The Best American Mystery Stories 2017

by John Sandford

  Sharon Postlewaite listened passively to all this as the evening grew dark around us. Occasionally she lit a cigarette and turned her head to blow the smoke away. When I finished, we sat quietly for a while. Then she asked, “That everything?”

  “I think so. I’m sorry.”

  “You know that stuff, the accelerant that you talked about?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s called DP123.”

  “It is? How do you know that?” I thought perhaps there were things Greg hadn’t told me, maybe things he didn’t know himself. “I mean . . .”

  “I know because Charles invented it. He was the head of the team that developed it, but it was his baby.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, Charles was a very brilliant man. He had a brilliant mind, but up until very recently I thought he was a psychopath. I thought he’d tried to kill us all. You see, Ike didn’t set that fire. Charles did.”

  “Charles? He was out of town.”

  “Charles was an engineer, Bill. Charles was a genius. He could set up a timer to turn the furnace on when we were away from home or preheat the oven. Did you ever see our Christmas lights? All on timers. And remote controls. Charles had a squabble with our neighbor one time. He got even by rigging his garage door so it would go up in the middle of the night. He used to lie in bed and laugh. That was Charles.

  “You see, he’d fallen in love with this little lab tech and wanted to run away with her, wanted to fuck himself to death. I knew all about it. We were in the way. We were a problem, and he was a problem solver. Voilà. He set that fire to kill us all.”

  “Now wait a minute . . . what are you saying . . . I mean, is all of this just pure speculation, because if . . .”

  “Not at all. I can prove it. I proved it to Charles. That’s how I got the divorce settlement I did. I put everything in a sealed file and gave it to my attorney and told him to take it to the FBI if anything happened to me. Then I confronted Charles. I said I didn’t know how he did it but I knew that he did it. He buckled like that. So you see, your friend Ike is off the hook, and so are you. Okay?” She watched me and nodded. “Listen, I should get these kids to bed. Okay?”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “You said you thought he was a psychopath until recently. What changed?”

  “Oh,” she said, “Charles’s death was no accident either. Of that I’m sure. As I say, he was a brilliant engineer. He would never, ever have died of carbon monoxide poisoning unless he wanted to. He had sensors everywhere. He was phobic about both fumes and smoke. Scared to death of dying in his sleep. So Charles must have wanted to die, which means that he must have felt remorse for what he did or tried to do, which means he wasn’t a psychopath. Plus he left the door unlocked and set it up so he’d be found quickly so he wouldn’t blow up the whole neighborhood. No, I really don’t think he was a psychopath after all.”

  “But if he wanted to die, why not just kill himself? Why fake it?”

  “Insurance. Charles always provided for us very well. He prided himself on it. I’m about to be a wealthy woman, Bill. Again.” She smiled, then crossed the yard and patio and disappeared into the house.

  I lit another cigarette. I lit several more. I watched until the lights went out on the first floor and then one by one on the second floor until there was just one and then it went out too. I sat there trying to figure this thing out. Who really set that fire? Could Ike have actually smuggled that stuff into the country? Would the Charles Novak I knew about try to kill his own children? And if he truly wasn’t a psychopath, was someone? Was Sharon, for God’s sake? There was something unsettling about the dispassion with which she’d described everything. Could she have somehow started that fire?

  She’d said that she always knew when she was being watched. Did she know it now? And didn’t that mean that she was also always watching? Might she be up there at this very moment standing in the shadows and peering through the venetian blinds?

  When I’d smoked my last cigarette, I put it out right on the picnic table and left. In June when I turned twenty-six, I left my job. In August when my lease was up, I left town. In a way I’ve been leaving ever since, and I don’t think that I’m finished leaving even now. Not quite yet.

  CHARLES JOHN HARPER

  Lovers and Thieves

  FROM Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

  It was the kind of rain favored by lovers and thieves. A misty November rain. The kind that hangs low, veil-like, obscuring the dark, desperate world beneath it. The kind that sends lovers into their bedrooms and thieves into the night.

  I was more like the thief, waiting outside the Bon Vivant on La Brea, a tired, three-story stucco apartment building with a name more festive than its architecture. Waiting inside my gunmetal-gray 1934 DeSoto Airflow Coupe.

  It wasn’t where I wanted to be. It wasn’t where a PI makes any real money in this town. That kind of dough—the kind I never seemed to have—was found up in the Hollywood Hills, where the famous and the desperate-to-be-famous always managed to find trouble where trouble shouldn’t be found.

  But at the Bon Vivant, trouble came in the form of two lovers, a midlevel oil executive, Frank “Mac” McKenzie, and his youthful secretary, Teresa Vail. She lived in Apartment 311. The one on the top floor, right side, on the corner. The one with the lights still on at one-fifteen in the morning.

  It wasn’t that Mac’s wife cared all that much. Alice McKenzie just needed divorce-court evidence so that she could squeeze the most out of her philandering husband.

  She’d squeezed plenty out of me, talking me down to $50 a day and no expenses. I’d been no match for her the minute she’d walked into my office. I’d needed the work. Even though it was only fourteen months since V-J Day and the subsequent end to gasoline rationing, keeping the twelve-year-old DeSoto in fuel—and running—wasn’t cheap.

  I’d been tailing Mac around ten p.m. when he’d pulled his cream-colored Buick Roadmaster to the curb a block past the Bon Vivant. He’d walked in fast, his shoulders hunched against the rain, carrying a small black Gladstone bag. A change of clothes, maybe, or a gift for his concubine.

  I’d waited over three hours since then, only seeing a handful of people enter or leave the building. The first a happy man whistling a happy tune on his way out at ten forty-five. Whistling, that is, until he saw me, which made him pull his hat lower and hurry on, glancing back a couple of times as if I might be tailing him instead of Mac McKenzie. Which confirmed something I already knew: that everyone in this town was guilty of something.

  At eleven I saw two young women in their twenties scurry inside, looking guilty of little more than believing in the future. In who they still could be.

  And at one, a middle-aged couple in a drunken argument, both guilty as sin of who they’d become.

  That was it. In three hours. Three hours I’d never get back. Three hours that had turned my mood from gray to black.

  That’s when I decided it was time to move things along. Time to go in, get a shot of Mac in flagrante delicto, then run like hell. If all went well, I’d be home and in bed by two.

  The Bon Vivant was horseshoe-shaped, with its opening toward the street, but in the dark, oppressive drizzle it didn’t feel terribly lucky. I crossed the damp courtyard and walked inside. Passed the bank of mail slots, including the one with Teresa Vail’s name on it. Followed the worn floral carpeting to the stairs and up to the third floor. Found Apartment 311 and gave the knob a quiet turn. It wasn’t locked.

  I edged the door open. Held my Agfa Readyset Special camera in front of me like a gun. Kept my finger on its red shutter-button trigger, ready-set to immortalize Mac McKenzie’s infidelity in a flash of exposed silver.

  All the lights were on in the living room, an average space decorated with above-average furniture. Despite her age, Teresa Vail had taste. Not a thing that didn’t belong. Not a thing out of place.

  Except for the man on the couch pitched sideways against the armrest
with the ruby face and the cloth-covered extension cord wrapped around his neck.

  And the young woman slumped against his shoulder with the .22 in her hand and the bullet hole under her chin.

  Outside, a misty rain still veiled the sins of a desperate city. But inside Apartment 311, those sins were in full view, embodied in two dead lovers and the blood-red echoes they’d left behind.

  I was leaning against the jamb in the opening to the bedroom, smoking a cigarette, counting the black shoe marks on the bedroom door, waiting for the cops to cut me loose. Twenty-eight lines and smudges a foot above the wood floor. I pictured Mac carrying Teresa in his arms and kicking the bedroom door open on his way to violating the Sixth Commandment.

  Pictured that up until Teresa Vail’s mother walked in. As a cynical private eye, it’s easy to forget about the humanity that props up each life. A humanity that seems at its purest—its most sincere—when someone dies. Having seen hundreds of dead bodies from Anzio to Dachau as a rifleman-turned-medic in the war, I’d developed a certain indifference to the fate of others. A certain hardness to their trauma and pain. Enough, at least, to get me through the endless nightmare of battle.

  But seeing the mother of the young woman burst through the open doorway, push past the policemen milling about and the coroner taking still lifes of the bodies, and hearing the chilling, feral howl that rose from her soul when she saw her daughter, made me swallow hard. She would have thrown herself on her daughter’s body if an alert cop hadn’t stepped in front of her and gripped her shoulders, keeping her from disturbing the crime scene. She struggled but soon collapsed, borne down by the invisible weight of death. A weight that would, as I’d learned from the war, press down on her for years to come. If not forever.

  My client, on the other hand, showed no signs of heartbreak. Alice McKenzie—fortyish with unnaturally black hair and the swollen face of an aspiring alcoholic—strode through the door in a brown slack suit with a cigarette between her fingers and lipstick on her teeth. She reacted like a foreman who finds the crew lying down on the job. Wide stance, hands on hips, lips pressed into a thin, derisive line.

  “That s.o.b.,” she said.

  Unlike Teresa’s mother, Alice was childless. And now husbandless, but with an inheritance instead of a divorce. Assuming, of course, that she hadn’t murdered him, which had crossed my mind as I’d begun to wonder how she’d known to show up at the interloper’s apartment at this late hour.

  I sidled over to the detective in charge, who stood by the front door like a groomsman, his hands clasped behind his back. His name was Beaumont. I knew him from a prior case. We’d parted from that case like an old vaudeville team, sick to death of each other’s act. “Who called the wife?” I said.

  Beaumont wore a brown hat and brown suit that looked like they’d been up all night. He kept a stony face, but his eyes took on a blue twinkle as they stared past me at the commotion that follows in the wake of violent death. The commotion that paid for his tired suit and the mortgage on his house. “Dunno, Nash. I hear she’s your client. Why don’t you ask her?”

  “How about the mother?”

  “Dunno about her either. Maybe they’re both fortunetellers, like Doreena on the Santa Monica Pier.” He let the hint of a smile nuzzle his lips. Then he raised an eyebrow and turned his sights on me. “What I wanna know, Nash, is how you knew to be here. Square in the middle of a murder-suicide.”

  “I was watching the place, trying to get some black-and-white evidence for my client. But when McKenzie didn’t come out, I decided to come in. This is what I found.”

  “You’re a helluva PI,” he said, with more twinkles in his eyes. “Always one step behind.”

  I twinkled my eyes back at him. “But always one step ahead of you.” Then I took several steps over to Alice. With her feet planted on the wood floor, she looked more in charge than Beaumont.

  “Alice,” I said with a nod.

  “You found them?” Her skepticism was as subtle as the lipstick on her teeth.

  “I’m a full-service PI,” I said. “Who called you?”

  She turned her head toward me, took a pull on her cigarette, then exhaled. Her eyes narrowed behind the smoke that drifted from her lips. “A friend.”

  “What’s his name?”

  Her eyes turned steely. She dropped the cigarette on the varnished floor and stepped it out. “You can go now, Mr. Nash. I don’t need your help anymore. Send me a bill.” Then she spun and walked toward the door. She paused just long enough to give Teresa Vail’s mother a dismissive look and to tell Beaumont that if he needed anything more she was in the telephone book under Mr. Frank “Mac” McKenzie.

  After Alice left Teresa Vail’s apartment, I took a moment to gather up my camera and my hat from an accent chair and, with Beaumont’s blessing, made my way out of the apartment. In the hall I passed a Rita Hayworth redhead with her face buried in her hands, crouching with her back against the wall, struggling to compose herself. I almost stopped, but the wall of indifference rose up and without a second thought I took the stairs to the back door of the Bon Vivant.

  Once outside I followed the alley to the corner of the building, then crept up the narrow sidewalk between the Bon Vivant and a long hedge. I stopped in the shadows of the walkway not far from the street. From there I could see Alice standing at the curb near the no-parking zone, where two vacant patrol cars sat with their lights off.

  The misty rain made the world feel small, intimate, cold. But Alice seemed unaware of the dismal weather, her gaze distant, as if she’d forgotten where she’d parked her car but was in no hurry to remember. She glanced back at the courtyard and the front door to the Bon Vivant. Looked up at the windows to No. 311.

  I thought it might be a moment of weakness for Alice, a long, last look toward the man she had once loved. But then a dark Packard, wipers thumping, rolled to a stop in front of her. She slipped between the two empty prowlers and into the passenger side of the sedan. All I could see of the driver was the silhouette of a fedora.

  They drove off down the veiled darkness of La Brea, passing under the streetlamps, gliding like a blackened ghost in and out of the falling pools of light.

  As I drove back to my apartment on Hollywood Boulevard, I thought about the case Alice McKenzie had just fired me from. Thought about it free of charge, just like most things I thought about these days. Thought about what I’d seen when I’d discovered the bodies.

  Teresa had worn a gray pleated skirt and a pink wool pullover sweater—pink except for a scarlet cascade of blood at the collar. A pink ribbon held back her dark-brown hair in a ponytail. Her perfume was the expensive kind, not too sweet, and the makeup on her midtwenties face was flawless. She was the picture of vibrant youth. As vibrant as youth can look when the animation of the soul is gone.

  Mac had been dressed for a night on the town in a light-blue herringbone coat and pleated slacks and black-and-white wingtip shoes that needed a polish on the heels. His blue-black hair was slick with tonic and shaped as neatly as a mannequin’s. He was short and carried none of the extra pounds that seemed to come with age. He looked as trim as a varsity rower.

  The only thing out of place on him—other than the extension cord around his neck and the deep red coloring of his face—was the crop of medals pinned in random spots on his jacket. A World War II Victory Medal on the lapel. An army Good Conduct Medal on a lower pocket. An American Campaign Medal on the shoulder. A Combat Infantry Badge on the collar. A Purple Heart through a buttonhole. A European–African–Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, pierced by two bronze battle stars and a bronze arrowhead, near a cuff. And, sticking out of the upper left pocket like a red-and-blue pocket square, the Bronze Star.

  I’d never seen medals displayed on civilian clothes before, or in such a careless way, but maybe Mac had been a proud veteran. VFW type. There were millions of them around these days. Or maybe his medals had given Teresa a sexual thrill. Maybe his heroism was what had blinded her to the twen
ty years that separated their births.

  Whatever the case, they’d been two people dressed for a night out that had never come. And from the looks of it, hadn’t done anything more physical than sit on the couch and listen to The Adventures of Ellery Queen on the radio.

  But something about the whole picture hadn’t added up. Something that had drawn me to their hands. Made me smell them. Both of his carried a hint of soap, both of hers the muskiness of sweaty skin. None of them had smelled of gunpowder, not even the one—hers—holding the .22 that had sent the bullet up under her chin.

  Detective Beaumont saw it as a murder-suicide. I was seeing something else.

  Then again, what did I care? I was off the clock. Common sense said there’d be no payment for anything else I did on this case and to keep the DeSoto aimed for home. To let Beaumont and his underlings deal with it.

  I couldn’t have agreed more.

  Until I made an impulsive U-turn in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard, the DeSoto’s tires hissing as they pivoted on the wet, black, shimmering pavement.

  When I pulled to a stop at the curb in front of a small bungalow a block off Fairfax, Teresa Vail’s mother was being helped out of a dark-green prewar Dodge parked in the driveway. She stumbled toward the door, propped up by a woman nearly a foot taller than her. The same woman I’d seen crouched in the hallway of the Bon Vivant. The Rita Hayworth redhead.