The Best American Mystery Stories 2017

by John Sandford

  “Get out of here, Paul,” she said, her voice low, resigned. “And don’t come back.”

  He jumped to his feet. “But I love you.”

  Nobody in the room believed that either.

  I steered him toward the front door, noticing his limp again. “Beat it, Devore. She’s done with you. Alice doesn’t go for cowards.”

  The guilty verdict in his eyes was followed by an embarrassed rage that sent him out the door, hobbling toward his Packard. A rage still evident as he backed wildly out of the driveway and sped off into the night.

  Alice stood fingering the cigarette close to her lips as she stared into a darkness that illuminated her reflection in the window.

  I stepped up beside her. “You’re better off without him.”

  She turned her head and gave me a long look. I hesitated, surprised for a moment by what I saw, what I hadn’t noticed before. That her eyes—blue eyes that had once been so cynical—possessed a raw humanity. A tender loneliness.

  “You’ll find someone,” I said. And I meant it.

  She stared at me. Took a deep pull on her cigarette. Then looked away and exhaled, the smoke obscuring her image in the window.

  As I closed the front door behind me, I marveled at how somebody so hard-edged could be so vulnerable. But sometimes, I guess, the deepest truths can conjure up the greatest facades.

  At five a.m. outside the Bon Vivant there was no external evidence that two people had suffered tragic deaths inside. No ambulances. No cop cars. All that was left in the wake of the murderous violence was the pregnant, drizzling darkness just before another dawn.

  I’d stopped by hoping to catch Beaumont still on the job. I wanted to give him the envelope I’d found in the secret compartment inside Mac’s desk, proof that this wasn’t a simple murder-suicide.

  After leaving Alice’s house, I’d sat in my car and looked through the envelope’s contents. It held three short, cryptic notes, each typewritten on small pieces of white paper: I’M WATCHING YOU and DOES YOUR WIFE KNOW? and DOES YOUR BOSS KNOW?

  The fourth note got to the point:

  I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE. I KNOW WHO YOU ENTERTAIN AT THE BON VIVANT. IF YOU DON’T WANT ALICE AND EVERYONE AT STANDARD OIL TO KNOW TOO IT WILL COST YOU $50,000. IF YOU AREN’T AT THE APARTMENT ON SUNDAY NIGHT AT 10:00 WITH THE CASH BY MONDAY MORNING YOUR CAREER AND YOUR MARRIAGE WILL BE OVER.

  My guess was that tonight had been the Sunday night for the meeting. And I’d noticed when I’d followed Mac there that he had rushed into the Bon Vivant just before ten carrying a small Gladstone bag. At the time I hadn’t given it much thought. I had just assumed it held a change of clothes or a present for someone. But it might have contained something else. Something dangerous, like a gun. Or something worse, like money.

  And during my time inside the apartment, I hadn’t seen the cops tag it as evidence. I needed to know if it was still in there. And what, if anything, it still contained.

  As I walked through the courtyard to the front door, lights had come on in the windows of a handful of apartments, but not the one with Teresa Vail’s name on it. When I reached 311 there was no indication that the cops cared about this case anymore. No postings to keep out. No police tape. To them, it was a murder-suicide. Case closed.

  Then I heard a muffled noise through the paneled wood door. I pulled the .38 from my raincoat pocket.

  I examined the lock on the door. No evidence of tampering. I tried the knob. No resistance. The cops would have at least locked it when they’d left. Whoever was inside had used a key.

  I felt my heart clench. The feeling that comes with news I don’t want to hear. Or don’t want to believe.

  I stepped inside and closed the door. The living room was dark, but a flashlight beam danced against the walls in the bedroom. I turned on the lamp next to the couch where Mac and Teresa had died, casting the room in a tepid yellow glow. But not tepid enough to soften the poignancy of the bloodstains left behind on the couch.

  I heard the flashlight click off, leaving the bedroom buried in darkness.

  “It’s me,” I said into a silence both sharp and airless. “Darrow Nash.”

  No sound. Then a form in an overcoat stepped into the open doorway.

  “You work long hours for a PI.”

  “I work as long as it takes,” I said.

  “As long as it takes for what?”

  “For the truth.”

  No response. Just a long, wary stare. Deep and dangerous.

  “How’s Mrs. Vail?” I said.

  “Asleep.”

  “What brings you back here?”

  Eileen rolled her shoulders and lolled her head as if to stretch. “I couldn’t sleep there. I was too upset.” She set the flashlight on a small table by the bedroom door and opened her tan overcoat. She still wore the burgundy blouse, the one with the open-neck V that ended where her cleavage started. Her Rita Hayworth hair rested on her shoulders.

  “If you were looking for sleep, why did you bring a flashlight?”

  She took several slow steps out of the bedroom, the fingers of her left hand caressing the skin that led down into the deep cleft between her breasts. Her right hand was tucked into her raincoat pocket. I didn’t trust either hand. Or what either one was suggesting.

  “I wanted to collect some of Teresa’s things.” She stopped six feet away from me. “I was hoping I’d see you again. Maybe collect on that rain check.”

  Rita Hayworth in Blood and Sand. The sultry temptress.

  I took a deep breath and let out a long sigh. “Whose idea was it?”

  She cocked her head and pasted on a quizzical look. “Whose idea was what?”

  I gestured toward the bloodstained couch. “This.”

  She shrugged. “How would I know? It was a murder-suicide.”

  “If that’s true, why didn’t Teresa just shoot Mac, then shoot herself? Why go to the trouble of strangling him first?”

  She watched me, her hands frozen in place, one at her chest, the other in her pocket.

  “There was no gunpowder on Teresa’s skin,” I said, holding her gaze. “I smelled her hands. Someone else put that bullet in her head.”

  Eileen’s face seemed thinner than earlier in the night. And older. “Maybe we should sit down and discuss this. I know where we might be more comfortable.” Then she walked back into the bedroom and hit the wall switch, filling the room with a milky luminescence from the ceiling light. She sat on the edge of the double bed and crossed her legs.

  I stopped in the doorway. It was the same room from the pictures Mac had hidden in his desk at the house. The bed, made with military precision, was covered in a bright red satin spread. The dresser drawers were closed. The closet door was open.

  Eileen let an idle hand play back and forth across the silky covering. “Sit by me.”

  I made no movement toward the bed.

  “Here’s what I think,” I said. “You and Teresa were extorting money from Mac. You found out he preferred the company of men and used it to try to get fifty thousand dollars out of him. He was supposed to meet you here tonight to give you the money.”

  She tried on a look of skepticism. It didn’t fit. Even she knew that, so she tried on something else. “Mac shot Teresa.”

  I looked down, shaking my head. Caught sight of the black marks on the bedroom door, a foot above the floor. The marks I’d been counting as I’d been waiting earlier in the night for Beaumont to release me. All twenty-eight of them. Some of them thin, curved lines. Some of them dense smudges.

  And I remembered Mac’s shoes. Black-and-white wingtips that had needed polishing. Not on the toes but on the heels.

  A burst of clarity shot through me. I looked up at Eileen. “Mac didn’t kill Teresa. He couldn’t have, because he was already dead.”

  Eileen rose to her feet. Stared down at the bottom of the bedroom door, at the collection of black scars.

  “Mac’s shoes were scuffed on the heels,” I said. “He died hanging from
this door. My guess is the extension cord was tied to the knob on the other side and draped over the top. But for some reason his neck didn’t break. He struggled, then eventually suffocated. Which leaves only one person who could have shot Teresa. You.”

  “I would never do that.” She said it with icy confidence, but I sensed a weakening. Her act wasn’t working on me like she’d thought it would.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  She stared at me, her face a pallid mask. Stared so long that I began to wonder if she was going to say anything at all. “No one was supposed to die.”

  “Was it Teresa’s idea?”

  Eileen nodded. “She’d helped Mac get the apartment, but when she found out he only had men over here, she saw an opportunity. She didn’t think he’d be man enough to fight our demands.” Her eyes narrowed and she shook her head. “But neither of us thought he was the kind of guy who would kill himself.”

  “Why not?”

  “Mac seemed okay with his . . . with himself. And he was a war hero. All those medals. I never even knew he’d been in the war. He never talked about it.”

  “Why would you get involved?”

  “I don’t know. Easy money, I guess. I figured if I had enough cash I could quit looking for a day job and start going to more auditions.”

  “Then why did you shoot Teresa?”

  Eileen’s eyes grew wide and pleading. “I didn’t mean to. I was . . .” She glanced away for a moment, then looked out of the bedroom toward the living room. Toward the couch. “When we walked in at eleven and saw Mac hanging from the door . . .”

  “Eleven? Weren’t you supposed to meet him at ten?”

  “No, the note said eleven. So when we saw him hanging from the door, Teresa pulled out her gun, thinking it was some sort of a setup. But when she realized he was dead, she went crazy. Screaming and crying, shouting that he wasn’t supposed to kill himself. I knew she had to quiet down or someone would come to the door. She was waving the gun around and I was afraid it would go off, so I grabbed it from her. She tried to take it back. We struggled. It went off.”

  She hesitated, replaying the scene in her head. “Then Teresa fell onto the couch.” Eileen looked down and her tears fell silently onto the carpet.

  “And you moved Mac’s body there to make it look like a murder-suicide. Did he leave a note?”

  “I don’t know.” She paused, glanced around. “I don’t think so. I guess I was so shocked that he’d done it I didn’t even think about a note.”

  “Did you call Paul Devore?”

  “No.” It came out sharp, angry. Honest.

  “Why’d you come back with Mrs. Vail?”

  She sighed. “I thought it would give me an alibi.”

  “And why come back now when you knew there was no money?”

  She shrugged, resigned, nearly drained of life. “When you mentioned the bag at the house, I thought maybe I was wrong. That there might still be some money in it.”

  “Did you find the bag?”

  She gestured with her head toward the closet. “Just now. The only thing in it was an empty leather jewelry box.”

  The box that was missing from the corner of Mac’s desk at home. The box in which he must have kept his medals.

  It all made sense.

  Still, I couldn’t shake the fact that the times didn’t add up. Eileen said that she and Teresa were supposed to meet Mac at eleven. But the extortion letter from Mac’s desk said to meet at ten. And when I’d been waiting outside the Bon Vivant I’d seen Mac go in at ten and two women—Eileen Burnham and Teresa Vail as it turns out—enter at eleven. Mac had died in that hour. But by whose hand? His own or someone else’s?

  Eileen took a long, slow breath. Finally looked up at me. The tears had left faint tracks in her makeup. She pulled a gun from her coat pocket. A .38. Aimed it at the general area of my heart.

  Rita Hayworth in Gilda. The femme fatale.

  She stared at me until tears began to well in her eyes. It looked like remorse, but I wasn’t sure if it was for what she had done or for what she was about to do.

  “I don’t want to kill you,” she said. “But I don’t want to go to prison either.”

  “You should put that away. Someone could get hurt.”

  Her gaze drifted over my shoulder into the living room again. This time her eyes grew wide.

  “He’s right, Eileen,” said a voice from behind me. “Drop the gun.” Then a chuckle. “Nice job, Nash. I heard the whole thing. She’s the killer. You might be a decent PI after all.”

  I turned to see the self-satisfied mug of Paul Devore, and the accusatory barrel of his revolver aimed past me at Eileen.

  He stood near the bloody couch as he punched a gesture toward her with the gun. “Mac killed himself and you killed Teresa. Isn’t that right, doll?”

  Eileen bore the stricken look of someone whose secret is out, but she didn’t respond.

  “Why are you here, Devore?” I said.

  “I followed you,” he said, glancing at me. “I was going to pay you back for what you did to me at Alice’s. But when I heard Eileen’s confession, I decided you needed my help.”

  “Sticking up for me like you stuck up for the men in your platoon?”

  He looked offended. I immediately felt better about myself. “Look, Nash, it’s five in the morning. You turned Alice against me. Just be happy I’m here to save your ass.”

  I almost said something glib. But then it struck me. First as a hunch, then as a flood of certainty. “You never cared about Alice, Paul. You just wanted her to be your alibi.”

  “That’s absurd.” He tried to mean it, but the phony outrage died somewhere in the space between us.

  “Not really,” I said as I moved out of the doorway and into the living room, away from both Eileen and Devore.

  I needed some space in case what I was about to say inspired a gun to go off. Including the one that I pulled from my coat pocket as I turned near the windows. I aimed it at Devore. Eileen, her gun also aimed at Devore, stepped into the doorway. Devore smirked when he saw my .38 but kept his gun aimed at Eileen. There was a ten-foot triangle between the three of us.

  “The extortion play on Mac,” I said, “was your idea, Paul. Teresa told you about Mac’s visitors here and you saw an opportunity.”

  “You were behind it?” Eileen took a step toward Devore, the shock on her face as real as the gun in her hand.

  “You didn’t know that?” I said.

  She shook her head. “Teresa knew how much I hated this bastard. She said it was her idea but that she didn’t want to come here alone.”

  Devore didn’t respond, but his eyes had narrowed.

  “What Teresa didn’t know,” I said, “was that Paul here was going to set you and Teresa up to take the fall at eleven o’clock for his extortion and murder of Mac at ten. Paul would get the money and you and Teresa would do the time.”

  Devore tried to laugh. He wasn’t the actor that Eileen was. “You can’t prove any of that.”

  “Actually, I can.” I patted my jacket where the inside breast pocket was. “I have the note you sent to Mac. It said to meet here at ten. But Eileen told me that they were supposed to meet Mac at eleven.” I glanced to Eileen. “Who decided on eleven?”

  Eileen kept her eyes and her gun on Devore. “He did. And he said he’d take care of sending a note to Mac.”

  I nodded at Devore. “So you told them eleven, but you told Mac ten. That gave you an hour to get the money, kill Mac, and make it look like a suicide. A gun would have been too loud, so you choked him with the cord until he passed out, then you strung him up so that Teresa and Eileen wouldn’t suspect you of murdering him and taking all the money. They would think that he had simply killed himself because of the extortion letter. That sound about right?”

  “You’ve really lost it, Nash.” He kept his gun aimed at Eileen. “She killed Teresa and Mac killed himself.”

  “I saw you leave at ten forty-five.” De
vore had been the man whistling a happy tune. The one who had seen me. Who had pulled his hat low. Who I’d assumed was guilty of something. “You were going to call the police so that they would get here just after Teresa and Eileen showed up at eleven. But you saw me outside sitting in my car and you got nervous. You were worried I could place you at the scene, so you didn’t call the cops.”

  Devore looked ashen in the yellow light of the room.

  “You were the one who pinned those medals all over his coat,” I said. “Was that your way of mocking him, Devore? Did those medals make you jealous? Make you face your own cowardice?”

  He turned his gun toward me and took a hobbled step. “I saw action, Nash.”

  “Where? Behind the Fort Bragg Officers’ Club?”

  “Iwo.” His face wrenched into a phony rage that almost gave cover for the blush that had spread across his cheeks and the beads of sweat that had popped up on his forehead.

  “Do you have a Combat Infantry Badge that will back that up? Or just a dishonorable discharge?”

  The fake rage turned real. “You think pinning a medal on somebody makes them a hero?”

  “No. But it says they’ve got more inside them than guys like you. Those heroes were just as scared as you, only they knew their buddies were depending on them. You’ve never cared about anybody but yourself. Mac was more of a man than you are.”

  Devore was breathing heavy, drawing in air in big, noisy wheezes, but his response came out breathless. “That’s what Mac said. You know what I said? ‘Medals or no medals, do you think Standard Oil is going to promote you when they find out you’re a queerie?’ ”

  “What did he say to that?”

  Devore paused. Seemed to stop functioning. He was looking at me, but his eyes went flat. Like they’d stopped seeing what was in front of him. When he spoke, his voice was as flat as his eyes. “He said, ‘I’ll just tell them about my war record. And if that’s not enough, then I’ll tell them about yours.’ ”