The Best American Mystery Stories 2020

by C. J. Box

  * * *

  Andi’s house was gray.

  The one just before it was a faded brick red and larger—​six hundred and twenty-five square feet, or a perfect twenty-five by twenty-five. Andi’s was twenty by twenty. She obsessed over the numbers. Hers was like living in a closet; the red house, small by any sane standards, felt expansive by comparison.

  Just the way it was, in L.A.

  * * *

  As she passed the red house, she stopped to peer at it. The house was partly owned by Helen McCall and partly by a rapacious reverse-mortgage company called Gray Aid, which hovered over McCall like a turkey vulture, waiting for her to die.

  Andi was friends with the old woman. They’d share a joint or a margarita or even two on a warm evening, and Helen would tell her about Hollywood days, or, as she pronounced it—​you could hear it in the words—​Hollywood Daze.

  Helen had been an actress, once . . . or almost an actress. She had the stories to prove it.

  And it occurred to Andi that she hadn’t seen Helen for, what, three days? She thought three days. Helen was ninety-nine years old.

  With the ax banging against her leg, Andi continued to her house, but the thought of Helen stuck like a tick on her scalp. Inside, where the ambient temperature was possibly 120 degrees, she turned on the air conditioner and took the ax out of the case—​a 2007 Les Paul custom—​and stuck it in a cabinet that maintained a temperature of 72 degrees and a relative humidity of 40 percent. Five other guitars resided in the cabinet, not counting the two of them still at the Bridge, with her Fender and Mesa amps.

  The instruments were all sturdy enough, but even with the ocean, L.A. got dry enough in the summer that Andi liked to keep her guitars somewhat humidified. She’d like to keep herself somewhat humidified as well, but in the tiny house, with the piece-of-shit air conditioner that she suspected had fallen off a truck, probably in Chechnya, that was difficult.

  She was a dry-looking girl; parched.

  * * *

  And she hadn’t seen Helen.

  She got a beer from the refrigerator, popped the top, and since the house was too hot to stay in anyway, she walked next door and knocked. No answer. Knocked harder. Still no answer. She trudged back to her place, a little apprehensive now, a little scared, and found the key that Helen had given her.

  She opened her neighbor’s door and smelled the death.

  Not stinky or especially repulsive, but death all the same. To be sure, she walked back to Helen’s bedroom, where the old lady lay on her bed, in a nightgown with embroidered flowers across the chest, her head turned to one side. She looked desiccated, like a years-old yellowed cigarette found under a couch when you move.

  “Helen?” Andi knew she was dead but called her name anyway. Then she called the cops.

  * * *

  Of all the stories Helen had told Andi, the most interesting was about a famous artist who’d painted her back in the late thirties, and that the painting itself had become famous, and now hung in a Kansas City museum. Helen had never been the star of a movie, or even the third banana, but she’d been the star of Thomas Hart Benton’s Hollywood, standing straight, tall, and only skimpily clothed in the center of the work. She’d shown Andi a book about Benton’s relationship to motion pictures, and to Hollywood in particular; and a black-and-white photograph of herself with Benton, who was holding a paintbrush and whose head came barely to her shoulder.

  Andi knew some famous people—​singers—​but they were workaday people who’d happened to push all the right buttons and had gotten rich and famous, or one or the other. Just people. To be in a famous painting was something else: something that would carry you into the future, long after you were gone, and your music was gone, and your songs were gone. . . .

  * * *

  The cops came and were quick and professional. They looked at the undisturbed body, sat Andi down, interviewed her and took a few notes, especially emphasizing the time between her discovery of the body and her call to 911—​Andi estimated it at thirty seconds. She was allowed to return to her house but was asked to stay around until a medical examiner’s investigator could speak to her.

  That happened an hour and a half later. The investigator, a weary-looking woman in shoes like Andi’s, named Donna, told her that the cops had been interested in the timing of her call to be sure she hadn’t looted Helen’s house after she discovered the body.

  “She didn’t have anything to loot, except maybe her wedding ring,” Andi said. “She was living on Social Security and payments on a reverse mortgage.”

  Donna asked if Andi knew about survivors.

  “Her son died two years ago, from being too fat. That’s what Helen said. She has a granddaughter and some great-grandchildren who live in San Diego, I think. She has one of those old Rolo things with their names written in them. Their name is Cooper. The daughter’s name is Sandra Cooper. I met her once, a couple of years ago.”

  “A Rolodex, I saw that. I’ll notify the Coopers . . .” Donna made a note and asked, “Do you think she might have taken her own life? There was no note, no pill bottle or anything.”

  “No, I don’t think so. She was a lively old lady. Not in pain or depressed or anything, as far as I could tell. She was looking forward to turning a hundred next fall. She was ninety-nine.”

  They talked a while longer, and Andi cried a little, and Donna patted her on a knee, and when she was leaving told her, “I kind of think that most people wouldn’t want somebody to say this after they die, but . . . her death looks to me like it was totally routine. She got old and died.”

  Andi nodded. “That’s what I think. But she lived so long. She knew so much. Now that’s all gone. Gone.”

  “You gonna be okay?”

  “Sure. I’m okay. Sad.”

  “And you’re a musician?”

  “Yes. Play guitar, I do session work. I work a couple nights a week over at the Guitar Center on Sunset,” Andi said.

  “I think you’re probably good folks.” Donna nodded. “You take it easy, girl.”

  * * *

  The girl with the ax got off the bus at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Gower Street and started walking the superheated eleven blocks down Gower to Waring Avenue, where she still lived by herself in a four-hundred-square-foot bungalow with an air conditioner designed and manufactured by cretins.

  She took the right on Waring, and the first thing she saw was a U-Haul truck and an SUV parked outside Helen’s house. The truck’s back doors were open, and she could see Helen’s two-cushion couch and television inside it. She walked past, looking through the open door, and could see a man pushing a desk across the wooden floor. He looked out and saw her, and she lifted a hand and went into her own house, unlocked it and put the ax in the humidifier cabinet and got herself a beer.

  It had been two weeks since Helen died, and a piece of cop tape had been stuck on the door ever since, to keep people out. Andi had gotten her guitars and amps back from the Bridge and had been working at a place called Grassroots in Pasadena, laying down tracks for a Bakersfield country band that was, she had to admit, really pretty good. The front man had spent some time chatting her up, and she’d liked it; and she’d noticed that the band’s own lead guitarist had some kind of ego conflict going with the front man.

  * * *

  She was thinking about the singer, whose name was Tony, and thinking that if he lost his lead guitar and she went on the road with the band, how she’d wind up sleeping with him. That prospect was pleasant enough—​the sex part, not the road part—​but then she’d lose her place in the L.A. session world, which kept her in a house, and the job at Guitar Center, which kept her in fish sticks and fries.

  The fact was, she was $1,450.88 from being broke, and the transmission was broker. Summer was slow; even with no crises along the way, she needed every dollar she could find to keep her head above water until the busy season started again, in October. She wasn’t desperate, she’d been her
e before, financially, but from where she was, she could see desperate.

  * * *

  Halfway through the beer, the man she’d seen at Helen’s house rang the doorbell. He was sort of piggish, she thought as she walked toward the door. Probably her age, in his later twenties, middle height, overweight, with a short, oily flattop over heavy pink cheeks. He was wearing a black T-shirt and tan cargo shorts. The T-shirt showed a slogan: THAT’S TOO MUCH BACON and in smaller letters, beneath, . . . SAID NO ONE, EVER. He apparently tried to live up to it.

  “Can I help you?”

  The man looked at a piece of paper in his hand. “Are you Andi Holt?”

  “Yup.”

  “You found my great-grandma when she died?”

  “Yes, I found Helen.”

  “Could you come over for a minute? My brother and sister and I are going through the place, checking out what she had.”

  “Sure.”

  * * *

  On the way over, she asked, “What’s your name?”

  “Don Cooper. My brother’s Bob, my sister’s Cheryl. There’s about a ton of paper shit in there; we’re trying to figure out what to do with it.”

  The three Coopers were a matched set: dark hair, overweight, shorts and T-shirts with slogans. Cheryl’s read, NOPE, STILL DON’T CARE. Bob’s read, PETA and beneath that, PEOPLE EATING TASTY ANIMALS. All three shirts were sweat-soaked; Helen had had a window air conditioner, which was sitting in the middle of the living room.

  Helen’s house had only one bedroom, but it had another small room, which might have accommodated a twin bed and which Helen had used as a home office: a couple of filing cabinets, rarely used, a midcentury office chair, a tiny desk, pictures on the wall. No computer. An elaborate old steamer trunk, probably dating back to the 1930s, substituted for a coffee table. It had been full of scrapbooks and other memorabilia, which now lay on the floor with the contents of the filing cabinets. The filing cabinets and trunk were gone, apparently loaded into the U-Haul. All the pictures that had been on the wall had been stripped of their frames, which were gone, the pictures scattered on the floor.

  “Here’s the deal,” Bob said. “If we don’t leave for home in an hour, it’ll take us three hours to get down the Five. We need to get all this crap outta here so we can sell the place. We were thinking we could throw you a few bucks and you could bag it and stick it in Helen’s trashcan and your trashcan over the next couple of weeks, and that way we don’t have to pay to haul it and you get a few bucks, which you look like you need anyway.”

  Andi ignored the implied insult. “What’s a few bucks?”

  “Fifty?”

  Andi looked at the mess on the floor. “Fifty is a pizza for two and a couple of beers. For cleaning out this house?”

  “Well . . . tell you what. You play the guitar, right? I saw all those guitars. Helen had a guitar in the closet. We’ll give you the guitar.”

  “Let’s see it.”

  Bob went out to the U-Haul and came back a minute later with the guitar. Solid body, weighed a ton. Two rusty strings still attached, four broken and curled around the neck, specks of rust on the bridge and the tuners.

  “Electronics are probably shot,” Andi said. She squinted down the fretboard. “But . . . neck looks straight, anyway.” She grimaced and hefted the guitar. “Okay.”

  “Great,” Don said. He waved at the paper, the photos, a round rag rug on the floor. “Just dump everything. The rug smells like a cat shit on it.”

  “Cat died a couple of years ago,” Andi said. “It was seventeen.”

  “Good. Hate fuckin’ cats,” Bob said.

  “I gotta ask,” Cheryl said. “You didn’t help yourself to anything when you found Helen, did you?”

  “What? No! Jesus!”

  Cheryl shrugged. “Had to ask. You’d think she would have built up a little more of an estate, you know. She was ninety-six or something. We got her rings, the diamond was like a half carat, about the size of Don’s dick.”

  “And she’d know,” Bob said.

  “Fuck you,” Cheryl said.

  “We got that camera,” Bob said. An old camera sat on a windowsill, an Argus C3. “That’s gotta be worth something.”

  “She was ninety-nine,” Andi said, still pissed about being asked if she’d taken anything.

  “Whatever,” Cheryl said. She had a cigarette in her hand, lit it with a yellow plastic Bic lighter, blew smoke. “Got the house, anyway. We looked at houses around here on Zillow; that’s a nice piece of change. One down the block like this sold for eight-fifty. Mom said the three of us could split half and she keeps the other half.”

  “Hello, cherry-red Camaro,” Don said.

  “Piece of shit,” said Bob. “I’m going ZR1!”

  “What’s that?” Andi asked, waving smoke away from her face.

  Bob did a spit take. “Corvette. Play your cards right, I’ll give you a ride, sweetpuss.”

  “Yeah, well, before you spend the money, you better talk to Gray Aid,” Andi said.

  “What’s that?” Don asked.

  “Reverse-mortgage company. Helen had a reverse mortgage,” Andi said. “I’m not sure, but I don’t think there was much left. Maybe some.”

  “What the fuck? The old twat spent the house?”

  “Most of it. Not all of it yet,” Andi said. “She told me that she wouldn’t get paid anymore after she turned 102, so she planned to die before then.” She gestured at the papers on the floor. “The contract’s probably in there. I’ll go through it, see if I can turn it up.”

  Cheryl slapped her forehead. “Ah, Christ! She spent it? What about us?”

  “Let’s see if we can find the contract,” Bob said, and kicked a pile of the papers.

  “That won’t do it,” Andi said. “It’s only going to be a few sheets of paper, probably.”

  They spent fifteen minutes looking, then Cheryl said, “Let’s get the air conditioner in the U-Haul. We gotta get moving. If there’s a mortgage, the hired hand can find it.”

  “We called and had the water company turn off the water,” Bob said. “The toilets don’t work. You think anybody would see me if I took a dump in the backyard?”

  Andi: “Hey, I gotta live here . . .”

  “And I gotta go,” Bob said. He walked down the hall to the bathroom, reappeared with a half roll of toilet paper, and went out the back door.

  “He’s a real classy guy,” Cheryl said. She lit another cigarette. “He’d take a dump on the White House lawn if he had to go. One time at a rock concert—”

  “So fuckin’ hot in here,” Don interrupted. “Shoulda left the air conditioner to last.”

  “You really don’t want all the pictures and photo albums and stuff ? You don’t think your mother would?” Andi asked. “It’s Helen’s whole life in here.”

  “Shit-can it,” Bob said. “We don’t care about that shit.”

  “You know, Helen once told me that she posed for a painting for a really famous painter,” Andi said. “Back like . . . eighty years ago.”

  “You see a painting in here?” Don asked.

  “No, but . . .”

  “Then fuck it,” he said.

  Bob came back, threw the remnants of the roll of toilet paper on the floor, and he and Don staggered out of the house with the air conditioner. Cheryl was stacking plates and glasses into cardboard boxes and said to Andi, “Don’t just stand there; you want the fifty,” so Andi helped out. The dishes were old and never had been expensive: “I’ll unload them on the wetbacks down at the flea market,” Cheryl said. “That’s a hundred bucks right there.”

  Bob and Don came back and carried boxes out to the U-Haul. Helen had had a couple of hundred books, many of them old Reader’s Digest versions of fifties novels, along with a complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica, which Andi knew from her own flea market experience were virtually worthless. It amused her to see the two men sweat them out to the trailer.

  And it went on for an hour like tha
t: “Fuck her, fuck this place, fuck you.”

  When the house was empty, except for the thousands of sheets of paper and folders of old memorabilia, the Coopers headed out for San Diego. Bob gave a final kick to the stuff that had been in the steamer trunk, the photo albums, sending it exploding across the floor, faces of forgotten men and women, forgotten times, black-and-white images of men in army and navy uniforms . . .

  “Old bat,” he said.

  Andi: “How about my fifty dollars?”

  * * *

  The Coopers had gone.

  Andi took a closer look at the guitar, decided to leave the broken strings on it, placed it in a clear corner of the living room, and went to work on the paper. There was a lot of it: she went through it carefully, into the evening, and halfway through one of the stacks that had apparently been dumped from the file cabinet she found the reverse-mortgage papers, and also the original mortgage on the house, which apparently had been paid off in the sixties.

  Most of the paper on the floor really was trash and should have been thrown out years earlier: old bills, old warranties, old canceled checks. Some of it was interesting, though: fliers for movies in which Helen had appeared, a stack of love letters bound together in their original envelopes, with a rubber band, from her husband, Gary, who’d fought in World War II, then Korea, and finally Vietnam, where he’d been killed in a car accident in Saigon. The letters all began with the same five words: “Hey Babe, Miss you bad.”

  * * *

  Bob Cooper had left his cell number with her, and when she called it and told him she’d found the papers from Gray Aid, he gave her an address and she said she’d mail them. “How long before you get the place cleaned?”