The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

by Edited By Scott Turow

  The apartment was small-like Gert’s.

  There was a table in the middle with a brown manila folder on it.

  Leonid held a similar folder in his right hand.

  “Sit down,” Karmen said, gesturing toward a blue sofa.

  In front of the couch was a small table holding up a de­canter half-filled with an amber fluid and flanked by two squat glasses.

  Leonid opened the folder and reached for the photographs he’d taken.

  She held up a hand to stop him.

  “Will you join me in a drink first?” the young siren asked.

  “I think I will.”

  She poured and they both slugged back hard.

  She poured again.

  After three stiff drinks and with a new one in her glass Kar­men said, “I loved him more than anything, you know.”

  “Really?” Leonid said, his eyes drifting between her cleavage and her crossed legs. “He seemed like kind of a loser to me.”

  “I would die for him,” she said, gazing steadily into Leonid’s eyes.

  He brought out the dozen or so pictures.

  “For this louse? He doesn’t even respect you or her.” Leonid felt the whiskey behind his eyes and under his tongue. “Look at him with his hand under her dress like that.”

  “Look at this,” she replied.

  Leonid looked up to see her ample mound of pubic hair. Karmen had pulled up her skirt, revealing that she wore noth­ing underneath.

  “This is my revenge,” she said. “You want it?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Leonid answered, thinking that this was the other thing she wanted him to take care of.

  He had been half-aroused since the last night he saw Gert. Not sexy but prey to a sexual hunger. The whiskey set that hunger free.

  She got down on her knees on the blue sofa and Leonid dropped his pants. He didn’t remember the last time he’d been that eager for sex. He felt like a teenager. But push as he would he couldn’t press into her.

  Finally she said, “Wait a minute, Daddy,” and reached around to lubricate his erection with her own saliva.

  After his first full thrust he knew he was going to come. He couldn’t do anything about it.

  “Do it, Daddy! Do it!” she cried.

  Leonid thought about Gert, realizing at that moment that he had always loved her, and about Katrina who he was never good enough for. He thought about that poor child so much in love with her man that she had to have revenge on him by giving her love away to an overweight, middle-aged gumshoe.

  All of that went through his mind but nothing could stand in the way of the pulsing rhythm. He was slamming against Karmen Brown’s slender backside. She was yelling. He was yelling.

  And then it was over-just like that. Leonid didn’t even feel the ejaculation. It all blended into his violent, spasmodic at­tack.

  Karmen had been thrown to the floor. She was crying.

  He reached to help her up but she pulled away.

  “Leave me alone,” she said. “Let me go.”

  She was in a heap with her skirt up around her waist and the slick sheen of spit on her thighs.

  Leonid pulled up his pants. He felt something like guilt about having had sex with the girl. She was only just a few years older than his wife’s girl, the daughter of the Chinese jeweler.

  “You owe me three hundred dollars,” he said.

  Maybe sometime in the future he’d tell someone that the best tail he ever had paid him three hundred dollars for the privilege.

  “It’s in the envelope on the table. There’s a thousand dol­lars there. That and the ring and the bracelet he gave me. I want you to give them back to him. Take it and go. Go.”

  Leonid tore open the envelope. There he found the money, a ring with a large ruby in it, and a tennis bracelet lined with quarter-karat diamonds.

  “What do you want me to tell him?” Leonid asked.

  “You won’t have to say a word.”

  Leonid wanted to say something but he didn’t.

  He went out the door, deciding to take the Stairs rather than wait for the elevator.

  On the first flight down he thought about Karmen Brown begging for sex and then crying so bitterly. On the third flight he started thinking about Gert. He wanted to reach out and touch her but she was gone.

  On the first floor he passed a tattooed young man waiting at the elevator doors.

  When Leonid glanced at the young man he looked away.

  He was wearing leather gloves.

  Leonid went out the door and turned westward.

  He took four steps, five.

  He made it all the way to the end of the block and it was then, when he had the urge to take off his jacket, because of the heat, that he wondered why somebody would be wearing leather gloves on a hot day. He thought about the tattoos and the image of a motorcycle came into his mind.

  It had been parked right outside Karmen Brown’s front door.

  ~ * ~

  He pressed every buzzer on the wall until someone let him in. He was even ready to run up the stairs but the elevator was there and open.

  On the ride he was trying to make sense out of it.

  The doors slid open and he lurched toward Karmen’s apartment.

  The young man with the tattooed arms was coming out. He jumped back and reached for his pocket but Leonid leaped and hit him. The young man took the punch hard but he held on to the pistol. Leonid grabbed his hand and they embraced, performing an intricate dance that revolved around their strengths and that gun. When the kid wrenched the pistol from Leonid’s hand the heavier man let his weight go dead and they fell to the floor. The gun went off.

  Leonid felt a sharp pain at just about the place that his liver was situated. He leaped back from the motorcycle man, grab­bing at his belly. There was blood on the lower half of his shirt.

  “Shit!” he cried.

  His mind went to November 1963. He was fifteen and devastated at the assassination of Kennedy. Then Oswald was shot by Ruby. Shot in the liver and in excruciating pain.

  That’s when Leo realized that his pain had passed. He turned toward his opponent and saw that he was lying on his back, gasping for air. And then, midgasp, he stopped breath­ing.

  Realizing that the blood on him was the kid’s, Leo stood up.

  Karmen lay on the floor in the corner, naked. Her eyes were open and very, very bloodshot. Her throat was dark from strangulation.

  But she wasn’t dead.

  When Leonid leaned over her those destroyed eyes recog­nized him. A deep gurgling went off in her throat and she tried to hit him. She croaked a loud inarticulate curse and actually sat up. The exertion was too much. She died in a sitting posi­tion, her head bowed over her knees.

  There was no blood under her nails.

  Why was she naked? Leonid wondered.

  He went into the bathroom to check the tub-but it was dry.

  He thought about calling the hospital but…

  The kid had used a .22 caliber long-barrel pistol. Leonid was sure that it was the pistol Nora Parsons said that she lost seventeen years before.

  In her wallet the dead girl’s license had the name Lana Par­sons.

  It was then that Leonid felt the heat from her jewelry and cash in his own pocket.

  The killer had a backpack. It contained two stamped en­velopes. One was addressed to a lawyer named Mazer and the other to Nora Parsons in Montclair, New Jersey.

  The letter to her mother included one of the photographs that Leonid had taken of Richard Mallory and his girlfriend.

  Dear Mom,

  While you were in the Bahamas with Richard last year I went to your house looking for anything that might have be­longed to dad. You know that I loved him so much. I just thought you might have something I could remember him by.

  I found a rusty old metal box in the garage. You still had the key in the hardware drawer. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that you hired a detective to prove that daddy was steal­ing
from his company. He must have told you and you figured you could keep his money and your boyfriends while he was dying in prison.

  I waited for a long time to figure out what to do about it. Finally I decided to use the man you used to kill daddy to break your heart. Here’s a picture of your precious Richard and his real girlfriend. The boy you say you love. The boy you sent through college. What do you think about that?

  And I took the report Leonid McGill made about daddy. I’m sending it to my lawyer. Maybe he can prove some kind of conspiracy. I’m sure you framed daddy and if the lawyer can prove it then maybe they’ll send both of you to prison. Maybe even Mr. McGill would testify against you.

  See you in court.

  Your loving daughter,

  Lana

  To the lawyer she sent a yellowing and frayed report that Leonid had made many years before. It detailed how Nora’s husband kept a secret account with money that he’d embezzled from a discretionary fund he controlled. Leonid remembered the meeting with Mrs. Parsons. She’d said that she couldn’t trust a man who was a thief. Leo didn’t argue. He was just there to collect his check.

  Lana had included a copy of the letter to her mother in the lawyer’s envelope. She asked him to help her get justice for her father.

  Leonid washed his hands carefully and then removed any sign that he had been in the girl’s apartment. He rubbed down every surface and the glass he drank from. He gathered the ev­idence he’d brought and the unmailed letters, then buttoned his coat over the bloody shirt and hurried away from the crime scene.

  ~ * ~

  Twill was wearing a dark blue suit with a pale yellow shirt and maroon tie that had a wavering blue line orbiting its center. Leonid wondered where his son got such a fine suit but he didn’t ask.

  They were the only two in the small funeral parlor chapel where Gert Longman lay in an open pine coffin. She looked smaller than she had in life. Her stiff face seemed to be fash­ioned from wax.

  The Wyant brothers fronted him fifty-five hundred dollars for the funeral. They gave him their preferential rate of two points a week.

  Leonid lingered at the casket while Twill stood to the side-half a step behind him.

  Behind the pair two rows of folding chairs sat like a mute crowd of spectators. The director had set the room for a ser­vice but Leonid didn’t know if Gert was religious. Neither did he know any of her friends.

  After the forty-five minutes they were allotted Twill and Leonid left the Little Italy funeral home. They came out onto I he bright sun shining on Mott Street.

  “Hey, Leon,” a voice called from behind them.

  Twill turned but Leonid did not.

  Carson Kitteridge, dressed in a dark gold suit, walked up.

  “Lieutenant. You met my son Twill.”

  “Isn’t it a school day, son?” the cop asked.

  “Grief leave, Officer,” Twill said easily. “Even prison lets up in cases like that.”

  “What you want, Carson?” Leonid said.

  He looked up over the policeman’s head. The sky was what Gert used to call blue-gorgeous. That was back in the days when they were still lovers.

  “I thought that you might want to know about Mick Bright.”

  “Who?”

  “We got an anonymous call five days ago,” Carson said. “It was about a disturbance in an apartment building on the Upper East Side.”

  “Yeah?”

  “When the officers got there they found a dead girl named Lana Parsons and this Mick Bright-also dead.”

  “Who killed ‘em?” Leonid asked, measuring his breath.

  “Looks like a rape and robbery. The kid was an addict. He knew the girl from the Performing Arts high school.”

  “But you said that he was dead too?”

  “I did, didn’t I? Best the detectives could tell the kid was high and fell on his own gun. It went off and nicked his heart.”

  While saying this Carson stared deeply into McGill’s eyes.

  Twill glanced at his father and then looked away.

  “Stranger things have happened,” Leonid said.

  Leonid had long since realized that Lana found the pistol in her mother’s metal box too. He knew why she’d killed Gert and had Bright kill her. She wanted to hurt him and then send him off to prison like he’d done to her father.

  It was as good a frame as he would have thought up him­self. The lawyer would make the letters available to the cops. Once they suspected Leonid they’d match his semen inside her. She would expect him to have kept the expensive jewelry. Robbery, rape, and murder and he would have been as inno­cent as Joe Haller.

  I’d die for him, she’d said. She was talking about her father.

  “I been knowing about the case for days,” Kitteridge said. “The girl’s name stuck in my head and then I remembered. Lana Parsons was the daughter of Nora Parsons. You ever hear of her?”

  “Yeah. I brought her information about her husband. She was considering a divorce.”

  “That’s right,” Kitteridge said. “But he wasn’t fooling around. He was embezzling money from their own company. They sent him to jail on the dirt you dug up.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He died in prison, didn’t he?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  ~ * ~

  Leonid burned the letters Lana had intended to incriminate him.

  His work for Lana’s mother had driven the girl to murder and suicide. For a while he considered sending the photograph of Richard and his girlfriend to Lana’s mother. At least he could accomplish one thing that she intended to do. But he de­cided against it. Why hurt Nora when he was just as guilty?

  He kept the picture, though, in the top drawer of his desk.

  The shot of Richard with his hand up under the receptionist’s red dress, out on Park Avenue after a spicy Brazilian feast. Next to that he had placed an item from the New York Post. It was a thumbnail article about a prisoner on Ryker’s Island named Joe Haller. He’d been arrested for robbery. While waiting to stand trial he hung himself in his cell.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  JOYCE CAROL OATES

  So Help Me God

  from The Virginia Quarterly Review

  Phone rings. My cousin Andrea answers.

  It’s a pelting-rain weekday evening last April, just past 7 p.m. and dark as midnight.

  Without so much as glancing toward me Andrea picks up the receiver as if she’s in her own home and not mine, shifting her infant daughter onto her left hip in a way to make you think of a migrant farm wife in a classic Walker Evans photograph of the 1930s.

  Phone rings! I will wish I’d snatched the receiver from her hand, slammed it down before any words were exchanged.

  But Andrea is answering in her wishing-to-be-surprised high school voice, not taking time to squint at the caller ID my husband, a St. Lawrence County law enforcement officer, has had installed for precisely these evenings when he’s on the night shift and his young wife is alone in this house in the country except for the accident of Andrea dropping by with the baby and interfering with my life.

  “Yes? Who is this?”

  Andrea laughs, blinking and staring past me. Whoever is on the other end of the line is intriguing to her, I can see.

  I’m checking the digital code which has come up unavailable. Sometimes it reads no data given which is the same as unavailable and a signal you don’t want to pick up. At least, I don’t. In Au Sable Forks, which is the center and circumference of my world, everyone is acquainted with everyone else and has been so since grade school. It’s rare that an unknown name comes up for on the fingers of one hand I can count the people likely to be calling me at this or any hour which is why ordinarily I’d have let UNAVAILABLE leave a message on the machine figuring it must be for my husband.

  unavailable could be anyone. Like seeing on your doorstep a hulking individual wearing a paper bag over his head, or a ski mask. Do you throw open the door?

 
I could wring Andrea’s neck the way she’s smiling, shaking her head, “Which one? Who?” opening the damn door wide. Wish I’d never called her this afternoon hinting I was lonely.

  This pelting rain! The kind of rain that hammers at your head like unwanted thoughts.