The Best American Mystery Stories 3

by Edited by James Ellroy

  “But, Dad ...”

  “Now, please,” he said, and Carla added, “Olivia, listen to your father. He’ll finish with your horses later.”

  He went to the door, wiped at his hair for a moment, remembered the many other times when he had answered evening doorbells like this one, so he wasn’t surprised when he opened the door and saw the town’s police chief there.

  “Mr. Dow?” he said quietly. “Ted Reiser. Chief of police.”

  The chief was about ten years older than Richard, heavyset, with a black mustache and a chubby neck that spilled over the collar of his white uniform dress shirt. A gold star was in each of his collar tabs, and Richard thought the chief — who was boss of a whole six officers — looked slightly ridiculous.

  “Sure,” Richard said. “What can I do for you?”

  The chief looked past Richard and said, “Can I come in for a moment?”

  “Absolutely, come on in,” he said, and the chief came in and took a seat on the couch, balancing his gold-brimmed hat on his knees. Richard sat down and said, “If you’d like, can I get you a drink, or —”

  Reiser raised his hand. “Sorry, no. Look, I’m sorry, but this is an official call. I’m investigating something that occurred earlier today. Something I’m afraid that might involve you.”

  He made a point of folding his hands together and leaning forward in his chair. “One of my kids? Did they do something?”

  The chief ignored the question, went on. “George Winn. I take it you know him.”

  “Sure. I coach his kid in the baseball league.”

  “You’ve also had words with him, plus one altercation. True?”

  Richard nodded. “True. I try to help out his boy, and George thought the kid would work best under threats.”

  “But there was an altercation, nearly a week ago.”

  “I didn’t hit him, not once. Can you tell me what’s going on?”

  The chief sighed. “George Winn was attacked and severely injured today. An intruder broke into his home, struck him from the rear. No description of the attacker, but I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you what you were doing at about four forty-five p.m. today.”

  “Why?”

  “Please, Mr. Dow. You were in a fight with him last week. I need to know this.”

  “Should I be getting a lawyer?”

  That got the chief’s attention. “Do you think you need one?”

  “No,” Richard answered.

  “Then why don’t you tell me where you were this afternoon.”

  Richard shrugged. “All right. I was at the movies with my boy Sam, at the River Mall theater. The picture started at three-thirty, got out at five-thirty.”

  “Do you have any proof?” the chief asked.

  “Sure.” He dug into his pants pocket, past his handkerchief and change. “Look. Ticket stubs for the both of us.”

  “Anybody see you at the theater?”

  “Um, a kid named Larry who took my money.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “Let’s see . . . oh, sure. Paul, who works at Twombly’s Hardware. He sat next to me. In fact, I stepped on the poor guy’s toes when I left to get some popcorn about halfway through the movie.”

  The chief moved his hat in a semicircle. “Did you know what time it was?”

  “Nope.”

  “And what time did you get back into the theater?”

  Richard looked at the chief, tried to feel what was going on behind those unblinking eyes. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  Now it was time for the police chief to lean forward. “You said you left the theater to get some popcorn. And what I want to know is, how long were you out there?”

  “Two minutes, maybe three.”

  “And did anybody see you come back into the theater?”

  “Yeah, Paul did, I’m sure.”

  “Oh, you are, are you,” the chief said. “And why’s that?”

  Richard looked at the chief calmly. “Because when I tried to get past him and sit next to my son, I accidentally poured a cold drink on his head. That’s why.”

  ~ * ~

  Another sunny day, hot but the air was dry, with little humidity. Richard was back at his position near first base, waiting. It was the bottom of the sixth inning and the score was tied, o to o, but his boy Sam was on third base. He rubbed his hands together, could feel the anticipation in the air, as the next Pine Tree Rotary batter came to the plate, little Leo Winn, holding his baseball bat strong and true.

  The stands were nearly full, and there was Olivia, keeping score again with the large notebook on her tiny lap. Today Carla had taken the afternoon off and she was there as well, and he waved at them both, but neither waved back, as they were talking to each other. Maybe later, he thought.

  He wiped his hands on his pants legs. It was a beautiful day, the best so far this summer, and there was the first pitch . . .

  Thump! as the ball went into the catcher’s mitt. Denny Thompson was umpiring again today, and he slowly got up. “Ball!” came the shout.

  “Good eye, Leo, good eye!” Richard called out, and he looked up in the stands again, and sure enough, there was Leo’s dad George, sitting there stiffly. Richard thought about waving at George but decided that would be pushing it.

  Another pitch, and this time Leo swung mightily at it, and missed. Another thump! of the ball into the glove.

  “Strike!”

  Richard clapped his hands. “That’s fine, Leo, that’s fine. You’re doing all right,” and even his teammates in the dugout joined in, calling out to Leo, encouraging him, telling him to take his time, to swing at a good pitch. It was a good sound, a wonderful sound, made even better by the fact that no one was shouting insults, no one was shouting threats. Like he had mentioned the other night in the van to his son, sometimes a team was like a family, looking out for each other. Richard looked up in the stands again, and there was George, sitting still, sitting quietly.

  He clapped his hands again, “Come on, Leo, the next one’s yours!”

  But of course, George had no choice, for George was sitting there, jaw wired shut, after somebody broke into his house and smashed his jaw with what the police believed to be a length of lead pipe. Funny how things happen, Richard thought, and then he looked over at Carla, and waved at her.

  And she raised her arm and waved back, and even at this distance, he could see the slight pain in her eyes, for she had quite the workout the previous day, and wielding a lead pipe with such a slender arm could cause some soreness. He smiled as the other team’s pitcher began his windup, remembered the meeting last week with the two feds, and how even to this day, they couldn’t figure out why he had gotten away with eleven killings in his previous life. It was simple, really, if you looked at it as a game, as a family game, and he waved once more at his lovely wife.

  The pitch flew by and this time, oh, this time, there was a powerful crack! as Leo swung his bat and the ball flew up and out, heading so far out into the sky, and the people in the stands began cheering as little Leo chugged up the baseline, his face so alive and excited, and true enough, this was just a game, but it was the best damn game in the world.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  DAVID EDGERLEY GATES

  The Blue Mirror

  from Alfred, Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine

  “You know how long a tail gunner’s supposed to last in combat?” Stanley asked me. “Twenty-four minutes, on average. Me, I beat the odds, did my fifty missions, came back to the States, went on a bond tour.” He shook his head ruefully. “Now the cancer’s got me, I won’t live out the year.’’

  I’d known Stanley Kosciusko most of my life. He came from Fitchburg, just north of Leominster, where me and my brother Tony grew up. There were quite a few Poles up there, close to the New Hampshire border, and a fair number of Finns, oddly.

  The Poles had come originally to work in the paper and textile mills, the Finns to make furniture — Windsor chairs an
d dining room sets. Stanley had married a Finnish girl himself after the war. Maria Aho.

  “You got to have an appreciation for life’s little ironies, ain’t it the truth?” he remarked.

  Did his wife know? I wondered out loud.

  “About the cancer, sure. This other thing, no.” It was the other thing he’d come to talk to me about.

  “I lied about my age,” he went on. “Enlisted when I was seventeen. Wound up in a B-24 Liberator, flying out of Sicily bombing the Ploesti oilfields. Froze your ass off in those planes, but man, you’d sweat bullets when the German fighters came at you, Fockes and Messerschmitts. Anybody claims they weren’t scared stiff is retarded or just plain crazy.”

  I was thinking about how old he was. Fifty-odd years since D-Day. Add it up, and Stanley was in his mid-seventies. He still seemed vigorous enough, but now that I knew what to look for, I saw the tightness around his eyes from holding in the pain, and a metallic cast to his skin, tarnished and dull. In the afternoon sunlight coming in my office windows I noticed he’d used some kind of rouge or blush to give his face the color it lacked. I figured that was harmless enough.

  “Your dad was in the war, wasn’t he?” he asked.

  “Different war,” I said. “Korea.”

  Stanley nodded. “I knew that,” he said, as if it were important for me to understand he still had all his buttons. He’d dressed for the occasion, too, like he had to impress me.

  Stanley was a retired auto body man. Tony and I had hung around his shop on Saturday mornings when we were kids because Stanley could fix anything. You could take him your bike or a broken kitchen appliance your mom was ready to throw out or a Lionel locomotive with a bad armature, and he’d make it work. He loved tools, not just what he used on the job, breaker bars and socket sets and orbital sanders, but old hand tools like rabbeting planes and Yankee drills, miter boxes and shake splitters, anything that had a purpose, because Stanley himself was purposeful. Me and Tony would hunt up objects in the abandoned mills and the local landfill just to have Stanley tell us what they were for. He’d examine a rusty, weathered thing, a spokeshave or a bit-and-brace with a corroded ratchet, and take it apart, clean it up, hone the bit or the blade, and put it back together so he could show you how well it suited your hand, you wanted to make a paper-tight join or dowel a table leg. He could repair a grandfather clock or a .22 rifle, and the trick was his curiosity, that certain knowledge that somebody else had made it, whatever it was, had designed it with a use in mind.

  “I blame myself,” Stanley said. “You have to own up to the responsibility for what you’ve done or haven’t done.”

  “Cancer’s not your fault, Stanley,” I said.

  “You think I don’t know that?” He shifted his weight awkwardly, his suit making him self-conscious. “Jack, there’s somebody looking to hurt me. Or my family, which amounts to the same thing.”

  His namesake was a Revolutionary War general who later went home to Poland and led a hopeless revolt against the Russians.

  “Here’s what I need you to do for me,” he said. “I’m dying on the vine here. I got to have me a surrogate.”

  I could still see him breaking some Cossack’s neck with his bare hands.

  “See, if the damn Commies hadn’t killed Stosh over in Vietnam, things’d be different,” he said. “The way it is, I’m stuck with it. But me, I can’t hardly lift a glass.”

  Life’s little ironies. If somebody’s going to be dead inside a year, what do you threaten him with? But more to the point, how do you turn him down when he asks you for help?

  ~ * ~

  Here’s the rest of what Stanley told me. I was explaining it to my brother Tony over a beer.

  “Stanley junior died in Vietnam, right?” he asked.

  “First Cav,” I said.

  Tony swung his wheelchair over to the sink. I’d just helped him move into this place, and he was still adjusting to being on his own. He’d resented being dependent, and once he was out of rehab he didn’t need nursing care, but it was a big step all the same. He rinsed out his beer bottle and left it on the drainboard. “And there’s a grandson?”

  “Andy. Andy Ravenant. He took his stepfather’s name after his mom remarried, but he and Stanley have always been close.”

  “Ravenant. Why’s that name ring a bell?”

  “You used to see his ads on late-night TV, after Star Trek. Raving Richie Ravenant. Sold rugs and wall-to-wall.”

  “Out in Lynn on the discount strip?”

  “Next door to Adventure Car-Hop, home of the Ginsburger.”

  “He must do a pretty high volume,” Tony said. “You’d think somebody would go after the carpet king, not Stanley.”

  “Except the stepdad’s been dead for eight years, and Andy’s mom lives in Florida.”

  “Puts a crimp in that line of inquiry.”

  “Assuming you were using Andy for leverage,” I said.

  “Unless it’s the other way around.”

  I took my own bottle to the sink, rinsed it out, and got two more out of the fridge. I cracked the tops.

  “Okay,” Tony said, taking the beer I handed him, “why is who-ever-this-is bothering Stanley? If they’ve got a beef with the kid, what’s it have to do with the grandfather? And how did Stanley get wind of it anyway?”

  Stanley was seeing a specialist out at Beth Israel, off the Jamaicaway. He’s coming out of the hospital, headed for where he’d parked on Brookline Avenue, and some greaseball — Stanley’s description — starts giving him a hard time.

  “Explain that a little better,” Tony said. “This guy comes out of nowhere?”

  “Apparently,” I said. “Stanley’s like, hel-LO, what’s your story? Homeless vet, willing to work for food?”

  “I take it not, unhappily.”

  The guy’s trying to act smooth, but he’s antsy, like he has someplace else to be and this is just a pit stop.

  “Coked up?” my brother asked.

  “Good observation,” I said. “Except that Stanley wouldn’t know what to look for. I’m reading between the lines. The dude was looking over his shoulder.”

  “Sorry,” Tony remarked, smiling. “You were saying?”

  According to Stanley, the guy couldn’t seem to get to the point, or it was like he was talking in code. He kept using these veiled, oblique references as if they were supposed to make sense to Stanley, and Stanley finally gets fed up and just steps around him. The other guy is so frustrated with Stanley for, like, willfully refusing to understand that he calls after him he’ll send him his grandson’s tongue in a pickle jar.

  “This is the first overt mention of Andy, right?”

  “Right. The rest of it’s been this sly jive-ass hinting around.”

  “I can see this going one of two ways,” Tony said. “Or one of one, namely Stanley drop-kicking the guy to Chestnut Hill.”

  “Except that he’s past seventy and he’s on heavy medication and he doesn’t know what any of it’s about.”

  “So he suppresses his natural instinct to scrub the bricks with this yo-yo’s face, not to mention that he’s maybe no longer the man he once was, and he comes to you.”

  “Pretty much.”

  Tony pursed his lips. “Where do you start?” he asked.

  “I start with Stanley’s grandson.”

  “The kid.”

  “He’s not a kid, exactly.” In fact, Andy was close to my brother’s age. He was thirty-one, an attorney. Criminal law, unglamorous but always in demand. He’d done a couple of years as a public defender in Suffolk Superior Court, and now he was in private practice, with an address downtown on Milk Street.

  “You hoping that dog will hunt?” Tony asked.

  “Andy’s more likely to have enemies than his grandfather.”

  “Yeah, you’d think so,” Tony said, but he seemed distracted by something, a thought hovering on the periphery.

  “What?” I asked him.

  “I can’t put my finger on i
t,” he said. “Maybe if I’d quit chasing after it, it would stop ducking out of sight.”

  ~ * ~

  The offices of Ravenant & Dwyer were at the bottom edge of the financial district, in the shadow of the Customs House tower. It was one of the oldest sections of town, built over again and again, but like the North End or Beacon Hill, you could still see an imprint of how Boston had once been laid out back in the eighteenth century when its commerce depended on shipping and the narrow, crooked streets led down to the harborfront. The traffic then would have been horse-drawn wagons and drays lurching over the cobblestones and the small businesses would have been ship’s chandlers and jobbers, sailmakers’ lofts, and rope factories. It remained a commercial district, outlets for wholesale plumbing supplies and the like at street level, and the tenants in the offices on the upper stories were a similar mix of tradesmen and professionals, but they offered a different range of services these days. Andy’s law office was one flight up, the entry door sharing a small landing with a jeweler and an architectural drafting studio. I had a ten o’clock appointment.