The Best American Mystery Stories 2017

by John Sandford

  I checked my watch. Almost three a.m. The rain had stopped, leaving in its wake a cold, surly dampness. The redhead, still holding Teresa’s mother with one arm, was struggling to find a key in her purse. I hurried up the driveway.

  “Can I help?”

  The redhead looked back at me, wary, protective. “Who are you?”

  I stopped a dozen feet from them and raised my hands. “Darrow Nash. I was at Teresa’s apartment. I wanted to see if Mrs. Vail needed anything.”

  “I’ve got it covered.” The redhead turned away and continued to dig in the purse as Mrs. Vail moaned at her side. The purse fell and its contents spilled out onto the front step. Curses spilled out of the redhead.

  I helped gather up the debris, then used the key that I’d picked up off the step to unlock the front door. The redhead led Mrs. Vail inside and straight down a hall. I wiped my feet on the rug by the front door and waited. To the left lay the living room, a small space stuffed with a sofa and a pair of chairs and a trio of burning lights. It looked like a room that had been left in a hurry, and smelled like a room that was beginning to sour. But what captured my attention stood between two double-hung windows: a liquor table holding a quartet of upside-down tumblers and a bottle of Jameson.

  A couple of minutes later the redhead came back up the hallway, her head down, her hands buried in the pockets of her tan raincoat. She looked up, saw me standing in the living room, and gasped, a hand shooting up to cover her heart. Irritation flooded her words. “What are you still doing here?”

  “I was the one who found Teresa.”

  “That doesn’t give you the right to barge in here.”

  “I’m the one who let you in.”

  She gazed at the two tumblers of Jameson I held in my hands. Finally said, “Are you with the police?”

  “No. I’m Darrow Nash. A private detective.”

  “Then why should I let you stay?”

  I offered her one of the drinks. “You probably shouldn’t.”

  She stared at me. Seemed to assess my face, studying it for clues. Then she shrugged off her coat, tossed it over the back of the sofa, and kicked her shoes toward the door. She took the drink from my hand. “You win, Darrow Nash.”

  “Nobody wins tonight,” I said.

  She dropped into one of the stuffed chairs and took something between a sip and a gulp. Held the side of the glass against her forehead. Leaned into it. Her silk burgundy blouse, open at the neck in a V, gave me a glimpse of the dark depths between her breasts. Later I noticed her dark gray skirt.

  “How’s Mrs. Vail?”

  Her eyes brushed me off. “How do you think?”

  “I’d say terrible.”

  “Brilliant deduction, Holmes,” she said, tilting her drink in a salute. “She fell asleep the minute her head hit the pillow.”

  “Is she your mother?”

  “Clara? No. Teresa and I aren’t sisters. We’re . . .” She paused, looked away, rubbed her eyes. “We were friends from work.”

  “But you live here, right?”

  She nodded. “Just until I find some work. Cattle calls don’t pay the rent. Teresa and I used to be in the secretarial pool together at Standard Oil.” Something about my silence made her add, “I wasn’t fired. I quit.”

  “Why?”

  She started to speak but caught herself. Her eyes narrowed. “Not that it’s any of your business.” She waited. Finally said, “My boss wanted more from me than I was willing to give.”

  “Who was your boss?”

  “Paul Devore.” Just saying his name made her clench her jaw. “Teresa helped me stand up to him. She . . .” Then the tears came, filling her eyes, spilling down her cheeks. Quiet tears, unaccompanied by sobs or anguished moans. The ones that look like they hurt the most.

  I filled the void the best I could. “If it helps, I don’t think she killed herself.”

  Her swollen eyes widened and locked on mine. She hesitated, as if too many words had come to mind and she couldn’t decide which ones to use. She didn’t have to.

  “There’s no way on God’s green earth,” said a voice from down the hall, a voice both fragile and firm, “that Teresa would ever kill herself.” Mrs. Vail stopped at the edge of the hallway, one hand pressed for support against the wall. “She was too strong to do that.”

  The redhead stood up. “Clara, I told you to get some sleep.”

  It seemed to take herculean effort for Mrs. Vail to turn her gaze on her housemate. “My daughter is dead, Eileen. I can do whatever I like.”

  She hauled her eyes back over to me. “Teresa would never take her own life, sir. Never.” It came out stronger than before, overwhelming whatever had been fragile. But the effort used up what strength she had left. Her knees buckled and she slumped to the floor, sobbing. Eileen and I each took an arm and helped her back to her bedroom. The light was off, but I got a picture of it from the smell of lingering perfume and the profound lack of a male presence. A room that had seen its share of tears and loneliness over the years. With many more to come.

  Eileen and I returned to the main room and took long sips of our drinks. I felt nauseous from the perfume and the air of death in the house, but I needed to know more. I looked at Eileen. She seemed exhausted, distracted.

  “Cattle calls?” I said. “You’re an actress?”

  “Aspiring.” She wrapped the word in a thin sheen of bitterness. “Which means ‘unemployed.’ ”

  Looking at Eileen, I thought of Rita Hayworth in The Lady in Question, the innocent, melancholy defendant.

  “How long had Teresa been seeing Mac?”

  She let out a short burst of air, a cheap substitute for a laugh. “Teresa and Mac? You’re not much of a private eye, are you?”

  “He brought a Gladstone bag with him like he might be spending the night.”

  The thought made her smile. “Not a chance. She was his secretary and they were friendly, but he wasn’t the dating type, if you know what I mean. And he wasn’t particularly good-looking. Teresa felt sorry for him, married to that bitch of a woman. Living behind that kind of a lie.”

  Something dawned on me. Something that should have crossed my mind earlier. “Why did you move in here with Mrs. Vail? Why not with Teresa at the Bon Vivant?”

  Eileen cocked her head and looked at me like I was a sap. “Teresa didn’t live there. She lived here. That was Mac’s apartment.”

  “But the mail slot has Teresa’s name on it.”

  “She did that for him. He wanted a place where he could be himself and be free of that nasty woman.”

  I nodded, trying to hide the fact that I’d been surprised by the information. “What do you think happened?”

  “Murder-suicide. What else?”

  “Most murder-suicides come from romances gone bad. But you said they were just friends.”

  She stared at me for a moment, mulling over my reasoning, then seemed to give up, her only response a self-conscious sip of her drink.

  “How did you and Mrs. Vail know to go to the apartment?”

  She took another sip before answering. “Paul Devore called me.”

  “How did he know about it?”

  “I didn’t think to ask,” she said, glancing away. “I wanted off the phone as fast as possible.”

  “Did Devore and Mac know each other?”

  “Yes. I guess you could call them rivals. Paul always envied Mac’s success with the company. Before the war, Mac had even beaten Paul out of a couple of promotions.” She paused and her eyes widened. “Maybe Paul was the one who killed them. Maybe that’s how he knew about it.”

  We looked at each other, considering the possibility. But then her eyes eased from thoughtful into purposeful. She stood up and stretched. My eyes wandered off on their own to see what that stretch did to her curves. It didn’t hurt them at all. Rita Hayworth in Cover Girl, the sexy showgirl. I set my empty glass on an end table.

  Eileen did the same, her eyes now deep and dangerous.


  I gave her a long look. A very long look. “I better get going. Thanks for talking.” I moved to the front door, but fought every step. I was surprised by how much I liked this Rita Hayworth redhead. Liked her toughness. Her ease. Her complexity.

  When I turned back to her, she had followed me to the door. “What did you say your name was?”

  I fingered an information card out of my suit coat and gave it to her. “Darrow Nash.”

  “Eileen Burnham.”

  “Thanks for not kicking me out earlier, Eileen Burnham.”

  “Thanks for the drink, Darrow Nash. Is it too late for a second?”

  “I’ll take a rain check on that.”

  “It’s raining now.”

  I knew what a second would mean. Saw it in her eyes. Felt it in my blood. And it wasn’t what you should be doing on a night like this. A night when a friend is dead and the mother of that friend is sleeping in the next room.

  “That card I gave you has a telephone number on it,” I said. “If after a week or so you find yourself wondering about me, try that number. Won’t cost you a thing. It’s a local call.”

  She didn’t smile. Just kept staring at me with those deep, dangerous eyes. Eyes that I felt following me all the way back to my car.

  Mac and Alice McKenzie lived on a quiet, unlighted street in Burbank in the heart of the San Fernando Valley, bounded by the Santa Monica Mountains to the south and the San Gabriels to the north. A flat basin in the middle of mountain ranges, like the bottom of a petri dish where, particularly in the entertainment business, everyone seemed to be under a microscope.

  It was raining again.

  The house, one story of faux-Spanish stucco, was dark. I looked at my watch. It was just after four a.m. Either Alice and her boyfriend were home and asleep already or they hadn’t come back to Alice’s house at all. The one-lane driveway was empty.

  I knocked on the front door a couple of times, rang the bell a few more. No answer. Tried the knob. Locked. Tried the back door to the patio. Locked. Tried the hairpin I kept in my coat pocket. Unlocked.

  I left the lights off as I stepped into the kitchen. Switched on my flashlight. Moved to the living room. Found nothing but the casual disarray of everyday life.

  Moved down the hall to the bedrooms. All the doors were open and all the beds were made. It didn’t take long to see that Alice and Mac didn’t sleep together. Alice, of course, had the larger bedroom, Mac the smaller one.

  I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, so I started with Mac’s closet. Found half a dozen pairs of hard shoes, a dozen wool suits, two dozen dress shirts, three dozen ties. Nothing out of the ordinary for a middle-aged oil executive. His dresser wasn’t much different, though I learned his hair tonic was Lucky Tiger and his aftershave was Yardley. The drawers held undershirts, silk socks, boxers, pocket squares, and a handful of neatly folded sweaters. The common denominator was quality. All of his clothes were very expensive and very new.

  The same wasn’t true in Mac’s desk. I found it in another bedroom, which had been turned into a study. The top of the desk was covered by a writing blotter and anchored at the two outer corners by a fluorescent lamp and by something that was no longer there. Something that had sat on that corner long enough to have left a faint outline in the dust. Just enough dust to betray a rectangle.

  The drawers of the desk were filled with a hodgepodge of pens and pencils and old financial detritus: receipts, bank statements, bills. I flipped quickly through some documents but couldn’t find any life insurance policies that might betray a million-dollar motive.

  The right-hand middle drawer held several small rectangular boxes. Inside the boxes were stacks of canceled checks. I was about to close the drawer when I noticed that its interior seemed shorter than it should.

  I reached a hand in and touched the back panel. There was a space at the top of the panel for a finger to gain purchase. When I pulled on it, the panel fell forward. Behind it in the secret space was another small rectangular box and a letter-sized envelope folded in half.

  I opened the box expecting to find more canceled checks but instead found several matchbooks from a place called The Roaring 20s. Inside the matchbooks were handwritten first names and telephone numbers.

  Lying in the box beneath all the matchbooks were a dozen black-and-white photographs, the kind with thick white borders. Different names were written on the backs of the photographs, names that were the same as those in the matchbooks. Men’s names. And in each of the pictures Mac was with a different man. All of the men were naked. Doing the kinds of things people do when they’re naked.

  Better divorce photographs than I could have ever taken at the Bon Vivant.

  The flash of headlights swung across the rain-streaked window to the study like a lighthouse beam through the mist. I thought about trying to hide or to make a break for the back door, but my old DeSoto was parked down the street. Alice knew it was mine.

  Instead, as I heard the car pull to a stop in the driveway, I tucked the small box back into its hiding place in the desk and replaced the fake drawer wall. I slipped the pictures and the envelope into the inside pocket of my suit coat.

  In the living room I turned on a lamp, aimed a flower-patterned wing chair toward the front door, and took a seat. Crossed my legs. Used one hand to prop up my chin. Used the other to keep my .38 company inside the pocket of my raincoat.

  The front door opened. Alice, still in her brown slack suit, led the way, the keys jangling in her hand. She stopped when she saw me. Took up the foreman pose she’d displayed at the Bon Vivant, feet planted, hands on hips, flint in her eyes. “I thought I made it clear you were fired.”

  “You did,” I said. “I’m off the clock.”

  A man came through the door behind her wearing a navy-blue suit and hat with water droplets on the shoulders and crown. He bore a slight limp that I recognized from the war—I’d treated several GIs for the same wound. He wasn’t tall but had a certain sense of size about him. Probably from his ego, because he came at me with the misplaced confidence of a rookie cop.

  He grabbed my lapels and hoisted me from the chair. “Time to go, pal.”

  “Not just yet, pal,” I said, and kneed him in a place a knee is never welcome. He doubled over and dropped face-first onto the floor. I left the gun in my coat pocket and pulled his right arm behind him, resting the offending knee in the middle of his back. I leveraged his arm up until he yelped.

  I glanced up at Alice. “Introductions?”

  She looked disgusted with both of us. “Darrow Nash. Paul Devore.”

  I gave his arm another twist, and he yelped again. “Pleased to meet you, Paul.”

  “You’re hurting me.”

  “Tell Mr. Devore,” I said to Alice, “that I’ll let him up if he stops playing a tough guy.”

  “He won’t do anything.”

  I eased off his arm and used my knee on his back to push myself up to my feet. He yelped again but remained on the floor, squirming, finally able to wallow in the pain in his groin now that the pain in his arm and back had subsided.

  I dipped my hand into my raincoat pocket and kept it there. I trusted Alice, but not Devore.

  “How did you get in?” she said as she pulled a pack from her purse and shook a cigarette between her lips.

  “I carry a master key shaped like a hairpin.”

  She didn’t seem to care, as she snapped her lighter shut and blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. It swirled over us, between us, like silent blue worry. “What do you want?”

  “I want to know why you went to the apartment tonight.”

  She glanced down at the man on the floor between us. “Paul took me there.”

  I hoisted Devore to his feet and settled him into the flowered chair he’d pulled me out of. His hat had fallen off, exposing the smooth curvature of his head through thinning black hair. An oversized grimace exposed tiny fractures around his eyes.

  “Why did you take Alice to the ap
artment?”

  He squeezed the words out through exaggerated pain. “I wanted her to see Mac’s home away from home. I didn’t know he was dead.”

  “But you knew it was Mac’s place and not Teresa Vail’s.” It wasn’t a question.

  His eyes shifting away from me was as good as a nod.

  I turned to Alice. “Did you know it was Mac’s?”

  She looked off through the walls toward a spot somewhere beyond the Santa Monicas. Somewhere closer to La Brea. Took a long drag on her cigarette, let the smoke out with the words. “No. I figured on the nights he didn’t come home he’d found some bimbo to put him up.” Her eyes came back to me with a darker tint. “I didn’t know his affairs were month-to-month.”

  I studied her. Realized that she had no idea who Mac McKenzie really was.

  I turned back to Devore. “How did you know about the apartment?”

  “None of your damn business.”

  I didn’t have to threaten him. Alice did it for me. She wanted to know too. “Answer him.”

  “My secretary called me tonight and told me.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Eileen Burnham.”

  “Don’t you mean your former secretary?”

  His focus sharpened on me. “How do you know that?”

  “I’m good at what I do.” I gestured toward Alice. “Why don’t you tell her why Eileen quit.”

  He took a quick, panicked glance at Alice. Her gaze narrowed into a hard stare. Then she stuffed out her cigarette in an ashtray and folded her arms.

  I didn’t have a warm spot in my heart for Alice. Had never liked that kind of cynicism in a woman. But I hated guys like Paul Devore. Guys with moneyed egos and bankrupt character. Guys who used their positions of authority to get what they wanted, not through persuasion but through force. I answered for him.

  “Paul here likes his secretaries to take more from him than just dictation.”

  Alice eyed Devore like a hammer eyes a nail. Devore verbally backpedaled in the chair. “It was before I met you, honey.”

  Nobody in the room believed that.

  I watched Alice, waiting for the anger inside her to show itself in something specific, in either her words or her fists. Devore was watching for the same thing. Instead the anger melted into disillusionment. As if her expectations had been met. Expectations she’d been hoping would be proven wrong. She moved to a window and lit another cigarette.