advice that I mostly ignore.
That was how I learned something that cast Edith’s requests in a different light. Robin looked in the next morning on her way to the auto body shop. As she put a list of names on my desk, she said, “Bit odd. You know she has a MacBook Pro sitting in the living room.”
“Really? Hers? She always says she can’t see the screen and can’t bother to learn the programs.”
“It’s probably the only thing in the house that is hers,” Robin said, turning to go.
“What do you mean?”
“That’s the Latour house. Old local money. My grandmother used to cook for them, and I was in the house once or twice as a child when the old lady was alive. Nothing’s changed. I recognized the pictures, the furniture, even the family photos.”
“But Edith has lived there a while, right? Long as I’ve been here.”
Robin thought a minute. “Ten years at least, probably more. She must have bought it furnished. But who lives with someone else’s photos? Paintings, maybe, but personal photos?”
“Clearly Edith Wing,” I said, though this seemed beyond eccentricity, and when I next did some Internet searches for her, I indulged a little old cop curiosity. My client had asked for address, email, and phone number, but just for the heck of it, I plugged one Bruce Horman’s name into a criminal conviction site I use.
I was thinking, I don’t have time for this, when my screen blossomed: Our man Bruce had convictions for grand larceny, armed robbery, assault, and firearms violations. Some old school friend. As I went down Edith’s list, each name not only turned up a big-time rap sheet but, if I was reading between the lines correctly, connections to a notorious mobster, a real monster who’d dominated the Boston rackets for decades and currently resided in a maximum security prison. By the time I was finished, I had some serious questions—and not just about Edith Wing’s alma mater, either.
Whether and how to ask them was my problem, one I had not settled by the time I arrived at her house.
“Oh, Ray, how nice to see you,” she said.
The low afternoon light emphasized the lines in her face, but she stood very straight and, as always, she was well groomed, her white hair nicely cut, her nails immaculate. Previously, I had focused on her age and on the job at hand. Now I realized that she was still handsome and suspected that she had once been a real looker. Was that important in some way?
“Do you have time for a little snack?”
“If you have some of those muffins, I have the time.” I followed her into the kitchen, old-fashioned—obsolete, to be honest, but with glass-fronted cabinets and tall windows that made a charming impression, like a stage set for some period piece. It struck me how formal my interactions with Edith were. We said the same things and went through the same motions. For the first time I wondered what was underneath and asked myself what was the real point of my employment.
“I brought you the addresses and numbers you asked for.” I laid the envelope on the table.
She put on a pair of reading glasses to examine the list. I should mention here that Edith does charming welcomes and mild irritation very well. She showed genuine relief when I returned her old dog and real sorrow about the loss of her cat. Otherwise, she has perfected an all-purpose poker face. You have to know her for quite a while to read her emotions, and that day, to my surprise, I realized that she was not only deeply concerned but frightened.
What to do about that was the big question. Clients sometimes want no more than they’ve asked for. Still, because I liked Edith, I ventured to ask if something was wrong.
“No, no,” she said. “I was noticing a pattern, is all.”
“Mostly Boston area,” I said.
“But one in Woonsocket and”—she tried for indifference and did not quite manage it—“one in Brockton Heights.”
She glanced at me as she spoke. Woonsocket was closer to our fair town than Boston, and Brockton Heights was our next-door neighbor. “Did you really know them at school?” I knew I sounded skeptical.
“In a manner of speaking.” Her expression, eloquent a moment before, shut down. “Another muffin? These are a new recipe with orange rind. I have good hopes for them.”
The moment had passed. I knew that even if I asked about those extensive rap sheets, I would get no answer. The busi
ness would—and should—have nagged at me, but I got a contract from a local big-box store with an unacceptable level of shrinkage, and for several weeks I was just swamped. Robin was delighted with what she took to calling “our cash flow,” and the eccentricities of Edith Wing and the criminal careers of her schoolmates faded into the background.
A month later, Edith called late one rainy afternoon. Though she invited me to try an “interesting new cake,” I knew her well enough to sense a disguised appeal for help. I was right. The cake, like all Edith’s confections, was superb, but as soon as she put a slice on my plate, she said that she wanted to find out if Archie “The Ox” Shaunessy, the Brockton Heights resident on our list, was really living in town and what he was doing in the area.
I said that the lemon topping was outstanding and that she should tell me what this was all about.
She thought for a minute, and I waited to see if she was going to reveal that Shaunessy was an old gangster, that she feared her school friend had gone bad, that she’d had a girlish crush on him decades before—whatever.
“He’s no friend of mine,” she said, “and he’s been around here. Here in town. I can feel it.”
I couldn’t think why Edith Wing, ultracorrect single lady, pillar of the preservation society, and devoted communicant of St. Mary’s, was worried about some superannuated gangster. “Lot of Brockton Heights people shop the Big Y. And the Walmart,” I said. Our center has declined from its glory days but the big retailers like the cheap land on the outskirts.
“But what’s he doing here in the first place?” she asked sharply. “He’s a Boston man, a big-city guy.”
“People retire. They look for cheaper living.”
“They go to Florida,” she said in a scornful tone. “They aspire to die in the sun.” Her expression suggested that snowbirds let down right living and the entire northeast.
“He may remember the old days,” I said carefully. “There used to be a dog track in Brockton Heights.”