The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021

by The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021

  The murder of Lucy Wilson was one. What happened to Smokey Bowersox close to a half century later was another.

  Smokey Bowersox was a piece of work, a big, ugly piece of work, drunken, cussing, brawling, barely smart enough, but plenty intimidating enough, to avoid jail for any long stretches. He was known to host the occasional flea infestation, and lice were pretty much in permanent residence. You didn’t want to cross paths with him anywhere, in Jum’s or any of the other bars and junkyards where he spent most of his time, but especially not out in the woods, hunting. Strange things have been known to happen in those hills. Bowersox was around when Lucy Wilson was killed, and it was him in fact that first gave the nickname Killer George to Henry Huffman’s father, even before his nephew, Oscar, had been executed. Just to be mean. Just to cause trouble. But it caught on. For years Bowersox got away with his bullying, until the day the woman he lived with figured enough was enough. That was Edna Harriger. She looked for all the world like Grimelda the Witch, and when she wasn’t praying or chattering incoherently—often one and the same—she was cooking and baking. She was purt near as famous for her cooking as she was for her weird, witchy ways. One day when Smokey brought her home a little girl’s pet cat to bake up in her leberkäse—she used all kinds of meats in her leberkäse—she decided to conk him over the head and bake him up in it instead. His just deserts, so to speak.

  Quite a few folks in town got a taste of Bowersox before the main ingredient was found out. He actually didn’t taste too bad. What finally tipped it off was when the fat banker, Alexander Fiscus, mentioned how smoky Edna’s leberkäse tasted.

  Edna’s reward for her prize leberkäse recipe was a life of leisure in the loony bin up in Warren. She spent the rest of her days strolling the hallways and grounds, muttering for the most part, and praying, eyes often as not rolled halfway back up in her skull. They wouldn’t let her near the kitchen, which, word had it, broke her heart. When she died a little while back, Edna’s older brother called Sheriff Rote. The sheriff in turn called Chief Toole.

  “Hey, Chief,” Rote said. “I just got a call from Beesie Harriger.”

  “You mean D. W.?” His name was Garfield Abraham Harriger, but everybody knew him as D. W. Everybody except for the ones who called him Beesie.

  “Beesie—lives out there in the woods above Jimtown Road. Edna Harriger’s brother.”

  “Yeah. That’s old D. W. What’d he want?”

  “You knew his sister, Edna, passed away up there in Warren?”

  “I did. Yep. A mercy.”

  “Seems he was going through some of her things and he found a box with Smokey Bowersox’s name on it.”

  “The hell you say.”

  “Yeah. Says there’s something in it we ought to see.”

  “We? Or you? He called you up, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah, but Smokey Bowersox and Edna—figure it probably has something to do with her cooking him up in that pie, and that was on your patch.”

  “That wasn’t no pie, it was more like a meatloaf. That was quite a while back.”

  “I figured you’d want to have a look.”

  Chief Toole thought it over. He was one of us, an old-timer. He was tired, about ready to hang ’em up, but this one took him back and made him perk his ears up. He could still taste the smoky flavor of Edna’s prize leberkäse on a corner of his tongue. It was never going to go away. “The hell you say.”

  Garfield Abraham D. W. Beesie Harriger was a hermit. He lived alone in a little shack with a rusty tin roof and warped green shingles the color of moss deep in the woods north of town. He must have been near eighty but still ran a string of traps and hunted and planted a few tomatoes. He had the odd visitor now and then, an old hunter or fisherman, and he made the occasional trek into town. It wasn’t so much he disliked people, just that he never had much use for them. He kept dogs, he’d always kept dogs, two or three or four at a time—them, he had use for. He always kept them a little bit hungry. He figured it kept them more on edge, which was good in case of a bear or other trespasser with bad intentions, but there was more to his fancy plan than that: He didn’t like the idea of keeling over dead some day and laying there rotting, stinking up the place to high heaven, so he figured his dogs would do what there was no undertaker there to do, dispose of his body for him by eating him and shitting him back into the dirt. To him, it was just another version of dust to dust.

  When Hiram Mackey, one of his rare visitors, asked him what would happen if he was just incapacitated but still alive, that gave old Beesie some pause. But it didn’t make him change his plan any.

  Chief Toole and Sheriff Rote took along a couple of men. They weren’t too leery about old Beesie himself, but the dogs were another story. Beesie greeted them at the door of his shack. He only had a little hair left, but it was on its own, wisps and strands sticking out this way and that, and his bony, spotted forehead glowered over the caves of his eyes. “Don’t pay ’em no mind,” he said as the men approached through the trees and over the fallen logs. The dogs were barking and snarling, but keeping an eye on Beesie, too, and keeping their distance.

  “What do you got for us, Beesie?” Chief Toole said. Toole, his Clark Gable mustache all gone to gray and scraggle now, his jowls all droopy and spotted, was the closest to Harriger’s age, and he knew him some, so he took the lead. Sheriff Rote, young, polished, and cocky, looked like he didn’t belong in any woods. Young folks nowadays, all of them hardly ever look like they belong in any woods.

  “In here,” Beesie said. On the floor of the shack—it was hard to tell whether it was a dirt floor or a board floor caked with dirt—by the rough wood table sat a cardboard box that was falling apart. There were three or four other boxes like it, but this was the only one had Smokey’s scrawled on it. “In there.”

  “Check it out,” the chief said to Rote, nodding toward the box.

  “I ain’t sticking my hand in there,” Rote said. “You check it out.”

  “Deemer,” called Toole to one of his officers. “See what’s in that there box.”

  Officer Deemer, a little fellow who was used to being picked on, stepped up, sighed, shook his head, and knelt down in front of the box. He hesitated. “What am I looking for?” he said.

  “A big glass doohickey,” Beesie said.

  Deemer groped his hand in holding his breath as though he was performing an autopsy, and pulled out something blue. He held it up. It was glass. It was big and heavy, a deep, dark blue color, murky with age. “Appears to be an old inkwell,” he said.

  “What the hell’s an inkwell doing in Smokey’s stuff?” said Toole. “I didn’t think that dumb bastard could read, let alone write.”

  All Rote could do was shrug. He only barely remembered the adventures of Edna and Smokey, what he’d read in the papers well over a decade before.

  Beesie’s glowering brow took a dark turn. “None of you fellas remember when that woman was killed up there in the railroad signal tower? Back around ’35, ’36, around in there?”

  “Can’t say as I do,” Rote said, “but I wasn’t even a gleam in my daddy’s eye back then.”

  Toole, however, the old man, was nodding, rousting old memories.

  “Lucy Wilson, I think her name was,” Beesie said. “They nabbed a fella name of Oscar Huffman, sent him to the chair for it.” Toole remembered. He’d barely been born when it happened, but he remembered the talk through much of his young life, hell, through all of his life—they still talked now and then about Hartsgrove’s Crime of the Century. Toole was impressed by Beesie’s memory. The old man’s mind was still sharp as the claws in his traps.

  “Yeah,” Tool said, “It was Lucy Wilson.” Then he looked at the blue inkwell on the table where Deemer had dropped it like a petrified turd. “What the hell’s that got to do with this?”

  “Shit,” Beesie said, “why you boys is even dumber’n you look, the whole pack of you. Ain’t you supposed to be coppers? Ain’t you supposed to be able to pu
t two and two together and solve a crime when a body hands you a goddam clue?” Toole and Rote and Deemer just looked at one another and frowned and looked back at Beesie. The deputies and officers in the doorway outside the cabin looked away and whistled.

  “The murder weapon up there at the signal tower,” Beesie said. “They figured it was a blue glass inkwell that was missing from off of her desk. They never did find the damn thing.”

  Beesie glowered at the men, one after the other, then he glowered at the inkwell. “Not until now, they didn’t,” he said.

  The Harvest Senior Center was, fittingly enough, in an old sagging building with a swayback roof that used to be a grocery store back before it went bust. It was down at the bottom of town near the ball fields, past Proud Judy’s Bar and Dan Tucker’s Candies and Ice Cream. The Senior Center was packed to the gills at the potluck lunch that Wednesday. It was probably twice as many people as what normally showed up, an even bigger turnout than the Fourth of July square dance. Even though that shindig was over two months before, the crepe paper was still up, red, white, and blue. Buzz about Smokey Bowersox and Lucy Wilson and the Huffman family, the old murder up at the signal tower way back when, had lit a fire. We had to bring out extra chairs and tables from the back room.

  “Don’t eat the meatloaf!” That was Charlie Waters. Waters was a loudmouth and his little joke took some of us a while to get—the thinking caps don’t fit quite as snug as they used to—before we connected the dots from the meatloaf to Edna Harriger’s leberkäse. Charlie Waters wasn’t by any stretch the first man to make a smoky meatloaf joke, but he might have taken more satisfaction in it than most, since Smokey Bowersox had beat him up, damn near killed him, not too long before he up and got himself baked. Hattie Hetrick, though, didn’t get it. It was her meatloaf. She took some offense and asked her husband, Harvey, what was the matter with it. Harvey just shook his head and patted her hand.

  “I ain’t the least bit surprised,” Annie Westphall said. “I remember a story about him groping and grabbing this waitress out at Vowinkle—oh, what was her name?”

  “Vowinkle used to have some damn good fish fries,” said Chet Emerick.

  “I don’t believe she was the only one, either,” Elva Plotner said. “Women were afraid to say anything back in those days.” Her husband, Jacey, a grizzled old ball player, was there too, much to everyone’s surprise, but he didn’t say anything. He never said much. Matter of fact, he hardly ever came out at all, but we figured the lure of the gossip was too strong.

  “Heck, a lot of ’em still are,” said Harvey Hetrick.

  “You should have seen the bruises on poor Edna,” said Myrna Sayers. She lived near the old witch’s haunted house. “Every day she seemed to be sporting some new ones. I couldn’t hardly blame her a bit for what she done.”

  Ron Bullers said, “You know he tried to get on with the Shawmut, but they wouldn’t hire him. They didn’t want nothing to do with him. He had a reputation even way back then.”

  “I remember when he beat up the brakeman up there, I forget his name.” That was Earl Radaker. “Wonder if it might’ve had something to do with that, with him not getting on.”

  “I ain’t the least bit surprised,” Joe Milliron said.

  “Who brought this succotash?” said Chet Emerick.

  There was more talking than eating going on. A lot of the dishes still had the tin foil on the top. The chatter put you in mind of the low rumble you used to get up in the Moonlight Roller Rink, and you couldn’t hardly hear the music from the record player up front. Sinatra mostly, a little Bing Crosby. Most of it was about what they’d found out, what Chief Toole had told the paper. Turned out the fingerprints on the inkwell matched the other fingerprints they found in the box, on the boots and the belt and the billfold and the belt buckle. Turned out the tiny trace of blood you couldn’t even hardly see deep in the chipped corner of the inkwell was the same type as Lucy Wilson’s. It was all gift-wrapped with a pretty white bow.

  Smokey Bowersox was the son of a bitch that killed Lucy Wilson.

  It wasn’t Oscar Huffman. It sure wasn’t George either. Sure as hell was Oscar that got fried for it, though. That was sinking in. That, and that it was Henry Huffman who bore the brunt of it down through all the years ever since.

  “Oh, Lordy, Lordy,” said Annie Westphall, “that poor man.”

  “Which one? Oscar or George?”

  “Or Henry?”

  “Well she sure as hell ain’t talking about Smokey.”

  “Why, yes, the Huffmans. All three of them, I suppose.”

  There was an awful lot of headshaking going on. We knew Earl Radaker was as close to Henry Huffman as anybody, probably the only buddy he had. Ron Bullers said, “Hey, Earl—you know if Huffman heard about it yet?”

  Radaker had his mouth full. “Yep,” he said, “I stopped on up to see him. He wasn’t too impressed. Said what difference does it make. Said it’s all water over the dam bridge.”

  “You should’ve asked him to come on down.”

  “I did. He said he’d sooner go fishing.”

  It was quiet for a minute while everybody felt bad for poor Henry.

  “I wonder if there’s anything he can do about it,” Milliron said. “His cousin getting fried for something he didn’t even do.”

  “He ought to be able to sue ’em,” Jacey Plotner said. That caused a few double takes, not on account of what he said, but on account of he said anything. Jacey hardly ever said two words.

  “And everybody blaming his dad. And him wearing it like a crown of thorns.”

  “Wasn’t him that got electrocuted, though. His cousin—I don’t even think they consider that immediate family.”

  Earl Radaker said, “Hey, Elva—what was the name of that girl?”

  “You mean Gracie?” Elva Plotner said. “Gracie Wolfgang?”

  “Yeah, that was her. She still alive, I wonder? Wonder if she heard about it?”

  “We still exchange Christmas cards,” Elva said. “I’ll make sure she knows.”

  “He was crazy about her,” Radaker said. “Only woman he was ever crazy about.”

  It was quiet then as it settled in, just silverware clinking on china, the groaning and creaking of tables and chairs, and underneath it all, from up front, Sinatra singing “I’ll Never Smile Again” from fifty years ago.

  Just after Radaker’s wife, Gwenda, died here a few months back, Henry Huffman went up to see him. It was early. Radaker was always an early riser anyhow, in the building business, and so was Huffman. Every now and then, in the early morning light, we’d look out our window over the first cup of coffee and see Huffman walking by. He liked to get out early to enjoy the fresh air before everybody else used it all up.

  Huffman told him he was sorry he didn’t make it up to the funeral. Radaker put the posies he’d brought in an old jelly jar with some water, poured them a cup of coffee, and they sat down at the kitchen table and looked out the window at the big maple in the yard where he’d made a tree house once for his stepdaughter. The sun was just peeping up, and the morning shadows stretched across the dewy lawn. Huffman told him he was real sorry about Gwenda.

  “You know what they say,” Radaker said. “Only the good die young.”

  Gwenda was a good ten years younger than him. Fit as a fiddle too, or so everybody thought right up till the minute she dropped a carton of eggs on the floor in the middle of the Golden Dawn Supermarket, then dropped dead right on top of them. Aneurysm, they said. “I guess,” said Huffman. “Or only the lucky.”

  They’d been friends over forty years. Exactly how they’d managed that nobody knew for sure, since Huffman really didn’t have another friend, but it might have had something to do with their parents, or lack of them. They had that in common. Radaker’s had taken off on him when he was little and left his Uncle Shorty to raise him, and Huffman’s parents—well, we all knew about them, about Elsie bashing George with a frying pan after his nephew had been fried
for killing Lucy Wilson. Then running off with that barnstorming pilot. Back in the day, Radaker and Huffman used to hang out, have lunch together, a beer after work, shoot the breeze, damn near every day, but after Radaker got married (Huffman never did, after Gracie flew the coop), they didn’t get together near as often, even less the older they got. But when they did, it was like they never left off. Radaker said, “Like your cousin Oscar? Was he one of the lucky ones?”

  “Maybe,” Huffman said. “Apparently he wasn’t one of the good ones.”

  Radaker shrugged. “Me, I’d rather be lucky than good.”

  “Well, looks like you ain’t either. You’re still alive and kicking.”

  “Alive, I guess. Ain’t too sure about the kicking.”

  Huffman took a sip of his coffee, made a sour face. “I remember squabbling over comic books with him when I was little. Joe Palooka was his favorite. I still got ’em—that’s all they sent us after they executed him—just his comic books.”

  “Maybe be worth some money someday,” Radaker said.

  Huffman still lived in the house up on Hastings Street not far from the old railyard where he’d shared a room with his cousin Oscar right up till the day they took him away for the murder. The same house where he stayed with his addled father, minded him, changed his dirty pants, after his mother had run off. The same house a fire burned down with his father inside it, a fire they figured he must have started himself by accident. They had no proof of anything else. Huffman had it rebuilt with the insurance money, and moved back in as quick as he could. Why, we couldn’t figure. Why he’d want to live back there, after all that had happened, none of us was ever too sure about. He was still looking out the window at the tree house tree and shaking his head. “I could never fathom how a man whose greatest passion in life was Joe Palooka and Fritzi Ritz could take and bludgeon a woman to death. He was always so careful not to wrinkle the pages.”