The Best American Mystery Stories 3

by Edited by James Ellroy

  “A lawyer,” he said, shaking his head, after we’d come to a stop. We were standing at the edge of the public golf course. Skeet turned and beamed at me, seemingly more proud of me than I was of myself. He held his head back and looked at me steadily. Then his admiration transformed into a leer. “Whooda thunk it,” he said, and in the space of those three words I felt no pride at all.

  He poked me in the side and laughed. “You wouldn’t bust me, would you?”

  “I can’t arrest people, Skeet,” I said, brushing away his arm. “I’m a lawyer, not a cop.”

  “Yeah. But that’s not what I asked. That’s technical,” he said. “I asked, would you if you could?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No, Skeet.”

  “You’d stand by me, right? Keep me out of the can.”

  “Right.”

  His expression veered sharply from suspicion to anger to wildeyed amusement. He looked at me hard one last time, then smiled. “The fuck you would,” he said.

  When I took the bar last month I was asked to take a pledge. A pledge to uphold the law. I know a little about the law. Now it’s even fair to say I “practice” it. But that phrase — “a practitioner of the law” — has always had an odd ring to my ear. Like a practicioner of magic, an instructor in illusions, a dabbler in the dark arts. Thinking of it that way, though, maybe it’s not so odd after all. Maybe it’s perfectly appropriate. Maybe all I do is dabble in illusions — the illusion of the law. I’d never voice that suspicion to a single one of my peers (a key to success in this line of work, one learns early on, is playing dumb and holding your tongue at the right time). Skeet knew nothing of the law itself. But in his limited way, maybe Skeet knew the only laws worth knowing.

  ~ * ~

  Last week, on Saturday morning, Janie and I met again at Skeet’s apartment to clear out all that was left over. The few clothes, the dishes, the hot plate and filthy bedding, the archival implements and the butterfly boxes. The mattress and box spring we dumped in the alley. The huge desk and swivel chair, though Janie pegged them as potential “antiques,” demanded more energy than we could summon. We left them for the owner to keep, along with an envelope containing a check for the balance of Skeet’s rent. After sweeping the floors, we locked up and left. It was ten in the morning. We were finished.

  On the sidewalk, I waited and talked to Janie while she finished another cigarette.

  “How’s Hal?” I asked. I don’t claim to know or understand Hal very well, even though we went to high school together. But asking after him is one way I have of asking after Janie. Things were still rocky between the two of them, so I thought I’d ask.

  “He’s pathetic,” Janie said casually. She exhaled and glanced at me to register my reaction. I gave none. “He says hello.”

  “Say hello back,” I told her. Janie, I guess, has always held her husband up to the masculine standard that Skeet came to represent for her. Or for both of us, really. Skeet was vicious. He often frightened me. Everywhere he walked, he walked with a steely stone scowl. The arteries in his neck twitched, alive like vital organs, and the blood rushed into his cheeks when he was coolly furious, which was often. But he made us both feel safe.

  Janie stopped going out with us eventually. She was dating some, and when she wasn’t dating she had girlfriends to run with. Skeet and I went everywhere together, though. High school for us was probably no different than it is for anybody else. And in the parks and parking lots where we all gravitated at night, somebody was going to get fucked up. I had Skeet to make sure it wasn’t me.

  One late Friday night, in the bathroom of the White Castle downtown, where everyone went on late Friday nights, two guys from St. Xavier, primping at the mirror, mumbled something not nice about Skeet and me. I don’t know what they said, but they said something — “faggots” maybe. I wasn’t paying attention. But Skeet was. He was waiting for it. He was always waiting for it — the offhand insult, the snotty look, the middle finger, the rich-boy snort, the bigoted slur. He’d learned to expect those signs and was attuned to them in a way that I never was. In me they provoked a shrug if I noticed them at all. To Skeet they really mattered; they were everything.

  I looked over at Skeet, standing at the urinal next to me. His eyes were narrowed and directed, burning holes in the tiles ahead. Then he just stopped peeing and zipped up in mid-stride, left me at the urinal, walked up to them in two decisive steps and smashed both of them full in the face so hard — one, two, that quick — that neither of them — both big boys in varsity letter jackets of some sort — had a chance to start. The sound of one of their noses breaking nauseated me.

  Skeet didn’t stop. He pulled one back by the hair and threw his head into the Formica countertop, let him fall to the ground, and then kicked him. He picked up the other one, who was cowering in the corner holding his bloody face, and kneed him in the stomach. That one fell to the floor and vomited. Skeet waited for him to finish, held his head up by the hair, and threw a sidewise punch into his jaw that made it seem as if the lower half of his face had a life of its own. When we walked out of the bathroom, every head in the restaurant was turned toward the bathroom door and Skeet cut an easy swath through them. I followed.

  He did it to pretty boys at country club parties we crashed out in the county, without provocation and for fun. He did it to jocks at basketball pep rallies, in the dark, behind field houses. He got into it with the black guys who strutted by our car in Central Park. He did it at dances to guys who were too drunk to dance and too drunk to know better.

  The one that Skeet killed, Gordon Lang, had dated Janie twice. Only twice, but I guess that was enough for Gordon to feel he had an investment in her. Drunk and bitter, he called her a whore to my face, slurring the words grotesquely, and I suddenly hated him. We were standing in Brad Bowman’s kitchen, in a lull during one of Brad’s backyard parties. I looked around for Skeet. He brought out the best behavior in everyone who came near him, and his arrival at my side usually brought a quick apology or a retreat. The only thing that could stop him was a word from me, and often that did no good. No one else was in the kitchen, though. No one had seen or heard a thing.

  After a minute of threats and posturing, Gordon walked away laughing. When Skeet returned a moment later I told him. “Who? Which one?” Skeet asked. I pointed out Gordon as he walked toward the street, and thought nothing of it, though in fact I’d just killed him. I walked away myself, to get another beer and brood on my own. The next morning Gordon Lang was found, two blocks down, in the backyard of a neighboring house, his head bruised and submerged in a two-foot-deep goldfish pond. He had “drowned.” Janie cried all the next day as though she had lost one of us, and maybe for that reason alone I never told her what Skeet had told me — that he’d done it, beat Gordon’s head against the creekstone and held him under. Janie never knew. She never knew and I never told her. I could never protect Janie the way Skeet could. But still, I have ways of my own — not telling her things being principal among them.

  “You’re still coming for dinner?” she asked me, stepping off the curb and into her car. Bachelor that I am, I eat dinner at least twice a week with my sister and brother-in-law.

  “What are we having?”

  “What do we always have?”

  “Something grilled?” In the summertime, with Hal cooking, we always have grilled something. Janie started the car, the door still hanging open.

  “That’s what we’re having, then. Grilled something.”

  “Bring beer?” I asked.

  “Please,” she said. “And dope.”

  Just after Janie left, I drove a few blocks out of the way to see the old house we had all three grown up in. It’s never been very far from the places I’ve lived — nothing’s very far apart in this city. But it was the only time since leaving it that I’ve ever been seized by a sense of nostalgia for my home, so I drove over and sat and looked at it. You could not pick it out from a picture; i
t still looks like every other house on that street, and it stands apart only because of its number: 332 Clay.

  I have three of Skeet’s butterfly boxes in my possession now, Janie has the others, and I’ve since taken the time to look up their names in Peterson’s Field Guide to Insects. What were at first extraordinary to my eye seem so no longer. The guidebook told me that. Most of the books I read these days do that — take the extraordinary out of everything. They were the most ordinary of butterflies, despite their exotic names, easy to catch in any suburban yard or public park. Easy to catch even along a city street. They were garden variety butterflies. Not an exceptional one among them.

  ~ * ~

  “I think I know,” Janie says. She is sitting on the couch across from me, cross-legged, her third scotch cupped in her hands like something delicate, alive. Hal is asleep on the couch next to her, wheezing gently as he has been for almost an hour. A big meal and marijuana always make Hal sleepy. But it makes Janie alive, fills her with chatter. We’ve been talking for some time.

  “You think you know what?” I ask.

  Janie, laying a fresh cigarette in the ashtray, throws her head against the couch and stares up at the ceiling. “The butterflies,” she says. “Why Skeet had the butterflies.” She says it in an almost mystical way, and I guess it’s just stoned talk. But as she finishes speaking her whole demeanor slides rapidly into a quiet oblivion. She looks down into her glass, then up at me, and then back into her glass, and I suppose she has understood something.

  “Why?” I ask, settling back into my chair.

  “Well,” she says, “it’s just a guess.” She looks up at me sheepishly. “It may seem kind of kooky. “

  “I’m sure it will,” I tell her. “What is it?”

  “Well, do you remember the picnic, your graduation picnic?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Janie looks back at her feet, and lifts up her drink for a swallow. “Never mind.”

  “No,” I tell her. “Go on.”

  “It’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it?” I say.

  Janie looks at me suspiciously, a little frightened. She shakes her head, but says nothing more.

  ~ * ~

  Many hours later we are sitting there still. Janie, asleep, is trundled hard against Hal’s shoulder and I have turned off all the lights. They are breathing softly, the two of them, and if they wake up I will pretend to be asleep myself, for Janie will think me crazy to not have gone home. I sit here watching them sleep because it’s good to sit here, good to be among family, to rest in the same room among loved ones and listen to them breathe in the dark. It has been so long since we shared a room together. So I will stay here and sip my drink, and think about what Janie doesn’t care to remember, about that day in the park, when Skeet killed a butterfly in the company of my friends.

  The day was dwindling. Everyone was drunk. Skeet had some music he wanted to play for us, convinced it would pick everyone up. Nobody protested, though nobody wanted it. We were pretending to enjoy the quiet. And as he opened his hatchback to take out his tapes, an insect — I couldn’t see what, a bee or a wasp or a moth — began wheeling around him furiously. Skeet leapt back, clearly alarmed. That’s when I looked up and saw him. He stepped back, then forward, and reached deftly into the trunk. He pulled out a beach towel. Holding it high, he aimed at the insect, still whirling around him, and swung at it frantically, thrashing like a swordsman in a duel with the air. He pulled back for one more swing, then, appeased, let his arm drop limply to his side.

  “Did you get it?” I asked, not really caring, but wanting to show some interest for Skeet’s sake.

  He looked at me absently, with that familiar trance born of violence, and then leaned over into the trunk. Between his thick thumb and forefinger he withdrew a wide-brimmed orange butterfly. It was a monarch — I know that now. He held it up for our inspection. Then he began to study it a little himself. He held its wings up to the light, examined its underbelly, turned it back and forth. Or maybe I’m giving him too much credit. Maybe he didn’t study it at all. Whatever attention he gave it, though, suddenly ceased when Janie, who had been watching too, stood up and dusted the seat of her pants. “Is it dead?” she asked.

  Skeet lifted it once more and looked at it. He shrugged, then let his hand, still pinching the butterfly, fall to his side.

  “Did you kill it?” Margaret asked, looking up from the cutting board. She shook her head. “Oh no,” she mourned halfheartedly. “You killed it.”

  Janie, a hint of humor in her voice, said, “Hey, Skeet murdered the butterfly. “

  “Oh yuck,” said Barbara. “He murdered the butterfly.”

  “Murderer,” Stan teased.

  “Murderer,” laughed Barbara, who went back to weaving her wildflowers.

  “Murderer,” they all canted in chorus and I joined in, thinking it funny too until Skeet’s confused eyes hardened into discs at the sight of me and I remembered too late.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  SCOTT WOLVEN

  The Copper Kings

  from HandHeldCrime & Plots with Guns

  After my wife divorced me last August, I left upstate New York and drove west. My plan was to live in Seattle, but money ran thin in Moscow, Idaho. I got stuck there. I devoted a lot of time and attention to heavy drinking and found I was really good at being drunk.

  Functional alcoholism requires a delicate balance of solitude, booze, and money, and I worked on making a science of it. Keeping the money part of the equation flowing is always tough, so I was relieved when Greg showed up on my doorstep early one Saturday morning, talking about getting paid cash for a day’s work.

  Greg was a big ex-football player of a man who lived with his girlfriend and her son in one of the trailers that surrounded my little cinder block, one-bedroom shed. Greg sold insurance, he painted houses, but his main sideline was bounty hunting and skip tracing. He was licensed by the State of Idaho, so most of the things he did were somewhere in the neighborhood of legal. My first week in Moscow, Greg roped me into helping him catch a fugitive, then we transported the bad guy to the U.S. Marshal’s office in Spokane. He had given me some of the reward money, which I promptly drank. Every time I saw Greg outside near his girlfriend’s trailer, I waved to him and he waved back. We were partners, in an unofficial sort of way. I saw him walking up the gravel road that wound through the trailers, and I opened the door before he knocked.

  “Hi,” I said. Greg wore a denim shirt, jeans, a tan hunting vest, and black cowboy boots.

  “Early to be stinko, isn’t it?” he asked, pointing his chin at the beer in my right hand.

  “That’s a myth,” I answered. “Alcohol doesn’t even begin to affect your brain before noon.”

  “Sure,” Greg said. He nodded. “Feel like taking a ride? I’ve got a potential client and we could get paid cash for working today.”

  “How much?” I asked.

  Greg shifted his weight and looked out over the trailers. “I think that depends,” he said.

  “Ballpark it for me,” I said. I leaned against the doorjamb and sipped my warm beer.

  “It’s a missing person job,” he said. He turned to look straight at me. “Could be a couple hundred bucks in it, and probably no guns.” He paused. “Well, maybe guns, but definitely no cops.”

  I nodded. “I’m in,” I said. I tilted my head and drained my beer, tossing the empty can back into my apartment. “Can I use your pistol?” Greg owned a Beretta that I coveted.

  Greg smiled. “Sure. Let’s drive over.”

  We walked back down the gravel road together and got into Greg’s ugly truck. It was an old Toyota four-door that he had rigged with a Plexiglas barrier, separating the front seats from the back, just like the cops. He started it up and we drove across town and out into farm country. Mile after mile of lentils and corn stretched toward the horizon.

  “Nice country,” I said. I was wearing my work clothes — a pair
of jeans, work boots, blue T-shirt, and tan work jacket. There was a bottle of whiskey in my jacket pocket. I took it out and had a swallow. I looked at the fields passing by.

  Greg leaned over, reached into the glove compartment, and handed me the Beretta. I stuck it in the right hand pocket of my work jacket. “Farms always scare me,” Greg said. “Too much work.” He watched the road straight ahead, oceans of grain fields passing by on both sides. “I like town,” he said. “No matter how small a town.”

  We passed a long-abandoned church and made a right turn onto a dirt driveway. A hand-lettered sign at the side of the driveway read Ryan’s Farm. I sucked back some whiskey. We drove down the dirt driveway and stopped in front of a white house surrounded by farm buildings. A sagging picnic table sat on the front lawn. An old man walked off the porch toward us. An older, white-haired woman stood on the porch steps, in front of the house. We both got out of the truck and I left the whiskey under the passenger’s seat.