The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

by Otto Penzler

  Hef looked at Loretta, an intelligent but sullen woman, and saw in her bruises and resolve a refracted portrait of his own mother’s life. “Okay, then,” he said, without touching the money. “Here’s the first order of business.”

  She returned home, as Hef Givens instructed her to do, and packed Blue’s personal belongings into two boxes, which she placed on the porch, along with a suitcase filled with his clothes. She took the children to Carol Lippincott’s house. Then she called the sheriff and requested that a deputy be sent to escort Blue away when he arrived home.

  The sheriff’s office had already received a call from Hef Givens, and no one there relished this assignment. They didn’t appreciate domestic situations, since those were often the only dangerous ones in Charnelle. Not many people were injured with criminal intent in the county unless, experience had taught Sheriff Britwork, they were on the receiving end of a love gone sour. In 1949 there was very little by way of criminal activity at all in Charnelle, so Sheriff Britwork and his four officers spent most of their time at the Ding Dong Daddy Diner, drinking coffee and munching onion rings, or hanging out at the high school football and basketball games to prevent adolescent brawls, or cruising through Mexican Town to make sure the residents knew that someone was keeping a suspicious eye on them. There were also no divorces recorded in Charnelle during the previous six years, even if a majority of marriages, by Britwork’s estimation, were not happy ones. Sometimes a couple would separate temporarily, or a man would run off with a mistress for a while, or a wife would run off with her husband’s best friend, only to return a few days or weeks later. These incidents seldom resulted in divorce. Acrimony, certainly, and a malignant resentment. Sometimes shots were fired or knives wielded or suicides threatened. But seldom divorce.

  The sheriff sent Fortney Nevers, the pudgy twenty-year-old deputy, out to the Simpson home to oversee the proceedings. This wasn’t a kind assignment on the part of the sheriff, but Britwork had a root canal performed that very morning—the fourth of what would eventually be six surgeries—and he was not in a generous mood. He didn’t want to be the one dealing with a marital dispute, especially between Blue and Loretta Simpson. He had known them since they first moved to Charnelle. The sheriff and his wife had even played pinochle with the Simpsons a time or two before both couples were besieged by children. Britwork would now and again shoot a game of pool with Blue down at the Armory, but since Blue’s accident a few years ago, the two families seldom saw each other, and that was just fine with the sheriff. Blue Simpson carried his misfortune and self-pity around like a virus, and the sheriff didn’t want to catch it.

  Besides, it would serve Fortney Nevers right. The young deputy annoyed the sheriff. The boy’s fatness was particularly galling to Britwork, a man with the metabolism of a greyhound, who harbored an unreasonable prejudice against the portly.

  “Nevers ain’t old enough,” Britwork once told his other officers, within earshot of the deputy, “to have earned the right to be fat.”

  The sheriff had been forced to hire the twenty-year-old because Fortney’s uncle was the Honorable Cleavis Nevers, the county judge. Given the irritable mood the root canal had fostered in Britwork, he half hoped that Blue Simpson might beat the shit out of the young deputy—not badly enough to inflict serious injury, of course, but enough to persuade the pudgy kid to give up on police work.

  Months later, at Fortney Nevers’s trial, the sheriff would change his tune. He would testify that the deputy was a model policeman, and that he had been confident Fortney could handle the assignment when he sent him to the Simpsons’ house that day. The sheriff would tell the court that he was sure the boy had warned Blue Simpson not to take another step, and that he had fired the shot only to scare the man. The jury would acquit Fortney Nevers, in large part because of their fondness for Hef Givens, who had agreed to represent the young officer, and out of deference to Judge Nevers, who reluctantly recused himself from the case but sat on the front row, directly behind his nephew, and stared solemnly at the jury members, as if issuing his own verdict. Sheriff Britwork would emerge as the incompetent one, the person in fact most culpable for the tragedy, a courtroom performance that would result in the loss of his job in the next election.

  Blue was already in a surly mood when he left for home. His eye itched and watered. His nostrils had swollen shut during the day, forcing him to breathe through his mouth, and now his throat was raw. He’d gobbled down aspirin every two hours to diminish the pain of his swollen nose and cheek and the scratches on his face and back, but it didn’t seem to help much. To make matters worse, he’d had to field the same questions a dozen times from his coworkers about how his face had become mangled.

  He repeated what Loretta had told him—that the dresser had fallen on him while sleeping. It had knocked him out and broken his nose, maybe busted his cheek. His coworkers’ arched eyebrows and smirks reinforced the suspicion he’d already had that such an accident was unlikely at best and preposterous at worst. Moreover, he didn’t have a good excuse for the scratches on his face, not to mention the unseen ones on his back and shoulders, and couldn’t come up with any better story. He didn’t tell them he’d gone a little nuts himself last night, drunk too much tequila, lost too much shooting pool, and did what he always regretted doing when he drank more than three shots and lost more than $20. Nor did he tell them that he didn’t really remember much after that, except that he woke in the morning with his face swollen and aching, his nose broken, his eyes black.

  “That dresser must’ve had some pretty sharp fingernails,” Melvin Doogle said. The other men snickered in such a way that Blue understood he’d been and would continue to be the butt of jokes for days, maybe weeks, to come. It didn’t help that at four o’clock that afternoon, lightheaded and then dizzy, hyperventilating, he’d collapsed on the floor of the shop and had been forced to breathe into a paper bag that Bean Peterson, the foreman, put over his mouth.

  How could the day be any more miserable? But then he arrived home to find a police cruiser parked on the curb, two boxes and a suitcase on the front porch, the door locked.

  Blue rapped on the door, but no one answered. He didn’t have his key. They never locked the house, except when they went for Christmas every other year to Bug Tussle and Honey Grove. He knocked again and heard footsteps on the other side, but no one answered.

  “Open the damn door,” he said.

  “Take your things and leave,” Loretta answered.

  He pressed his cheek, the one that was not bruised, against the wood and could hear his wife breathing on the other side, her face just inches from his.

  “Open it!”

  “No.”

  “I don’t mind breaking this fucking door down.” He said this flatly, without malice, which was a kind of victory, though he regretted the profanity. He didn’t usually swear at his wife unless he’d drunk too much tequila, and he’d sworn off tequila soon after he’d become lightheaded today and found himself on the floor with a paper sack over his face.

  The deadbolt was thrown. He waited a few seconds and then opened the door to find Loretta standing on the other side of the room, near the fireplace.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Stay there,” she said. There wasn’t any alarm in her voice. In fact, he wondered if this might be an elaborate joke.

  His sinuses throbbed, and he felt again the wooziness he’d experienced just moments before he’d passed out earlier in the day. He touched his nose. It felt tender and swollen—and he imagined that it was already turning a darker shade of blue. Both his good and bad eye began to itch and water, but he knew enough not to scratch that itch. It would only make things worse. He blinked a few times to clear his vision. A chubby boy in a uniform suddenly emerged from the bathroom.

  “Who are you?” Blue asked.

  “Deputy Nevers?” the boy said, his voice going up at the end so that his answer sounded like a question.

  “You related to Judge Ne
vers?”

  “I’m his nephew,” Fortney said, almost embarrassed. He had arrived at the Simpson home shortly before five-thirty and had been waiting for nearly an hour, wishing all the while that he’d urinated before he left the station because he didn’t want to be stuck inside the Simpson bathroom with his penis in his hand when Blue showed up. Fortney had inherited a weak bladder from his father’s side of the family, complicated by a serious kidney infection when he was a boy, and consequently he had to piss eight to ten times a day and often twice during the night. When he was nervous, he sometimes lost continence, which was not advantageous for a young man, especially a deputy—a predicament that forced him to order double-padded underwear from Montgomery Ward. This solution minimized but did not entirely eliminate his worry and shame.

  “Get out,” Loretta said. “This officer will follow you to the Charnelle Inn or wherever you want to go. But you must leave. Now.”

  “What’re you talking about?” Though Blue assumed that whatever he’d done last night could not have been good, given the state of his own face and hers, he didn’t expect such immediate nor dire consequences for his actions. He just wanted, for now, to lie down in his own bed and sleep for about twelve hours.

  “Blue. Now.”

  “Where’re the kids?”

  “Out,” she said. Blue wasn’t sure if she was referring to the children or issuing him another order. He breathed deeply through his mouth, having forgotten again, in the confusion of the moment, that this was the only way he could breathe. Dizziness seemed ready to engulf him.

  “Come with me, Mr. Simpson,” Fortney said nervously. “I’ll help you load your things.”

  “Loretta,” Blue said. He could hear a whine in his own voice, which surprised and embarrassed him.

  “Go, Blue,” she said, quieter now. He detected a trace of pity, a tenderness that he thought he might leverage to his advantage.

  “Let’s just you and me have a glass of tea and talk about it.” He sat down in the chair closest to the door.

  “No, Blue. You have to go.”

  “I don’t feel so good, you know. It’s been a hard day, Loretta. I need to rest.”

  “Sir,” Fortney said, “I’m afraid you have to leave. I’ll help you.”

  “You’ll be hearing from Hef Givens in the morning,” Loretta said.

  “Hef Givens?”

  “My lawyer.”

  “Hef? What do you mean Hef Givens is your lawyer? Hef is my friend.”

  He remembered suddenly, vividly, the last time he and Hef had gone hunting, both of them squatting in the bushes, the predawn light shrouding them, their breaths misting in the November air, both of them waiting, waiting, waiting for the bucks to appear on the meadow by the lake. He loved such moments, rare though they were, when he and another man, who also understood the dignity and beauty and suspense of such stillness, crouched together, watching and waiting patiently.

  “It’s over,” she said.

  “Come along, sir,” the deputy said, his voice rising again in a way that reminded Blue of Tildon. Where was Tildon? Where were the girls?

  Fortney put his hand on Blue’s arm, a place where Blue had blistered himself that very day when he dropped the torch as he fell to the concrete floor. Blue knocked the boy’s hand away and stood up.

  “Mr. Simpson,” the deputy said, unsnapping the button on his holster. Later he would swear under oath that he didn’t aim for the man’s back but for the fireplace, though after the trial he would sometimes remember or, in a feverish night sweat, dream it differently, would see his revolver pointed at a spot just below Blue Simpson’s left shoulder blade, would feel again his finger squeezing the slightly oily steel of the trigger. But right now Fortney only saw Blue glance down at the front of his pants. A small dark circle growing wider and wider. The man’s swollen lips seemed to curl with the dismissive contempt Fortney had put up with his whole damn existence. Blue shoved him aside and took two long strides toward his wife.

  It was now dusk, and the lights were not yet on in the house. Loretta was surprised when her husband moved toward her, suddenly blocking the window. The shadowy outline of him suddenly reminded her of the young man—not even twenty, with a thin fuzz of reddish blond scruff on his chin and jaw—who had charmed her when she was at college in Denton. The night they’d met, Blue was standing on the edge of the dance floor. He’d offered his hand. She’d taken it, and he twirled her quickly through a double-time waltz, and she’d smiled, thanked him for the dance, and started away, but then the next song began—a slow melancholy number, evocative, lovely—and he’d pulled her close, held her against him, and they’d moved in slow, swaying circles, and just like that he’d kissed her on the lips, a feather touch, then leaned back and smiled.

  As he crossed their living room now, Blue seemed impossibly young again and determined to claim Loretta’s last dance. But then she saw his face clearly. That left eye disfigured. She could see again the filament of steel lodged in the iris—like a tiny jagged flower. There it was, and then gone. She heard the sound of the shot, which echoed in the small room and kept ringing in her ears days later. Then she no longer saw Blue’s features, just his distinct silhouette falling toward her, eclipsing the fading sun.

  JASON DEYOUNG

  The Funeral Bill

  FROM New Orleans Review

  AT ONE TIME the landlord Jeffers had been a busy person, but not anymore. Now he had time to think, and he had recently decided that he was going to die. His stomach was no longer the taut paunch it had been. Food passed his tongue joylessly. He no longer lusted. His feet and legs often went numb, and he’d taken to massaging isopropyl alcohol on them to regain some feeling. The smoke from his pipe remained one of the only things that seemed right—perhaps the craving for vice was the last thing to leave a person. Just before his mother passed away she would only eat soft candies. Jeffers’s death wouldn’t be immediate: he wouldn’t pass away today or tomorrow. It just landed upon him, pressed upon him, that his own passing was imminent, and he had no idea what to expect in the afterward.

  Alone on the front porch in a frayed and stretched lawn chair, eyes closed, he imagined funerals. His tenant’s wife had died a few days ago. He pictured her supine like all bodies he’d seen in a coffin—clenched eyes, somewhat enlarged nostrils, mouth gently closed as if asleep. Peaceful rest. He remembered the summer evening years before when he’d had a body removed from Ashcross. The renter’s daughter draped across her father’s swollen body, weeping “Daddy . . . Daddy.” Her little fists sinking into her father’s stomach, her fingers groping at his shirt. The mortician’s assistant, grinding his teeth, pulled the little girl off the body, rending the moist stitching around the shirt’s collar. The renter didn’t appear as if he slept. In the near-subterraneous light, gape-jawed with eyes half closed and unfocused, his waxy face was constricted into a rictus articulating the ineffable of the beyond. Or perhaps the lack thereof. He didn’t look heaven-bound. If Jeffers had not gone when the rent stopped coming in, he wondered how long the kid would have stayed there, caring for her father’s decomposing body.

  Jeffers envied those who had seen a person die. He believed they understood what he didn’t—what death brought. He asked the renter’s little girl what had happened when her father passed. Without a tear in her eye, she said she didn’t know. She hadn’t seen it.

  This envy had taken root when his son, James, witnessed his mother pass away while Jeffers was out making a deal with a man named White who was ignorant enough to believe a handshake was still as good as a notarized contract. For James, watching his mother’s passing had been such a powerful thing he’d gone into the seminary. He now ran a church out of the storefront of an old third-rate grocery in the lower part of the state; its sanctuary still smelled of hoop cheese and day laborers. (Jeffers thought his son would have been better off reopening the grocery.) But James had witnessed many of his parishioners die, some of old age, others from disease. Each time his so
n told him of another death, Jeffers’s resentment grew. He never asked his son what it was like, afraid he’d get an earful of capricious religious nonsense, a tangle of words that would make him feel stupid.

  He opened his eyes to stop the images and looked at the clear plastic freezer bags filled with water and four pennies hanging from the upper porch railings. Craziest thing he’d ever heard—a suggestion from James, an article he’d sent Jeffers on how to ward off flies. It said to hang plastic freezer bags with pennies and water outside to keep flies away. It worked. But as the sunlight shot through them, casting a liquid-copper glow, he thought of the coins once used to cover the eyes of the deceased. He spat over the porch railing. He put his unlighted pipe in his mouth.

  He tried to recover his mind, replacing contemplating death with what to do about the Ashcross property, in which—he’d been told—a set of kids were now squatting. He’d let the place go to seed since the renter died in it nearly three years ago. Its roof and plumbing leaked, its walls drilled out by all manner of nest-builders, but he couldn’t abide the squatting. But apathy or something like it had gotten hold of him; it had embraced him at the same time the numbness started creeping into his legs. In quiet times such as these, something in the boredom and the numbness and the nature of age drew back like a bow and twanged when he tried to move, and a misdirected laugh or, on occasion, a hiccuplike cry sprang from his mouth. He didn’t understand it. But it locked him in his chair, kept him from getting anything done.

  He tapped a wooden, bald-headed match on the arm of the chair while trying not to look at the pennies. But images of edemas, time at work, wasting disease, null and vacant and quicklime-covered faces impinged upon his concentration. His pipe hung limply from his lips. He sucked on the raw tobacco packed inside it to get a hint of sweetness mixed with a burned residue.