by The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021
In death, a body loses its shape. The muscles holding the facial features in place go slack, so the skin flaps like a pancake. Even so, and with the eyes riveted shut and the mouth gaping open, there was no mistaking: this body was not Arnie Lukather.
“This is him?” I said. “You sure?”
“I know he looks a little different. That’s perfectly natural, honestly. There’s no mistake. I’m very sorry.”
The body was at least seventy years old—bald, liver-spotted, and toothless. Another martyr to the crippling heat, no doubt.
“Do you mind if I take a look at his records?”
The mortician was briefly flummoxed. “Sure. If you want.” He covered up the body and ushered me into a tiny, crypt-like office. There, he handed me a brown manila folder. I flicked through, and realized two things. The first was that this mortician, for all his professional merits, was not an avid reader of records. The second was that by now Arnie Lukather could be, quite literally, anywhere.
The kid had switched records with this dead old man. Perhaps he had been in the same ward and watched the geezer check out. Now he, Arnie, was officially dead, with all the freedom that brought.
“Thanks for your time,” I said.
After a couple of minutes’ contemplation at the wheel of my car, I decided to head for Roy Moretz’s bungalow. Of course it was a long shot, but by now it had dawned on me that I was lucky to have any shot at all. The place was identical to the Lukather house in design, but the stucco that was so carefully tended there had all but entirely peeled away here. Most of the terra-cotta roof tiles were chipped away to nothing. The patch of garden out front was a knot of weeds. Among this mess of yellowish-green vines and leaves, I glimpsed a pair of rusted lawn chairs, most likely irretrievable.
I rang the bell a few times, to be met only by angry silence within the house. I tried the door handle and, to my dismay, the front door was unlocked and fell obligingly open. I stepped through into the hallway. It was dingy and under-decorated, with patches of mold spreading outward from the corners of the room like wandering shadows. The distant sound of flies buzzing drew me toward the closed kitchen door, and I became conscious of an insidious odor seeping out from under it.
“I wouldn’t do that,” said a man’s voice from behind me.
I spun round, heart thundering, and found myself confronted by two men.
The man who had spoken was unimpressive. His suit, like his slicked-back hair, was gray before its time. The sole distinguishing feature of his smooth, insufferably oval face was a pair of small, circular, and very dark sunglasses shielding his eyes. He grinned fleetingly, flashing a set of angry little teeth.
At his side was another officious-looking nobody, this one dressed like an undertaker. He watched me through passive, half-lidded eyes.
“I don’t think you’d like what you found in there,” the first man went on. “Now let me see. Would you happen to be Mr. Max Ehrlich by any chance? We’ve been waiting for you. It took you longer to get here than we expected. Mind you, my friend tells me I’m looking at the most out-of-shape piece of shit he’s ever laid eyes on. He says he’s seen gentlemen who’ve been in the river for fourteen days and bobbed up in better shape than you.”
“He’s got a lot to say for a man who never opens his mouth.”
The sidekick took a step closer, but the man with sunglasses placed a gentle hand on his forearm. “Careful,” Sunglasses said, “he’s got ears, you know. Perhaps I should make it plain to you, Mr. Ehrlich, just how much trouble you are in. Do you know who I am?”
“Tell me.”
“My name is Frank Mellish.”
I halted midbreath. “Bullshit.”
“I’d tell you to check my driver’s license, but they don’t let me out on the roads these days.”
“So is it really true that you’re . . . ?”
Mellish removed the sunglasses with a practiced flourish. The eyelids beneath gaped wide and unblinking, encircled with tender, pinkish red. The eyeballs themselves were off-white globes, like twin cue balls, unmarred by pupils or irises. Everybody knew Mellish’s name. When it came to contract killers, he had been top of the heap for a long, long time; a real wizard with a knife. He had style and the psychosis to back it up. But he’d dropped out of the game a couple of years ago when a punk threw corrosive acid in his face.
“Oh, it’s true all right. But you should see the other guy.”
I resisted the urge to swallow the lump of fear which had bubbled up in my throat.
Mellish went on, nodding in the undertaker’s direction: “Meet my new eyes. His name is Ormerod, but don’t bother speaking to him. He’s been a mute ever since he was a little kid. Isn’t that funny, the two of us ending up together? Suits me fine of course, I have plenty to say. But some people might find it funny, a blind man and a mute.”
“Look Mr. Mellish, I don’t know how you found me, but there’s really nothing I can do for you. Honestly.”
“Let’s see about that, shall we. I’m told you were hired by a woman named Lukather to retrieve her errant son, Arnold.”
“That’s right. He’s just a kid on a bender, probably drunk in an alley somewhere, no use to you at all.”
Mellish smiled faintly. “Well, you seem to know an awful lot about a lot of things. You hear about a robbery last night? Old-fashioned stickup?”
I made a show of thinking about it, then shook my head.
“Out on La Cienega. Things turned messy. A checkout girl took a bullet in the throat and the two perpetrators made off with six thousand and change. Is that ringing any bells?”
I didn’t reply, so Mellish continued: “Your guy, Arnie, was one of the perps.” He waited a moment for that to sink in. “It was Arnie and his good buddy Roy, who you’ll find in the kitchen. They were just stupid kids trying to pull off a big score, make themselves look like big men. Ordinarily this kind of operation wouldn’t fall within the remit of Mr. Ormerod and myself, but that particular drug store just happened to be, shall we say, protected. The girl who died was the store owner’s daughter, who just happens to be a personal friend of my employer. Do you see now?”
Bewildered, I nodded.
“We already caught up with Roy but, credit where it’s due, he never opened his mouth. Except to scream, that is, when we turned his insides into outsides. They were kind of warm and juicy to the touch, like hamburger meat. But the smell isn’t quite so appetizing, of course. Although,” he added parenthetically, “I wouldn’t put anything past Ormerod. Between you and me, he’s crazy.”
On cue, Ormerod offered the first flicker of a smile. It was not an expression so much as an absence. Just a muscle spasm.
“So now we have something of a problem,” Mellish went on, mock casual. “No Arnie. And no cash.”
“That is a problem.”
“Yes indeed. And now it’s your problem. We know you’re looking for Arnie, and we know you’re being paid to do it. That’s fine. A man’s got to make a living. But I want you to know that we’ll be keeping an eye on you, so to speak. You find Arnie and collect your payoff, and then get the hell out, because Ormerod and I want to have a few words with young Arnold Lukather. Any objections?”
I cleared my throat. “None at all. May I leave now?”
“It’s a free country,” Mellish said.
My hands shook as I turned the key in the ignition. I drove away from the late Roy Moretz’s home with my heart still racing and my chest heaving with frantic breaths. It was true that, since his injury, Frank Mellish’s name was no longer synonymous with underworld supremacy. However, with Ormerod at his side he still presented a degree of danger which I’d not foreseen. No doubt Arnie and Roy had not foreseen it either.
Although, thinking it through as I drove, Arnie’s behavior started to make more sense. After the robbery, he had ditched Roy, taking both the car and the money. Roy, for whatever foolish reason, had returned home to find Mellish and Ormerod waiting for him. While this was
going on, Arnie had taken an ill-fated trip to the Hollywood Hills and promptly wrecked Roy’s automobile.
Odd, I thought, that Arnie had chosen for his getaway those narrow, circuitous country roads. Surely LAX, the bus terminal, or even the freeway would have seemed like more agreeable options to a seventeen-year-old on the run with a sack full of cash. But the Hills? There was nothing for him there.
With this fleeting notion snagging on my brain like a thin strand of gossamer, I pulled over at the corner, next to a payphone. I got out and dialed. Eventually I got through to the ambulance driver once again.
“Jasper? It’s Max Ehrlich.”
“You again? I’m trying to work here! Don’t you know there’s a heatwave going on out there?”
“Yeah, somebody mentioned that. I’ll buy you suntan lotion for your trouble. I only need to ask you one quick question and then I’ll be out of your hair for good.”
Jasper sighed breathily like the drama queen he was. “Go ahead.”
“Where exactly did you pick Arnold Lukather up from? Where exactly did he have his smash?”
“Southbound on Canyon Lake Drive.”
“Southbound? You mean he was headed back into Los Angeles?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Did he say anything to you?”
“He was unconscious, Max. Use your noodle.”
“Did you find anything in the car, Jasper? Anything unusual?”
“Such as?”
Such as a bag of blood money. “Such as anything unusual. I don’t know.”
“Nothing. The car was empty.”
I thanked him and hung up. Supposing this ambulance man was telling the truth, the cash had already been stashed somewhere when they pulled Arnie out of his wrecked car. Roy hadn’t had it, and Arnie hadn’t had it. There was only a small window of time in which Arnie could have disposed of it. That would also explain his mysterious trip into the Hollywood Hills. I thought back to those old adventure stories which had lined the boy’s shelves, and the whole thing made sense. Arnie had driven up there to bury his treasure.
I found the crash site with minimal effort. There is a devilish hairpin bend a mile along Canyon Lake Drive, and it was there that the asphalt was scattered with broken glass and errant slivers of rusty metal. I pictured Arnie, delirious with adrenaline in the early hours of the morning, losing control and spinning himself off into a tree.
From there, tracing Arnie’s steps back into the Hollywood Hills was surprisingly easy. The old Ford De Luxe had had uncharacteristically narrow tire treads, probably the cheapest Roy could find. The speed Arnie traveled had left frequent, serpentine black markings on the road itself. I followed these uphill for almost a quarter mile, until they unceremoniously stopped. So this was as far as Arnie had come. I pulled up at the roadside. It was reasonable to assume, therefore, that the money was stashed within walking distance of this very spot.
It was an isolated area, and easy to understand why Arnie had chosen it. If he had covered his tracks a little better, it would have been damn near untraceable. Just an anonymous stretch of road, shielded from the sun by dense clusters of trees. Above me was the Hollywood sign, beaming down on all like the smile of a benevolent God. Below me lay the city.
I climbed out of the car and wandered slowly up the road for another hundred yards. Then I wandered back down the road a similar distance. It was only on my third or fourth circuit, with my eyes fixed firmly on the ground, that I spotted familiar narrow tire treads in the dust, veering off the road to the right-hand side. I followed them through a patch of greenery into a small clearing, where they halted once more. Perfect.
The heat had dried out the terrain, giving it the texture and hue of scorched concrete. I dared not imagine how difficult it had been for Arnie digging a moneybag-sized hole in that unforgiving earth.
At the foot of a nearby palm, I found shovel marks in the smooth, dusty ground. When it’s as dry as this, it’s virtually impossible to smooth over. The ground does not decimate into powder; it splinters into messy chunks. There is no way to hide the fact that you have been digging. Arnie, after concealing the cash, had done what he could to rearrange the chunks over the hollow. But, inevitably, they had not quite fit. Just his luck. So, he had left the job half-finished; the money stowed in the ground with the sun-dried earth messily rearranged on top of it. Now, I did not even need a shovel. I merely kicked the dirt aside with my shoe, revealing a small black traveling case in a little cavity about eight inches deep.
I seized the bag and unzippered it a little to check that the cash was still there. It was. So Arnie had not yet returned to retrieve it. This was perfect. It meant the clearing was the one spot in the whole of Los Angeles where Arnie was guaranteed to show up. And I would be there waiting for him.
By nightfall, however, I had almost given up hope. I’d parked my Pontiac on the far side of the clearing and now sat behind the wheel, watching for the vaguest hint of movement in the seeping darkness. It was only the tangible presence of the moneybag at my side, like a loyal pet curled up in a shadow, that kept me from drifting off into a well-earned sleep. As I was breaking the seal on my third pack of Camels, I heard the chug of a car engine struggling uphill. I hastily lit the cigarette as a pair of headlamps swung into view.
It was a dirt-crusted Dodge pickup, and God knows where Arnie got it from. It rattled to a halt in the center of the clearing, the lights aimed straight at the burial site. A spindly figure that could only be Arnie clambered out, leaving the engine running. I watched as Arnie retrieved a shovel from the truck bed, then started to dig.
After about five minutes had passed and he had still not unearthed the case, Arnie gave in. In silhouette, I saw him drop the shovel and cover his eyes with his hands. Was he crying?
I gripped the handle of the Webley revolver I kept at my shoulder and slithered out of the Pontiac’s driving seat. “Don’t move!” I called, my voice wet with smoke and rattling in the darkness. Arnie, who had dropped to his knees in despair, sprang upright.
I cocked the hammer. “Don’t you goddamn move Arnie. I’m not kidding.”
Arnie was obviously itching to make a run for it, and probably could have pulled it off; it was, after all, dark and the shadows were untrustworthy. But his greed won out. He wanted his money more. “Who are you?” the kid called out, his voice cracking. Both of his eyes were blackened and he had a long, messy wound over his right brow, held together by a tangle of stitches.
I approached, the Webley still trained firmly on Arnie’s bony carcass. “Don’t talk. We need to get out of here.” I saw that Arnie’s limbs were quivering, like a half-drowned river rat.
“I ain’t going anywhere with you.”
I swung the butt of the pistol, catching Arnie a vicious blow across the jaw. Arnie dropped, spitting teeth. He struggled to his knees and hawked a chunk of bloody phlegm.
I knelt down beside him and seized a handful of his fulsome, oil-black hair. With my other hand I patted the kid down, removing a .45, which was stuffed down the back of Arnie’s Levis. “Quite a collector, aren’t you?” I said as I pulled him to his feet.
Bundling the sack full of dollars into the rear of the Pontiac, I installed Arnie in the passenger seat and calmly fired up the engine. We left the pickup with its headlights trained on the shallow ditch, and slowly snaked our way down from the Hollywood Hills. Along the way, Arnie began to snivel. “What . . . what happened to Roy?” he wanted to know. “I tried to get in touch, to say I was sorry, but he didn’t pick up the phone. Did you hurt him?”
“Me? No. This whole mess is nothing to do with me. But I wouldn’t make any plans on seeing Roy again anytime soon.”
Arnie fell silent.
“So,” I said, as if making conversation, “which one of you was it that shot the checkout girl?”
“Roy,” said Arnie without hesitation, “it was Roy I swear.”
I laughed. “Whatever you say.”
“It was all Roy’
s big idea. He wanted the money so he could leave home.”
“And what about you? What about your mother?”
Arnie’s gaze snapped toward me. “What about my mother?”
“Easy now. I’m only asking.”
Arnie’s shoulders slumped; he deflated like a corpse. “Yeah, I guess I wanted to get away too. Things were getting a little . . . close, at home.”
“Well, it sounds like you boys came up with the perfect crime,” I said, smirking at myself in the rearview mirror.
We picked up the tail on Homebrook Street. It was a burgundy Oldsmobile, with two shadowed passengers. I made no effort to lose them. “See that car?” I said to Arnie.
Arnie looked and nodded.
“In there are the two men who killed Roy.”
Arnie gasped. “You mean Roy’s really dead?”
“As dead as that cashier girl. And now they’re coming for you.”
“No!” Arnie shrieked, making a desperate grab for the steering wheel. I put a stop to that with a swift punch to the nose. I felt the bone crunch beneath my fist and saw the gout of blood shimmer beneath the streetlamps. Arnie was quiet after that, his hands clamped to his face as fresh blood spilled out between his fingers.
We reached Mrs. Lukather’s house at around eleven P.M. She came out onto the veranda to meet us, sobbing with joy and relief. When she saw the mess Arnie was in, she stopped. “Hey, what have you done to my boy, you animal?”
“Let’s go inside, Mrs. Lukather. I believe you owe me seventy-five dollars.”
Grudgingly, she ushered me in. Before I stepped across the threshold, I glanced along the street, where the Oldsmobile sat idling by the curb.
Mrs. Lukather positioned Arnie at the kitchen table and handed him a wet washcloth for his bloody face. “Thanks Mom,” he said softly and nasally. Then she turned on me.