The Best American Mystery Stories 2017

by John Sandford

  Burke said, “Mine took a swing at me when I told him what I was looking into. I knocked him flat, frisked him and the dump he lives in. If he’s our guy, he sure cleans up after himself. He’s in holding downstairs.”

  “We’ll take turns,” Zagreb said. “Mac?”

  McReary got out his notebook. “Lives in Dearborn. With his mother, the landlord says. Both out; she cooks in the bomber plant in Willow Run, gets off at midnight. My guess is he’s sowing some oats before he ships out. The landlord wouldn’t let me check out the apartment. Should we get a warrant?”

  “Not yet.” Zagreb looked at his watch. “Twenty to twelve. We’ll try schmoozing Mom when she comes home.”

  “What about yours, Zag?” Canal asked.

  “Halfway to Honolulu on a troop ship. If we turn anything up on a search warrant we can tip off the MPs, though I’d sure hate to dump it in somebody else’s lap.”

  Burke grinned at McReary. “Slap on the Old Spice, Junior. If you can Romeo a jane like Bette’s roomie, the old lady on Dearborn’s a fish in a barrel.”

  “Mrs. Corbett?” Zagreb took off his hat.

  “Miss. I went back to my maiden name after my husband left me. For a tramp,” she added, pinching her nostrils.

  The woman who’d opened the door had a slight middle-aged spread but was still attractive. A lock of strawberry-blond hair had strayed from the red bandanna she wore tied around her head. The lieutenant had to admit she resembled Rosie the Riveter, even if her skills with a stove surpassed those with a jackhammer. She smelled not unpleasantly of hot grease.

  After the pleasantries, she let the squad into a tidy living room with a fake fireplace above which hung a period photograph in a matted frame of a man in his thirties who parted his hair in the middle and wore a trim mustache.

  “My great-great-uncle Boston,” she said. “He’s the man who shot John Wilkes Booth.”

  Zagreb nodded. “Good for him. Lincoln’s my favorite president.”

  As the others took seats on slightly worn mohair cushions, their lieutenant went through all the motions, assuring their hostess that her son wasn’t in trouble, just that they wanted to speak with him in connection with an investigation.

  “Leonard should be back any time,” she said. “He’s to report for duty at eight a.m. By this time next week he’ll be in England. I’m hoping he’ll find the time to visit family. His great-great-great-uncle was born there.” The cheerful glitter in her pale-brown eyes fell short of dissembling the concern behind them.

  McReary noted it. “He’s your only child?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’m sure he’ll be especially careful.”

  “You’re very kind.”

  Burke, not kind, asked if she knew where Leonard was on the night of the date Bette Kowalski was killed.

  “Was it a weeknight?”

  “Wednesday.” Zagreb cut his eyes Burke’s way, registering disapproval.

  “I wouldn’t know, then. I’d have been at work. He may have stayed home, or he may have gone out for a beer with friends. That’s what he went out for tonight—he’s throwing himself a sort of going-away party.” Once again concern clouded the glitter in her eyes.

  Canal fumbled at the pocket containing his cigars but refrained from taking one out. “Could we see his room?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. He’s a very private person. He won’t even let me go in to clean.”

  “We won’t disturb anything.” McReary looked sincere.

  “I’m afraid he keeps it locked.”

  “No problem, ma’am.” Canal took out a small leather case, displaying a collection of picks and skeleton keys.

  The room was upstairs, with a yellow tin sign tacked to the door reading:

  FIRING RANGE

  AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

  Mrs. Corbett’s smile was nervous. “Leonard’s little joke. He bought it in the army surplus store. He’s always bringing home odd bits.”

  Five minutes, three keys, and two picks later, the sergeant got off his knees and twisted the knob. Artfully the four men arranged themselves between the woman and the door and drew their revolvers, shielding the maneuver from her line of sight with their bodies. They sprang in single file and spread out inside the room; holstered their weapons when it proved to be unoccupied.

  “Holy—”

  “Mackerel,” Zagreb interrupted Burke.

  It was a small room with a single bed, a writing table, and a wooden chair. A Class-A army uniform in an open dry cleaner’s bag hung in a closet without a door. A metal bookrack beside the desk contained rows of worn books: The Lodger, The Curse of Mitre Square, several titled Jack the Ripper. A corkboard mounted above the table was plastered with black-and-white and sepia photographs, most of them clipped from newspapers and magazines, showing narrow cobblestone alleys, a stately building captioned NEW SCOTLAND YARD, and shots taken from dozens of angles of obviously dead women, some of them naked, exposing ghastly slashes imperfectly stitched.

  Mrs. Corbett gasped in the hallway. Zagreb jerked his chin at Canal, standing nearest the door. He eased it shut and leaned his back against it.

  “I’ve seen these,” McReary said. “There’s Annie Chapman, Catherine Eddowes, Elizabeth Stride.” He indicated the grisliest image of all, a skilled artist’s sketch. “Mary Kelly, the Ripper’s last known victim. Ring a bell?”

  “He cut up Bette Kowalski the same way,” Canal said.

  A black satchel, like the kind doctors carried, stood open on the table. It was old and cracked. Zagreb reached inside and began taking out the contents: stethoscope, glass medicine bottles, scalpels, a gadget resembling a brace and bit—what some people called a hand drill. He held up the last item. “You’re the big reader, Mac. This looks like it belongs in a carpenter’s toolbox.”

  “Trepan.” McReary paled. “They don’t make ’em anymore. Forensic surgeons used it to bore holes in skulls, looking for bullets and such. It’s an autopsy kit, L.T.”

  “None of these scalpels looks big enough for the murder weapon.”

  “There should be a postmortem knife in the bag.” The detective third grade spread his hands a foot apart. “About yay long. The experts figured that’s what the Ripper used.”

  Zagreb rummaged further, then picked up the bag and dumped it upside down onto the table. No such instrument made its appearance.

  Mrs. Corbett had no idea where her son had gone to celebrate his last night as a civilian. Zagreb borrowed her phone and described Leonard Corbett from a recent photo supplied by his agitated mother, showing a bland-faced young man in his uniform. Minutes later they were driving with the two-way radio turned up full blast.

  “Any cars in the vicinity of Woodward and Parsons,” crackled the dispatcher’s voice. “Suspect seen near the Paradise Theatre. Consider him armed and extremely dangerous.”

  “That place draws almost as many hookers as jazz buffs,” Zagreb said.

  Burke flipped on the siren and hit the gas.

  The street in front of the popular swing club was a sea of department vehicles, marked and unmarked. Spotting a uniformed officer on the sidewalk holding his sidearm, Zagreb rolled down the window and flashed his shield.

  The patrolman skipped the preliminaries. “Someone just ducked down that alley.” He pointed with his weapon.

  They left the Chrysler at the curb. At the lieutenant’s instructions, McReary and Canal circled the building on the corner to come in from the other end. Zagreb and Burke gave them two minutes, then entered from the Woodward Avenue side. All four had their weapons out.

  Crossing a dark doorway, McReary glimpsed a movement in the shadows. He touched Burke’s arm. Burke nodded and leveled his revolver on the doorway as his partner entered. The deep passage was black as a shroud. He felt for the door. A hinge squeaked and it swung open at his touch.

  A long hallway with a checkerboard floor showed barely in the dim light of a wall sconce. The far end was in deep shadow. He crept forward.<
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  The man at the far end of the hall came to a locked door. He turned and pressed his back to it, holding his breath. Three yards away, visible in the lighted section, a man with a gun was approaching, wearing a dark suit and a light-colored hat. He himself was secure in the blackness, as if he were enveloped in thick fog. The man creeping his way wore shoes appropriate to someone who habitually carried a gun, but he could hear the slight squish of the rubber soles as he advanced, smell the crisp odor of spice-based aftershave. That was another advantage, his heightened senses. But he would have to move fast and strike surely; this was no tart, her brains dulled by liquor and the plague her kind had brought upon itself.

  Closer now. He could almost reach out and touch the man. He drew the knife from his belt and sprang . . .

  Suddenly the shadow at the end of the hall coagulated into something blacker, a distinct shape dressed all in dark clothing. Fabric rustled; the light behind McReary drew a bright line down a length of steel. He raised his piece and fired. Something stung his wrist, something hot splashed onto his hand. An evil stench of singed cloth filled his nostrils; the muzzle flare had set the man’s coat on fire.

  He kept jerking the trigger, emptying the chamber. Something heavy piled into him. Automatically he threw his arms around it, supporting the dead man entirely.

  It was only after he let go and the man slid into a heap at his feet that he realized his wrist was bleeding.

  Daniel J. McReary entered the squad room. From habit he reached for his sidearm, intending to lay it on the desk still stacked with books, then remembered. Pending the results of the routine shooting investigation, he’d been relieved of his weapon and assigned to desk duty.

  He brightened when Lieutenant Zagreb came in. Flicking the hand belonging to the bandaged wrist at the book on top of the stack, he said, “I’ve been reading.”

  “What else is new?”

  “It’s about the Lincoln assassination. I got interested after Mrs. Corbett told us she was related to the man who killed John Wilkes Booth. This Boston Corbett was a piece of work: born in England under Queen Victoria, with all that entails. He was so mortified after going to bed with a prostitute he castrated himself.”

  Burke, cleaning his revolver at a nearby desk, dropped it on the blotter. “Holy—”

  “Shit,” Canal finished. “A thing like that can make a man surly.”

  “Do tell.” McReary opened the book to the page he’d marked. “Says here twenty years after he shot Booth they stuck him in a loony bin for pulling a gun in the Kansas House of Representatives, but he escaped in 1888 and was never heard from since. That’s the year the Ripper killings took place. What are the odds Corbett went back home and . . . ?”

  “You think Leonard knew about that?” Burke picked up his revolver and blew through the barrel.

  “You should write a book,” Zagreb said.

  “Not me. I’m through with ’em.” He slammed the volume shut and tossed it aside.

  The lieutenant lifted his eyebrows. “You failed the sergeant’s exam?”

  “I fell asleep.”

  PETER FERRY

  Ike, Sharon, and Me

  FROM Fifth Wednesday

  I taught in a little school out on the prairie among the lakes for four years until I turned twenty-six and was free of the draft. I lived in a garage apartment in town and sometimes drank beer in the Blue Moon Tap on my old paper route where Ike’s father used to spend his Friday nights. According to Greg, he quit drinking when Ike died. I hung out with Greg and his wife, Alice, until they divorced, and then I hung out with Greg, who was now a full-fledged reporter on the Courier. I thought often about Ike. I sometimes thought about the summer I’d spent in Europe and Morocco, but as if it were a movie I’d seen or a book I’d read. I’d found my way across one continent, an ocean, another continent, and into a third and all the way back. I was capable. I could do things. I could handle things. Sometimes I was even tempted to think that I could handle anything, but that seemed a bit too much like hubris, so I settled for “things.” Besides, I did not want to tempt fate. I could take care of myself, and that, I slowly, sadly began to conclude, was more than Ike could do. He’d been twenty-one when he’d stopped getting older and I hadn’t, and more and more he seemed to me like a boy, a lost boy, and I, well, I seemed to me a little less lost, at least back then.

  During my third year of teaching, Sharon Novak was hired at my school, although I didn’t recognize her at first because her name had changed. Greg told me the story. After the fire that burned her house to the ground and in which Ike, who lived next door, had perished and she and her children had nearly perished, there had been some unspecified problems with the insurance and also some questions about smoke detectors: Had they been operational? Had they failed? Why hadn’t they awakened the family? Or had they perhaps awakened the children? They didn’t remember. Before any of this was settled, the Novaks left town. People did not know it at the time, but they did not leave together. Sharon and the kids went to Champaign-Urbana, where she began work on a master’s degree. Charles, who was a chemical engineer, left town with his lab technician to work for Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan. It turned out that they had been having an affair. In the divorce that ensued, Sharon appeared to have gotten everything. Charles got the lab technician, but not for long. Within two years she was back in town. At about the same time, Sharon, now using her maiden name, Postlewaite, came back too. She bought a big house and took the teaching job that probably couldn’t pay her mortgage if she had one. And she looked different. Her hair was short, stylish, and streaked. Her wardrobe, which had once consisted of cotton dresses and gym shoes, was now made up of turtlenecks, tailored slacks, and clogs, and perhaps it was just these cosmetic changes, but she now seemed a little less resigned and world-weary. Still, I knew it was she the day I saw her walking away from me down the school hallway with that loose-limbed, swaying gait that Ike had so admired. Damn, I thought, what’s she doing here?

  I guess I’d begun to feel a certain ownership of my job. For one thing, we had a lot of turnover, so in two years I’d accrued some seniority and been given some out-of-classroom responsibility. For another, I wasn’t as bad a teacher as I’d feared I’d be. Of course, I had been at first. That first year I made a lot of mistakes. Every night when I got home, I was absolutely exhausted, and by April first I was pretty much out of gas. The next year was better, and by the time Sharon Postlewaite showed up, I was even feeling competent. And while I soon knew who she was, I didn’t think she knew who I was, and for quite a while I kept it that way. I did not know how much she knew about Ike, about his creepy obsession with her and her family, about the night of the fire, and I never wanted to be in a position of having or needing to tell her any of it. Then there was the fact that I knew more about her than I was comfortable with or than she could ever know I knew. No, best to keep her at a distance. I nodded in the hall, never said more than “Hi” or “Thanks” or “You’re welcome.” I sat on the opposite side of the coffee room or cafeteria or teachers’ meeting. But I did keep an eye on her. When the moment and angle were right, I sometimes watched her grading papers, legs crossed, even twined, coffee cup in one hand, red pen in the other, undisturbed by the clatter around her. Perhaps undisturbable.

  In the meantime I helped coach boys’ basketball, played church league basketball myself in the winter and city park softball in the spring. I drank beer and ate pizza with old high school friends, once in a while had a date of sorts—even ending up in the sack a couple of times—and made plans with Greg, who was still licking his wounds from the divorce, to take a long car trip that summer. Then one day in late May, Sharon Postlewaite and I found ourselves walking together down the empty hallway after school and really couldn’t avoid some kind of conversation without its being awkward and obvious.

  “Your kids squirrelly, Bill?” she asked me. I was surprised she knew my name.

  “Oh yeah, especially with the heat.”

&n
bsp; “Got plans for the summer?”

  “Going camping with a friend. Grand Tetons.”

  We had reached her classroom, and she was turning in. “You’re Ike Lowell’s friend, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thought so.”

  I was kind of stunned. I wondered how she knew and how long she had known. That evening she knocked on my door with a bottle of wine in her hand. “Wanna get drunk?” she asked.

  Sharon Postlewaite was the same kind of lover as she was hall walker or paper grader: easy, undistracted, languorous. She was not in a hurry. She closed her eyes and smiled. She made little noises. “Hmmm.” “Ah.” “Yes.” There were no gymnastics or weight-lifting involved. I remember wanting a cigarette afterward and asking her, “Do you smoke?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I never looked.” Then she laughed. It was an old joke, but it surprised and delighted me. She wasn’t regretting what we had done as I guess I assumed she would.

  “Do you want a cigarette, smart aleck?”

  “Sure.”

  “May I ask you something? How did you know that I was Ike Lowell’s friend?”

  “Used to see you over there. Coming and going.” That really surprised me. I think I’d only visited Ike about three times after he came home from Vietnam, and usually after dark. “Speaking of going.” She sat up on the edge of the bed and began to dress. It was a lovely thing to watch: effortless grace. The slipping on of the panties, the hooking of the bra with arched shoulders, the pulling over the head of the top, the shaking out of the hair.

  “You have to go?” I very much wanted her to stay longer. All I could think of was that it was Friday night and that I’d love to make love to her again; I’d love to make love to her all night long.