The rich gay donor, I learned, was outraged that his professor, Ol’ Bert, had been not only straight but bigamous! He was demanding a refund from the school, if you can imagine such a thing, and the current president, an astrophysicist by trade, was definitely not up to speed.
The FBI let it be known that they were carefully and scientifically
goddamn rich bitch you think your shitty little porn fuck take that in the crapper I’ll make you a porn you won’t forget too bad your fuckin’ memory is leaking out of one end while your shit dribbles out the
accumulating the evidence and soon they’d have a definitive answer to many questions.
Edgar, the deaf closeted playwright, was named acting interim chair of creative writing. His protégé Corbin was suddenly much in evidence. There was talk of extending his contract, and his garage band was asked to perform during the annual talent night on campus. They were called Ill Met by Starlight.
Edgar pretended that he disliked “administration” of any sort but he demanded (and got) course relief; starting next fall he’d be down from four courses a year to just one. As for his duties as chair, he threw them all at Wilma, who seldom leaves the office before ten at night. He couldn’t do anything. Poor Wilma had to crank out everything: budgets, teaching schedules, room assignments, year-end summaries of departmental activities and achievements, lists of students selected to write “creative theses” (sixty pages of doggerel or three or four lame, confused stories warmed over from sophomore or junior year), lists of students awarded prizes or given summer traveling fellowships (so they can go back to Shaker Heights or Indian Hill and track down their shallow, expensive “roots”—dyed blonde, no doubt).
The second murder was of Corbin. In our office, of all places, the one Corbin and I share with the strangely elusive Adam. I received a call from our resident poetess Emily. I’d almost never heard her voice before and I was astonished she knew how to work a phone. “Hello, Manuela?”
“Yes?”
“This is Emily. Emily from school?”
“Yes,” I laughed warmly. “ I know which—”
She interrupted in her tiny voice: “It seems Corbin has been killed.”
“So they got him too,” I said—the words just shot out of me.
“Yes?” Emily asked in her tentative nearly inaudible voice. At last she concluded, “Yes.”
“How was it … done?” I asked. “And when?” I didn’t want to lament too much in a tacky Latino way, but then again I feared I might be underdoing it.
“I don’t know if I can—I have to get off … ”
The instrument went dead. After a few moments I called Edgar on his mobile. I explained to him that Emily had hung up on me.
“That’s our girl,” Edgar said. “There will be a double sestina by noon tomorrow with only red as one of the six end words to suggest the whole bloody massacre.”
He explained that Corbin had been found this morning castrated, his face smeared with mascara and his rectum wedged wide open by an orange traffic cone. One of his transvestite poems was pinned to his chest, directly into the flesh.
“This must be especially horrible for you, Edgar,” I said.
“Why do you—well, yes. It is. I’ve had a—well, I’ve had a sort of breakdown. I don’t think I can really go on. I think Don and I—” Don was his partner, the one who puts up cherries in booze—“are going to go somewhere. I’ve canceled my classes. I can’t—” and here he began to sob.
When he finally pulled himself together he said he was going to hang up and call back. Before he could, I received a second call from Emily. With no prologue she announced, “The worst thing is that the FBI is going to commandeer our students’ computers and read their stories. And ours, too. Our stories and our poems!”
“That’s not the worst thing,” I said in gentle reproach.
“No,” she murmured.
“The worst thing,” I prated on, “is that poor Corbin was castrated and reamed with an orange—” But Emily had hung up a second time.
No sooner had I replaced the receiver than it rang again.
Edgar: “I was wondering if you’d be willing to fill in as chair for the rest of the semester.”
Me: “Me?”
Edgar: “It’s only five weeks more. I know it would be … strange since you’re not tenured but, remember, as soon as that book is finished—”
Me: “You mean my collection, Border People?” I’d just made up the name a second ago.
Edgar (momentarily delighted): “Oh, is that the title? Is it about—”
Me: “Mexicans. Mexican-Americans.”
Edgar: “The committee will be very heartened by this news. How far away … ?”
Me: “I have just one new story to write, ‘Big River Wall.’”
Edgar: “Big … oh! Rio Grande. And the wall is very—”
I knew he wanted to say “topical” but he contented himself with “relevant.”
Me: “Yes.”
Edgar: “Do you think you’d be willing to run the department?”
I knew that he was too lazy ever to take up the reins again once I’d replaced him and that no one on the permanent staff—Emily? Arthur?—would ever step forward.
Me: “I might be willing to consider it if someone would nominate me for the Woolcraft Award. With something like that backing me up, I might have the necessary heft to direct a program as distinguished as ours.”
Edgar hinted that this award for best teacher was already in the works and that, come June, I might be happily surprised. I asked if there might not be course relief and a salary override if my directorship “dribbled on.” He said, in his best mimsy-woolsy academic manner, “This too may come to pass.”
I immediately called my mother and interviewed her long distance for two hours about all the worst excesses of American immigration officials against what in my mind I called “wetbacks.” My mother was thrilled to help me. I knew I’d need this material for a last long story, “Big River Wall,” the capstone to Border People. I’d have to rework lots of the earlier stories, changing blonde gym teachers into suffering Chicanos. Of course it would be the expected indictment of whites.
A week later, Edgar and Don were on a Mediterranean cruise on the Napoleon Bonaparte and I’d moved into Bert’s office. Wilma helped me make it cozy. We had Bert’s sicko homo books boxed and put into storage, his rotting green carpet replaced by a tasteful new beige one, and his gloomy Shakespeare prints stored to make room for my newly bought Mexican Day of the Dead dolls, which my mother had just FedExed. I’d never liked Mexi kitsch but I’d decided to play up the wetback connection till the day I got tenure—then out it would all go.
Wilma and I had lunch every day. She thought she had me in her pocket as her new boss and took advantage of the situation by drinking two margaritas in my so-called honor. I was alarmed by her effrontery. I was trying hard to work on my stories but I couldn’t concentrate, and bits of unassigned dialogue or monologue kept slipping in, grotesque and inappropriate to say the least.
One day, after Wilma had come back to my office with me and was sprawling provocatively and a bit tipsily on the daybed, she said, “I guess you hate men as much as I do.” She even had the nerve to let one hand dawdle between her legs; fortunately she was wearing slacks.
“Hate men? Why do you say that?”
“Well,” she said, “don’t we see a certain … oh, forget it.”
“A certain what?” I prompted.
“A certain pattern in the … events of the—forget it.”
“Yes,” I said, standing up. “I think we should forget it.” I held the door open for her. She took it badly and waltzed out impertinently, saying, “I’ve got more on you than you—forget it.”
filthy bitch forget everything if your memory spills out of your dirty little mouth and cunt bitch or bloodies your mouth
We didn’t speak for three days (two of those were weekend days), but then on Monday she said she’d
like to have lunch. I said I couldn’t do lunch but that I’d be willing to have a late dinner with her in my office. I tried all afternoon to work on my stories, but a loud disturbing voice began to dictate what I should do next, and it had nothing to do with the Rio Grande. In fact the language seemed to be Italian—and the voice was Cecilia’s, something about lust and anger.
A NOTE ON THE EDITORS
S.J. Rozan, a native New Yorker, is the author of twelve novels. Her work has won the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity awards for Best Novel and the Edgar for Best Short Story. Bronx Noir, a short-story collection S.J. edited, was given the NAIBA Notable Book of the Year award. She’s served on the national boards of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, and is ex-president of the Private Eye Writers of America. In January 2003 she was an invited speaker at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The 2005 Left Coast Crime convention in El Paso, Texas, made her its Guest of Honor. A former architect in a practice that focused on police stations, firehouses, and zoos, S.J. Rozan lives in lower Manhattan.
Jonathan Santlofer is the author of five novels as well as a highly respected artist whose work has been written about and reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, and Arts, and appears in many public, private, and corporate collections. He serves on the board of Yaddo, one of the oldest artist communities in the country. Santlofer lives and works in New York City.
A NOTE ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS
All of the drawings have been created with black India ink and silver pigment built up in thin washes and made specifically for this anthology. Some are based on film noir, others invented. None were made to illustrate specific stories, but rather to echo the mood and tone of the collection.
—JS
Compilation copyright © 2010 by Jonathan Santlofer and S.J. Rozan
Introduction copyright © 2010 S.J. Rozan
"Dragon's Breath" © 2010 by Madison Smartt Bell. "Scenarios" © 2010 by Lawrence Block. "The Hereditary Thurifer" © 2010 by Stephen L. Carter. "Me & Mr. Rafferty" © 2010 by Lee Child. "The Perfect Triangle" © 2010 by Michael Connelly. "Sunshine" © 2010 by Lynn Freed. "Midnight Stalkings" © 2010 by James Grady. "Greed" © 2010 by Amy Hempel. "Deer" © 2010 by Janice Y. K. Lee. "The Salon" © 2010 by Jonathan Lethem. "Tricks" © 2010 by Laura Lippman. "Toytown Assorted" © 2010 by Patrick McCabe. "I've Seen That Movie Too" © 2010 by Val McDermid. "The Story of the Stabbing" © 2010 by Joyce Carol Oates. "The Beheading" © 2010 by Francine Prose. "Celebration" © 2010 by Abraham Rodriguez Jr. "Daybreak" © 2010 by S.J. Rozan. "Ben & Andrea & Evelyn & Ben" © 2010 by Jonathan Santlofer. "The Creative Writing Murders" © 2010 by Edmund White.
"Sunshine" by Lynn Freed originally appeared in Narrative magazine.
All illustrations copyright © by Jonathan Santlofer
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
The dark end of the street : new stories of sex and crime by today’s top authors / edited by S. J. Rozan and Jonathan Santlofer. — 1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-59691-683-8 (alk. paper)
1. Noir fiction, American. I. Rozan, S. J. II. Santlofer, Jonathan, 1946–
PS648.N64D37 2010
813’.087208—dc22
2009051637
First published by Bloomsbury USA in 2010
This e-book edition published in 2010
E-book ISBN: 978-1-60819-314-1
www.bloomsburyusa.com
The Dark End of the Street: New Stories of Sex and Crime by Today's Top Authors Page 25