The Little Men

by Megan Abbott

  In the morning, it would all be blurry, but in that moment, clues were coming together in her head, something to do with gas jets and Mrs. Stahl and love gone awry and poison in the walls, and she had figured it out before anything bad had happened.

  It made so much sense in the moment, and when the sounds came too, the little tap-taps behind the plaster, she nearly cheered.

  Mr. Flant poured her glass after glass of amaro. Benny waxed his moustache and showed Penny his soft shoe.

  They were trying to make her feel better about losing her job.

  “I never came in late except two or three times. I always did my job,” Penny said, biting her lip so hard it bled. “I think I know who’s responsible. He kited me for seven hundred and forty dollars and now he’s out to ruin me.”

  Then she told them how, a few days ago, she had written him a letter.

  Mr. D.—

  I don’t write to cause you any trouble. What’s mine is mine and I never knew you for an indian giver.

  I bought fine dresses to go to Hollywood Park with you, to be on your arm at Villa Capri. I had to buy three stockings a week, your clumsy hands pawing at them. I had to turn down jobs and do two cycles of penicillin because of you. Also because of you, I got the heave-ho from my roommate Pauline who said you fondled her by the dumbwaiter. So that money is the least a gentleman could offer a lady. The least, Mr.D.

  Let me ask you: those books you kept behind the false bottom in your desk drawer on the lot—did you buy those from Mr. Stanley Rose, or his handsome assistant Larry?

  I wonder if your wife knows the kinds of books you keep in your office, the girls you keep there and make do shameful things?

  I know Larry would agree with me about you. He was a sensitive man and I live where he did and sleep in his bed and all of you ruined him, drove him to drink and to a perilous act.

  How dare you try to take my money away. And you with a wife with ermine, mink, lynx dripping from her plump, sunk shoulders.

  Your wife at 312 North Faring Road, Holmby Hills.

  Let’s be adults, sophisticates. After all, we might not know what we might do if backed against the wall.

  —yr lucky penny

  It had made more sense when she wrote it than it did now, reading it to them. Benny patted her shoulder. “So he called the cops on ya, huh?”

  “The studio cops. Which is bad enough,” Penny said.

  They had escorted her from the makeup department. Everyone had watched, a few of the girls smiling.

  “Sorry, Pen,” Gordon had said, taking the powder brush from her hand. “What gives in this business is what takes away.”

  When he’d hired her two months ago, she’d watched as he wrote on her personnel file: MR. D.

  “Your man, he took this as a threat, you see,” Mr. Flant said, shaking his head as he looked at the letter. “He is a hard man. Those men are. They are hard men and you are soft. Like Larry was soft.”

  Penny knew it was true. She’d never been hard enough, at least not in the right way. The smart way.

  It was very late when she left the two men.

  She paused before Number Four and found herself unable to move, cold fingertips pressed between her breasts, pushing her back.

  That was when she spotted Mrs. Stahl inside the bungalow, fluttering past the picture window in her evening coat.

  “Stop!” Penny called out. “I see you!”

  And Mrs. Stahl froze. Then, slowly, she turned to face Penny, her face warped through the glass, as if she were under water.

  “Dear,” a voice came from behind Penny. A voice just like Mrs. Stahl’s. Could she throw her voice?

  Swiveling around, she saw the landlady standing in the courtyard, a few feet away.

  It was as if she were a witch, a shapeshifter from one of the fairytales she’d read as a child.

  “Dear,” she said again.

  “I thought you were inside,” Penny said, trying to catch her breath. “But it was just your reflection.”

  Mrs. Stahl did not say anything for a moment, her hands cupped in front of herself.

  Penny saw she was holding a scarlet-covered book in her palms.

  “I often sit out here at night,” she said, voice loose and tipsy, “reading under the stars. Larry used to do that, you know.”

  She invited Penny into her bungalow, the smallest one, in back.

  “I’d like us to talk,” she said.

  Penny did not pause. She wanted to see it. Wanted to understand.

  Walking inside, she realized at last what the strongest smell in the courtyard was. All around were pots of night-blooming jasmine, climbing and vining up the built-in bookshelves, around the window frame, even trained over the arched doorway into the dining room.

  They drank jasmine tea, iced. The room was close and Penny had never seen so many books. None of them looked like they’d ever been opened, their spines cool and immaculate.

  “I have more,” Mrs. Stahl said, waving toward the mint-walled hallway, some space beyond, the air itself so thick with the breath of the jasmine, Penny couldn’t see it. “I love books. Larry taught me how. He knew what ones I’d like.”

  Penny nodded. “At night, I read the books in the bungalow. I never read so much.”

  “I wanted to keep them there. It only seemed right. And I didn’t believe what the other tenants said, about the paper smelling like gas.”

  At that, Penny had a grim thought. What if everything smelled like gas and she didn’t know it? The strong scent of apricot, of eucalyptus, a perpetual perfume suffusing everything. How would one know?

  “Dear, do you enjoy living in Larry’s bungalow?”

  Penny didn’t know what to say, so she only nodded, taking a long sip of the tea. Was it rum? Some kind of liqueur? It was very sweet and tingled on her tongue.

  “He was my favorite tenant. Even after …” she paused, her head shaking, “what he did.”

  “And you found him,” Penny said. “That must have been awful.”

  She held up the red-covered book she’d been reading in the courtyard.

  “This was found on … on his person. He must’ve been planning on giving it to me. He gave me so many things. See how it’s red, like a heart?”

  “What kind of book is it?” Penny asked, leaning closer.

  Mrs. Stahl looked at her, but didn’t seem to be listening, clasping the book with one hand while with the other stroked her neck, long and unlined.

  “Every book he gave me showed how much he understood me. He gave me many things and never asked for anything. That was when my mother was dying from Bright’s, her face puffed up like a carnival balloon. Nasty woman.”

  “Mrs. Stahl,” Penny started, her fingers tingling unbearably, the smell so strong, Mrs. Stahl’s plants, her strong perfume—sandalwood?

  “He just liked everyone. You’d think it was just you. The care he took. Once, he brought me a brass rouge pot from Paramount studios. He told me it belonged to Paulette Goddard. I still have it.”

  “Mrs. Stahl,” Penny tried again, bolder now, “were you in love with him?”

  The woman looked at her, and Penny felt her focus loosen, like in those old detective movies, right before the screen went black.

  “He really only wanted the stars,” Mrs. Stahl said, running her fingers across her décolletage, the satin of her dressing robe, a dragon painted up the front. “He said their skin felt different. They smelled different. He was strange about smells. Sounds. Light. He was very sensitive.”

  “But you loved him, didn’t you?” Penny’s voice more insistent now.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Everyone loved him. Everyone. He said yes to everybody. He gave himself to everybody.”

  “But why did he do it, Mrs. Stahl?”

  “He put his head in the oven and died,” she said, straightening her back ever so slightly. “He was mad in a way only Southerners and artistic souls are mad. And he was both. You’re too young, too simple, to understand.”<
br />
  “Mrs. Stahl, did you do something to Larry?” This is what Penny was trying to say, but the words weren’t coming. And Mrs. Stahl kept growing larger and larger, the dragon on her robe, it seemed, somehow, to be speaking to Penny, whispering things to her.

  “What’s in this tea?”

  “What do you mean, dear?”

  But the woman’s face had gone strange, stretched out. There was a scurrying sound from somewhere, like little paws, animal claws, the sharp feet of sharp-footed men. A gold watch chain swinging and that neighbor hanging from the pear tree.

  She woke to the purple creep of dawn. Slumped in the same rattan chair in Mrs. Stahl’s living room. Her finger still crooked in the tea cup handle, her arm hanging to one side.

  “Mrs. Stahl,” she whispered.

  But the woman was no longer on the sofa across from her.

  Somehow, Penny was on her feet, inching across the room.

  The bedroom door was ajar, Mrs. Stahl sprawled on the mattress, the painted dragon on her robe sprawled on top of her.

  On the bed beside her was the book she’d been reading in the courtyard. Scarlet red, with a lurid title.

  Gaudy Night, it was called.

  Opening it with great care, Penny saw the inscription:

  To Mrs. Stahl, my dirty murderess.

  Love, Lawrence.

  She took the book, and the tea cup.

  She slept for a few hours in her living room, curled on the zebra print sofa.

  She had stopped going into the kitchen two days ago, tacking an old bath towel over the doorway so she couldn’t even see inside. The gleaming porcelain of the oven.

  She was sure she smelled gas radiating from it. Spotted blue light flickering behind the towel.

  But still she didn’t go inside.

  And now she was afraid the smell was coming through the walls.

  It was all connected, you see, and Mrs. Stahl was behind all of it. The lightspots, the shadows on the baseboard, the noises in the walls and now the hiss of the gas.

  Mr. Flant looked at the inscription, shaking his head.

  “My god, is it possible? He wasn’t making much sense those final days. Holed up in Number Four. Maybe he was hiding from her. Because he knew.”

  “It was found on his body,” Penny said, voice trembling. “That’s what she told me.”

  “Then this inscription,” he said, reaching out for Penny’s wrist, “was meant to be our clue. Like pointing a finger from beyond the grave.”

  Penny nodded. She knew what she had to do.

  “I know how it sounds. But someone needs to do something.”

  The police detective nodded, drinking from his Coca-Cola, his white shirt bright. He had gray hair at the temples and he said his name was Noble, which seemed impossible.

  “Well, Miss, let’s see what we can do. That was a long time ago. After you called, I had to get the case file from the crypt. I can’t say I even remember it.” Licking his index finger, he flicked open the file folder, then beginning turning pages. “A gas job, right? We got a lot of them back then. Those months before the war.”

  “Yes. In the kitchen. My kitchen now.” Looking through the slim folder, he pursed his lips a moment, then came a grim smile. “Ah, I remember. I remember. The little men.”

  “The little men?” Penny felt her spine tighten.

  “One of our patrolmen had been out there the week before on a noise complaint. Your bookseller was screaming in the courtyard. Claimed there were little men coming out of the walls to kill him.”

  Penny didn’t say anything at all. Something deep inside herself seemed to be screaming and it took all her effort just to sit there and listen.

  “DTs. Said he’d been trying to kick the sauce,” he said, reading the report. “He was a drunk, miss. Sounds like it was a whole courtyard full of ’em.”

  “No,” Penny said, head shaking back and forth. “That’s not it. Larry wasn’t like that.”

  “Well,” he said, “I’ll tell what Larry was like. In his bedside table we found a half-dozen catcher’s mitts.” He stopped himself, looked at her. “Pardon. Female contraceptive devices. Each one with the name of a different woman. A few big stars. At least they were big then. I can’t remember now.”

  Penny was still thinking about the wall. The little men. And her mice on their hindfeet. Pixies, dancing fairies.

  “There you go,” the detective said, closing the folder. “Guy’s a dipso, one of his high-class affairs turned sour. Suicide. Pretty clear cut.”

  “No,” Penny said.

  “No?” Eyebrows raised. “He was in that oven waist deep, Miss. He even had a hunting knife in his hand for good measure.”

  “A knife?” Penny said, her fingers pressing her forehead. “Of course. Don’t you see? He was trying to protect himself. I told you on the phone, detective. It’s imperative that you look into Mrs. Stahl.”

  “The landlady. Your landlady?”

  “She was in love with him. And he rejected her, you see.”

  “A woman scorned, eh?” he said, leaning back. “Once saw a jilted lady over on Cheremoya take a clothes iron to her fellow’s face while he slept.”

  “Look at this,” Penny said, pulling Mrs. Stahl’s little red book from her purse.

  “Gaudy Night,” he said, pronouncing the first word in a funny way.

  “I think it’s a dirty book.”

  He looked at her, squinting. “My wife owns this book.”

  Penny didn’t say anything.

  “Have you even read it?” he asked, wearily.

  Opening the front to the inscription, she held it in front of him.

  “‘Dirty murderess.’” He shrugged. “So you’re saying this fella knew she was going to kill him and, instead of going to, say, the police, he writes this little inscription, then lets himself get killed?”

  Everything sounded so different when he said it aloud, different than the way everything joined in perfect and horrible symmetry in her head.

  “I don’t know how it happened. Maybe he was going to go to the police and she beat him to it. And I don’t know how she did it,” Penny said. “But she’s dangerous, don’t you get it?”

  It was clear he did not.

  “I’m telling you, I see her out there at night, doing things,” Penny said, her breath coming faster and faster. “She’s doing something with the natural gas. If you check the gas jets maybe you can figure it out.”

  She was aware that she was talking very loudly, and her chest felt damp. Lowering her voice, she leaned toward him.

  “I think there might be a clue in my oven,” she said.

  “Do you?” he said, rubbing his chin. “Any little men in there?”

  “It’s not like that. It’s not. I see them, yes.”

  She couldn’t look him in the eye or she would lose her nerve. “But I know they’re not really little men. It’s something she’s doing. It always starts at two. Two a.m. She’s doing something. She did it to Larry and she’s doing it to me.”

  He was rubbing his face with his hand, and she knew she had lost him.

  “I told you on the phone,” she said, more desperately now. “I think she drugged me. I brought the cup.”

  Penny reached into her purse again, this time removing the tea cup, its bottom still brown-ringed.

  Detective Noble lifted it, took a sniff, set it down.

  “Drugged you with Old Grandad, eh?

  “I know there’s booze in it. But, detective, there’s more than booze going on here.” Again, her voice rose high and sharp, and other detectives seemed to be watching now from their desks.

  But Noble seemed unfazed. There even seemed to be the flicker of a smile on his clean-shaven face.

  “So why does she want to harm you?” he asked. “Is she in love with you, too?”

  Penny looked at him, and counted quietly in her head, the dampness on her chest gathering.

  She had been dealing with men like this her whole lif
e. Smug men. Men with fine clothes or shabby ones, all with the same slick ideas, the same impatience, big voice, slap-andtickle, fast with a back-handed slug. Nice turned to nasty on a dime.

  “Detective,” she said, taking it slowly, “Mrs. Stahl must suspect that I know. About what she did to Larry. I don’t know if she drugged him and staged it. The hunting knife shows there was a struggle. What I do know is there’s more than what’s in your little file.”

  He nodded, leaning back in his chair once more. With his right arm, he reached for another folder in the metal tray on his desk.

  “Miss, can we talk for a minute about your file?”

  “My file?”

  “When you called, I checked your name. S.O.P. Do you want to tell me about the letters you’ve been sending to a certain address in Holmby Hills?”

  “What? I … There was only one.”

  “And two years ago, the fellow over at MCA? Said you slashed his tires?”

  “I was never charged.”

  Penny would never speak about that, or what that man had tried to do to her in a back booth at Chasen’s.

  He set the file down. “Miss, what exactly are you here for? You got a gripe with Mrs. Stahl? Hey, I don’t like my landlord either. What, don’t wanna pay the rent?”

  A wave of exhaustion shuddered through Penny. For a moment, she did not know if she could stand.

  But there was Larry to think about. And how much she belonged in Number Four. Because she did, and it had marked the beginning of things. A new day for Penny.

  “No,” Penny said, rising. “That’s not it. You’ll see. You’ll see. I’ll show you.”

  “Miss,” he said, calling after her. “Please don’t show me anything. Just behave yourself, okay? Like a good girl.”

  Back at Number Four, Penny laid down on the rattan sofa, trying to breathe, to think.

  Pulling Mrs. Stahl’s book from her dress pocket, she began reading.

  But it wasn’t like she thought.

  It wasn’t dirty, not like the brown-papered ones. It was a detective novel, and it took place in England. A woman recently exonerated for poisoning her lover attends her school reunion. While there, she finds an anonymous poisoned pen note tucked in the sleeve of her gown: “You Dirty Murderess … !”

  Penny gasped. But then wondered: Had that inscription just been a wink, Larry to Mrs. Stahl?