The Best American Mystery Stories 3

by Edited by James Ellroy

  Billy said, “Coyle, there’s sins of commission and there’s sins of omission. This one’s a sixty-thousand-dollar omission.”

  Coyle said, “You got no proof. It was all cash like you wanted, no taxes.”

  Billy said, “I want my sixty back. You can forget the free rent and the twenty-five hundred you got off me every month, but I want the bonus money.”

  Coyle said, “Ain’t got it to give back.”

  Billy said, “You got the BMW free and clear. Sign it over and we’re square.”

  Coyle said, “You ain’t gettin my Beamer. Bought that with my signing money.”

  Billy said, “You takin’ it knowin’ your eye was shot, that was humbug.”

  Coyle said, “I’m stickin’ with the contract and my lawyer says you still owe me twenty-five hundred for this month, and maybe for three years to come. He says you’re the one that caused it all when you put me in with the wrong opponent.”

  Billy’d put weight on around the belly and Coyle was saying he wasn’t dick afraid of him.

  Billy didn’t press for the pink, and didn’t argue about the twenty-five hundred a month, didn’t say nothing about the lost projected income.

  “Then tell me this,” Billy said, “when do you plan on gettin’ out of my building and givin’ back my keys?”

  Coyle laughed his laugh. “When you evict me, that’s when, and you can’t do that for a while ‘cause my eye means I’m disabled, I checked.”

  Billy laughed with Coyle, and Billy shook Coyle’s left hand with his right before taking off, ‘cause Coyle kept the Ruger in his right hand.

  Billy said, “Well, let me know if you change your mind.”

  “Not hardly,” said Coyle. “I’m thinkin’ on marrying that cop’s daughter. This here’s our love nest.”

  ~ * ~

  Me and Dee-Cee was cussing Coyle twenty-four hours a day, but Billy never let on he cared. About a week later, he said his wife and kids was heading down to Orlando Disney World for a few days. On Thursday he gave me and Dee-Cee the invite to come on down to Nuevo Laredo with him Friday night for the weekend.

  Billy said, “We’ll have a few thousand drinks at the Cadillac Bar to wash the taste of Coyle out of our mouths.”

  He sweetened the pot, said how about spending some quality time in the cat houses of Boys Town, all on him? I said my old root’ll still do the job with the right inspiration, so did Dee-Cee. But he said his back was paining him bad since the deal with Coyle, and that he had to go on over Houston where he had this Cuban Santeria woman. She had some kind of mystic rubjuice made with rooster blood he said was the only thing what’d cure him.

  Dee-Cee said, “I hate to miss the trip with y’all, but I got to see my Cuban.”

  I told Billy he might as well ride with me in my Jimmy down to Nuevo Laredo. See, it’s on the border some three hours south of San Antonia. I had a transmission I been wanting to deliver to my cousin Royal in Dilley, which is some seventy-eighty miles down from San Antonia on Highway 35 right on our way. Billy said he had stuff to do in the morning, but that he’d meet me at the Cadillac Bar at six o’clock next day. That left just me heading south alone and feeling busted up inside for doing the right thing by a skunk.

  I left early so’s I could listen to Royal lie, and level out with some of his Jack Daniel’s. When I pulled up in front of the Cadillac Bar at ten of six, I saw Billy’s bugged-up Town Car parked out front. He was inside, a big smile on him. With my new hat and boots, I felt fifty again, and screw Kenny Coyle and the BMW he rode in on. We was laughing like Coyle didn’t matter to us, but underneath, we knew he did.

  Billy got us nice rooms in a brand-new motel once we had quail and Dos Equis for dinner, and finished off with fried ice cream in the Messkin style. Best I can recollect, we left our wheels at the motel and took a cab to Boys Town. We hit places like the Honeymoon Hotel, the Dallas Cowboys, and the New York Yankey. Hell, I buried myself in brown titties, even ended up with a little Chink gal I wanted to smuggle home in my hat. Spent two nights with her and didn’t never want to go home.

  I ain’t sure, but seems to me I went back to the motel once on Saturday just to check on Billy. His car was gone, and there was a message for me blinking on the phone in my room, and five one-hundred-dollar bills on my pillow. Billy’s message said he had to go on over to Matamoros ‘cause the truck for his shrimps had busted down, and he had to rent another one for shrimp night. So I had me a mess of Messkin scrambled eggs and rice and beans and a few thousand bottles of Negra Modelo. I headed on back for my China doll still shaky, but I hadn’t lost my boots or my El Patrón so I’m thinking I was a tall dog in short grass.

  There seems like there were times when I must a blanked out there. But somewhere along the line, I remember wandering the streets over around Boys Town when I come up on a little park that made me stop and watch. It happens in parks all over Mexico. The street lights ain’t nothing but hanging bare bulbs with swarms of bugs and darting bats. Boys and girls of fourteen to eighteen’n more’d make the nightly paseo — that’s like a stroll on the main drag, ‘cause there ain’t no TV or nothing, and the paseo’s what they do to get out from the house to flirt. In some parts, the young folks form circles in the park. The boys’ circled form outside the girls’ circle and each circle moves slow in opposite directions so’s the boys and the girls can be facing each other as they pass. The girls try to squirt cheap perfume on a boy they fancy. The boys try to pitch a pinch of confetti into a special girl’s month. Everybody gets to laughing and spitting and holding their noses but inside their knickers they’re fixing to explode. It’s how folks get married down there.

  ‘Course, getting married wasn’t on my mind. Something else was, and I did my best to satisfy my mind with some more of that authentic Chinee sweet and sour.

  ~ * ~

  Billy was asleep the next day, Sunday, when I come stumbling back, so I crapped out, too. I remember right, we headed home separate on Sunday night late. Both of us crippled and green but back in Laredo Billy’s car was washed and spanky clean except for a cracked rear window. Billy said some Matamoros drunk had made a failed try to break in. He showed me his raw knuckles to prove it.

  Billy said, “I can still punch like you taught me, Reddy.”

  Driving myself home alone, I was all bowlegged, and my heart was leaping sideways. But when it’s my time to go to sleep for the last time, I want to die in Boys Town teasing the girls and learning Chinee.

  ~ * ~

  I was still hung over on Monday, and had to lay around all pale and shaky until I could load up on biscuits and gravy, fresh salsa, fried grits, a near pound of bacon, three or four tomatoes, and a few thousand longnecks. I guess I slept most of the time ‘cause I don’t remember no TV.

  It wasn’t until when I got to the gym on Tuesday that I found out about Kenny Coyle. Hunters found him dead in the dirt. He was beside his torched BMW in the mesquite on the outside of town. They found him Sunday noon, and word was he’d been dead some twelve hours, which meant he’d been killed near midnight Saturday night. Someone at the gym said the cops had been by to see me. Hell, me’n Billy was in Mexico, and Dee-Cee was in Houston.

  The inside skinny was that Coyle’d been hogtied with them plastic cable-tie deals that cops’ll sometimes use instead of handcuffs. One leg’d been knee-capped with his own Ruger someplace else, and later his head was busted in by blunt force with a unknown object. His brains was said to hang free, and looked like a bunch of grapes. His balls was in his mouth, and his mouth had been slit to the ear so’s both balls’d fit. The story I got was that the cops who found him got to laughing, said it was funny seeing a man eating his own mountain oysters. See, police right away knew it was business.

  When the cops stopped by the gym Tuesday morning, I was still having coffee and looking out the storefront window. I didn’t have nothing to hide, so I stayed sipping my joe right where I was. I told them the same story I been telling you, starting off with stopping b
y to see old Royal in Dilley. See, the head cop was old Junior, and old Junior was daddy to that plain-Jane gal.

  I told him me and Billy had been down Nuevo Laredo when the tragedy occurred. Told him about the Cadillac Bar, and about drinking tequila and teasing the girls in Boys Town. ‘Course, I left out a few thousand details I didn’t think was any of his business. Old Junior’s eyes got paler still, and his jaw was clenched up to where his lips didn’t hardly move when he talked. He didn’t ask but two or three questions, and looked satisfied with what I answered.

  Fixing to leave, Junior said, “Seems like some’s got to learn good sense the hard way.”

  Once Junior’d gone, talk started up in the gym again and ropes got jumped. Fight gyms from northern Mexico all up through Texas knew what happened to Coyle. Far as I know, the cops never knocked on Billy Clancy’s door, but I can tell you that none of Billy’s fighters never had trouble working up a sweat no more, or getting up for a fight neither.

  I was into my third cup of coffee when I saw old Dee-Cee get off the bus. He was same as always, except this time he had him a knobby new walking stick. It was made of mesquite like the last one. But as he come closer, I could see that the wood on this new one was still green from the tree.

  I said, “You hear about Coyle?”

  “I jus’ got back,” said Dee-Cee, “what about him?” One of the colored boys working out started to snicker. Dee-Cee gave that boy a look with those greeny-blue eyes. And that was the end of that.

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  ~ * ~

  DANIEL WATERMAN

  A Lepidopterist’s Tale

  from Bomb

  When my sister Janie and I were coming up in Smoketown, not long after Skeet came from across the street to stay and be our brother, an alley cat took to lingering around our house. Like all stray cats it lingered indecisively, torn between its two basic natures — it rubbed against your leg, but wouldn’t let you pet it. It followed you everywhere, but hissed viciously if you tried to pick it up.

  Skeet loved that cat. For a while. It was scrofulous and rib-thin, but with lively gray eyes it still had its pride. Skeet put up with its nasty attitude, fed it food and milk, watched it stalk and prowl. I guess he just wanted something to take care of even then. But since no one really wants a cat that can’t be picked up and petted, an unfriendly cat, he stopped feeding it and petting it and letting it in. After a while the cat didn’t come around anymore. I guess it was picked up or wandered off or died — I don’t know which. And I guess Skeet was a lot like that cat. That cat had its own doom in it like a tumor.

  It’s a slight episode from my childhood, and I wouldn’t have remembered it at all if Janie hadn’t phoned me in tears at the office last week and asked me to meet her at Skeet’s apartment. Skeet lived in a lot of places around town after we all left home eight years ago. I never saw most of the places Skeet lived, and I probably wouldn’t have cared to. But two months ago, out of the blue, he turned up in the neighborhood that Janie and I always took pains to avoid, the one where we all grew up together.

  This was Smoketown, where the shotgun houses run undistinguished for blocks and blocks, like brick after brick in a masonry wall. Where the tedium of the street, dull and scrubbed and empty and clean, is punctuated at odd intersections by a few corner storefronts — a convenience store or a laundromat or a bar. Where the enormous chimney of the city incinerator looms over everything, and the smoke that erupts from it all day long gives the neighborhood its name.

  Skeet’s few belongings were still at his place, and his landlord had asked us to clear them out. Apparently Skeet had put down Janie’s name as the person to notify in case of an emergency. It wasn’t an emergency anymore, but Janie had finally found the nerve to go over and see what was there. On her day off, calling me from a pay phone on the corner because Skeet didn’t have a phone, had never had a phone, she wanted me to come over too. Quick.

  “What is it?” I asked her.

  “Just come over.”

  “It’s a bad time, Janie,” I told her. “I’m new here. I can’t be running out on little errands in the middle of the day.”

  “Just come over. All right?”

  “Listen,” I said, guessing she’d just had a bad attack of the sorrows. “Leave it alone now. Tomorrow’s Saturday. I’ve got the day off. I’ll help tomorrow.”

  “That’s not it.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  In the pause that followed I could hear her inhale, that signature breadth of time. She was smoking again. “Just come over,” she said.

  “I can’t. Can’t you call Hal?” I asked, hoping she might consider calling her husband. A vicious silence ensued, and I remembered that Hal, who is not a bad person, had fallen from grace with my sister, his wife. I had no doubt he’d done nothing wrong, but that wasn’t going to help Hal any. Janie’s judgments have lives of their own, never dependent on things like good and bad behavior, one’s deservings.

  “Never mind,” I said.

  “He never knew Skeet,” she said, almost a growl.

  “Janie,” I sighed.

  “Sorry,” she said, softening a little but still defensive, still the disappointed little girl. “Look,” she went on. “I found something.”

  Just then Mr. Logan, the senior law partner for whom I work, came into the library. Seeing me on the phone, he marched over to my table. I smiled and held up a hand in greeting. He leaned forward, his fingers splayed over the tabletop, and waited.

  “What?” I asked Janie.

  “I said I found something.”

  “I know what you said. What did you find?”

  “Just please come over.” She’d hung up.

  “Mr. Logan,” I said, looking up. He raised his eyebrows at me over the top of his half-glasses, his face already dead with preordained disappointment. “I’m afraid I’ve got to run out for a while.”

  ~ * ~

  Skeet’s apartment was no apartment at all, but one of those same storefronts in our old neighborhood, at the corner of Grand and Clay. I sat in the car for a moment and reread the address Janie had given me, convinced it was wrong. The store was too familiar to me, just two blocks from the house we grew up in. When Janie and I were kids it had been Murphy’s Candy Store, then Bunny’s Corner Market, and long after that a package store and bar — as though the building itself had seen fit to fulfill our every evolving need.

  It was vacant now, though the front window was still intact, which surprised me. But the plate glass was painted pitch black, and plastered thickly with nightclub posters and concert flyers. I turned off the air conditioning in the car, rolled down the window, and waited.

  The air outside was hot and still. The hollow summer sunlight, the shadows and the silence, the spare barren sidewalks all stole my momentum and I just sat there, feeling something of summers past. Further down the street two children were beating at each other with sticks. A screen door slammed somewhere behind me, and a little girl sped by on her bike, a doll tied cruelly to the rear fender. Suddenly and loudly a big yellow Cadillac ran the stop sign in front of me, its windows down and its stereo thumping, then was gone.

  When I looked back at the storefront, Janie was leaning out of the store’s dark doorway. She was watching me expectantly, staving off the heavy steel door with one of her strong, sinewy hands and motioning me inside with the other. I locked up the car and stepped up to meet her.

  Janie retreated in front of me like a tour guide, walking backward deeper and deeper into the room. “Look at these,” she said. But I couldn’t see anything. The room, though cool and damp, was too dark to see. Janie had propped open the front door, and the weak light from it lit up the shallows. A dirty skylight in back illuminated the rear. Stopping, I let her go ahead, waiting for my eyes to adjust. And when they did the room seemed simple and empty. Old tongue-and-groove wood flooring, smoothed like stone by the treading of years, ran the whole length of the room. A broad double desk sat off to one side. A hea
vy oak swivel chair was pulled up to it. At the end of the room a mattress and box spring were stacked on the floor.

  I stepped forward to follow, but something — a piece of string — fell against my face, startling me with its softness. A light cord. I reached up and pulled it.

  “Busted,’’ Janie said. “Come look at these.”

  At the desk Janie stepped around to the other side and faced me. She looked down at the surface, and I followed her eyes. Some boxes sat there. We looked up at each other, then back at the boxes.

  “What are they?” I asked.

  “You tell me,” she said.

  I stepped around and leaned in closer. They were display cases — plain rectangular wooden boxes with hinged lids and glass tops — two of them, lying face up. They were recognizable immediately, the kind of boxes over which you might linger at a flea market, inspecting the pocket watches, pen knifes, old fountain pens, and election buttons they contain — all the ephemera and mantelpiece trinkets that people hoard and collect and imbue with some secret significance. I peered into one of them and then looked back at Janie.