The Best American Mystery Stories 2017

by John Sandford

  Funny thing: the word “remorse” actually smelled pretty good, on the whole. The word “remorse” tended to smell like wood shavings and sunburned lawns; at its worst it smelled of anthills, or something sort of like anthills, sand dunes, Indian burial mounds. He never objected to the smell of the word “remorse.” In fact, rather to his surprise, Tilly tended to like it a lot. It was a pity that the word was heard so seldom in the course of ordinary conversation.

  Tilly, of course, tended not to have ordinary conversations.

  In October of 1958 Tilly once again found himself in Milwaukee. He had come not in pursuit of one or more of his many private obsessions, but because he had a genuine interest in a real estate property. Two years before, Tilly had acquired a real estate license. It had required considerable effort, but he managed to pass the qualifying exams on his first attempt. He wanted to be able to justify his trips out of town, especially those to Milwaukee, on commercial grounds. Now he had come to inspect a building, a four-story, mixed-use building on Welles Street. Its only problem was its single tenant: a sixty-five-year-old woman who had once worked for the mayor and for the past six years of her life had claimed to be dying from cardiomyopathy. Tilly had come to see if it might be possible to resolve this tenancy problem by means of certain efficient measures never to be revealed. Yet when he looked at it again, the building had become far less attractive—he saw the old lady, intractable, seated on her unclean old sofa, skinny arms extended as if for hundreds of feet, and chose not to negotiate in any way.

  Late in the afternoon of the same day, Tilly decided to take a walk through downtown Milwaukee. He wanted to uncoil, perhaps also to allow passage into the attentive atmosphere of some portion of his rabid, prancing inner self. Around the corner on Wisconsin Avenue stood the vast stone structure of the Central Milwaukee Library, and across the avenue from this big, dark building was a bookstore called Mannheim’s.

  Tilly had no interest in these buildings and could imagine no circumstance that would persuade him to enter either one. No sooner had he become conscious of this fact than he took note of someone, a young woman, who had no problem being in both. Through the slightly sunken and recessed front door of Mannheim’s she floated, unencumbered by handbag, not to mention doubt, fear, depression, or any other conventional female disorder—perhaps thirty yards away, and already, instantly upon her entrance into his frame, rivetingly, infuriatingly attractive.

  The girl was in her midtwenties, and perhaps five and a half feet tall, with dark brown hair and long blue eyes in a decisive little face with a flexible red mouth. She wore a green cardigan sweater and a khaki skirt. Her hair had been cut unusually short, to almost the length of a boy’s hair, though no one could mistake her for a boy. He liked her suntanned fox face and her twinned immediate air of independence and intelligence. The girl glanced at him, and before continuing on displayed perhaps a flicker of rote, species-reproductive interest. (Tilly had long felt that women capable of bearing children came to all-but-instantaneous decisions about their willingness to do so with the men they met.)

  She went up the stairs to the sidewalk, moved across the cement, and with a side-to-side flick of her eyes jumped down into the traffic moving north and south on busy Wisconsin Avenue. Delightful little twirls of her hands directed the cars that coursed around her, also to dismiss the few drivers who tried to flirt with her. It was like watching someone conducting an orchestra that moved around the room. She looked so valiant as she dodged through the fluid traffic. Who was this girl: her whole life long, had she never been afraid of anything? At first not entirely aware of what he was doing, Tilly began to move more quickly up the block.

  The young woman reached the near curb and flowed safely onto the sidewalk. Without the renewed glance he felt he rather deserved, she sped across the pavement and proceeded up the wide stone path to the Central Library’s massive front doors. Tilly began walking a little faster, then realized that she would be inside the building before he had even reached the pathway. He suffered a quick, hell-lit vision of the library’s interior as a mazy series of tobacco-colored corridors connected by random staircases and dim, flickering bulbs.

  Once he got through the main door, he looked both left and right in search of the girl, then straight ahead down the empty central hallway. At the end of the hallway stood a wide glass door, closed. Black letters painted on the pebbled glass said FICTION. This was almost certainly where she had gone. She was imaginative, she was interested in literature: when the moment came, she’d have things to say, she would be able to speak up. Tilly enjoyed flashes of spirit in his playmates.

  At the you know. During the. Maybe. If not then, what a pity, never.

  Tilly strode through the glass door into the fiction room. The girl could have been bent over a book at one of the wide tables or hidden behind some of the open shelves at the edges of the room. He did a quick scan of the tables and saw only the usual library riffraff, then moved toward the shelves. His heart began to beat a little more quickly.

  Tilly could taste blood; he could already catch the meat-sack stench of “please” and “mercy” as they slid through the girl’s sweetheart lips. Better than a meal to a hungry man, the you know . . . except the you know was a meal, finer than a T-bone fresh from the slaughterhouse and butchered on the spot . . .

  Tilly stopped moving, closed his eyes, and touched his tongue to the center of his upper lip. He made himself breathe softly and evenly. There was no point in letting his emotions ride him like a pony.

  Twice he wandered through the three stacks of books on the fiction floor, going in one end and out the other, along the way peering over the cityscape tops of the books to see if his target was drifting down the other side. Within a couple of minutes he had looked everywhere, yet had somehow failed to locate the girl. Girl walks into room, girl disappears. This was a red-line disappointment, a tremble, a shake-and-quiver. Already Tilly had begun to feel that this girl should have had some special place in his grand scheme—that if she were granted such a place, a perfection of the sort he had seldom known would have taken hold. The grand scheme itself borrowed its shape from those who contributed to it—the girls whose lives were demanded—and for that reason at the moment of his fruitless search the floating girl felt like an essential aspect of his life in Milwaukee. He needed her. The surprise of real fulfillment could be found only in what would happen after he managed to talk her into his “special place” out in the far western suburbs.

  After something like fifteen minutes, Tilly finally admitted to himself that somehow she had managed to escape from the fiction room. Baffling; impossible. He had kept his eye on the door the whole time he’d been in the room. Two people, both now bent over their reading, had entered, and only three people had left—a pair of emaciated women in their fifties and a slender Negro girl with glossy little curls in her hair.

  For a moment Tilly considered racing out and following the wide central hallway wherever it went. He saw, as if arrayed before him on a desktop, pictures of frantic Tillman Hayward charging into rooms where quiet people dozed over books or newspapers. No part of balance and restitution could be found in the images strewn across the desk. Something told him—everything told him!—that none of these people half asleep under the library lamps could be his girl.

  He had lost her for good. This wonderful young woman would never be permitted to fulfill her role in the grand design of Tillman Hayward’s extraordinary life. For both of them, what a tragic diminution. Tilly spun around and dropped himself into an empty chair. None of the pig-ignorant people reading their trashy books even bothered to glance at him. He continued to try to force calm upon himself, to take control of his emotions. Tilly feared that he might have to go outside, prop his hands on his knees, and inhale deeply to find calm. Eventually his body began to relax.

  The girl was gone. There was nothing to be done for it. It would always be as if he had never seen her. For the rest of his life he would have to act as thoug
h he had never sensed the possibilities with which this young woman, so alive with possibility, had presented him. Tilly knew himself to be a supreme compartmentalizer, and he did not doubt his power to squeeze the girl down into a little drawer in his mind, and there quite nearly to forget her.

  Two nights later, he had planned to get some rest before going back to Columbus, but the idea of Mags and Bob sitting in their miserable living room thinking God knows what and remembering too much of what he might have said made him edgy. Probably he should never have given that True Detective to poor little Keith. It was like a secret handshake he could not as yet acknowledge. It was like saying, This is my work, and I want you to admire my achievement, but it is still too soon for you and me to really talk about it. But you’re beginning to understand, aren’t you? Because that was true: the kid was beginning to put things together.

  Tilly tried stretching out on the bed and sort of reading his book, which was a novel based on the career of Caryl Chessman, the Red Light Bandit, who had been sentenced to execution in the gas chamber at San Quentin. Tilly loved the book. He thought it made Chessman seem at least a little sympathetic. Yet his attempt at reading did not go well. The image of Bob and Mags seated stiffly before their television, and that of Keith doing God knew what with True Detective in his bedroom, kept dragging his concentration away from the page. Finally he decided: one last night, maybe one last girl. Good old Caryl kept himself in the game, you had to give him that.

  He checked his inner weather. A sullen little flame of pure desire had flared into being at the prospect of going out on the hunt one last time. He tucked the book beneath his pillow, took his second-favorite knife from its hiding place, then put it back. He would play it All or Nothing: if he could coax a girl out to his special place in the suburbs, he would use his favorite knife, which was stashed in a drawer out there; if he failed, there’d be one less corpse in the world. All or Nothing always made his mouth fizz. He lifted his overcoat off the hook on the back of the door and slipped his arms into the sleeves on the short distance to the living room.

  That coat fit him like another skin. When he moved, it moved with him. (Such sensations were another benefit of All or Nothing.)

  “Why do you do that, Tilly?” Mags asked.

  “Do what?”

  “That thing you just did. That . . . shimmy.”

  “Shimmy,” a word he seldom used, stank of celery.

  “I have no idea how to shimmy, sorry.”

  “But you are obviously going out. Aren’t you?”

  “Oh, Mags,” sighed Bob.

  “Last-minute look at a property. I shouldn’t be superlate, but don’t wait up for me.”

  “Where would this property be, Tilly, exactly?”

  He grinned at her. “It’s on North Avenue, way east, past that French restaurant over there. The next block.”

  “Is it nice?”

  “Exactly my question. Be good now, you two.”

  “What time is your train tomorrow?”

  “Eleven in the morning. I won’t be home until midnight, probably.”

  When he got outside and began walking down the street to his rented car through the cool air, he felt himself turning into his other, deeper self. It had been months since he had last been in Lou’s Rendezvous.

  Formerly an unrepentant dive, Lou’s had recently become a college joint with an overlay of old-time neighborhood pond scum. Ever optimistic about the possibility of having sex with these good-looking youngsters, the old-timers kept jamming quarters into the jukebox and playing “Great Balls of Fire” and “All I Have to Do Is Dream of You.” That the neighborhood characters never got disgusting made for a loose, lively crowd. Supposedly a businessman from Chicago, a man who had been at Lou’s several times before, the Ladykiller dressed well, he was relaxed and good-looking. Knew how to make a person laugh. The man wandered in and out, had a few drinks, talked to this one and that one, whispered into a few ears. Some thought his name was Mac, maybe Mark. Like a single flower in a pretty vase, the girl from the library was parked at the corner of the bar. Her name was Lori Terry. She called him Mike and slipped out of the bar with him before anyone had time to notice.

  So not Nothing. All. A final present from the city of Milwaukee.

  After he had driven west some fifteen minutes she asked, “So where are we going anyhow, Mike?” (Young avocado, peppermint.)

  Like very few people he had observed, Lori Terry had the gift of imbuing words and even whole sentences with fragrances all her own. His nephew had a touch of this ability too.

  “This place a little way out of town,” he said.

  “Sounds romantic. Is it romantic?” She’d had perhaps two or three drinks too many. (“Romantic” kind of hovered over a blocked drain.)

  “I think it is, yes.” He smiled at her. “Tonight wasn’t the first time I’ve ever seen you, you know. I was in the library this morning. I saw you walk from Fiction right through into Biography.”

  “Why didn’t you say hello?”

  “You were too fast for me. Peeled right out of there.”

  “Must have made quite the impression.” (Some lively pepperminty thing here, like gum, only not really.)

  “I looked at you, and I thought, That girl could change my life.”

  “Well, maybe I will. Maybe you’ll change mine. Look what we’re doing! Nobody ever takes me out of town.”

  “I’ll try to make the trip extra-memorable.”

  “Actually, isn’t it a little late for going out of town?”

  “Lori, are you worried about sleep? Because I’ll make sure you get enough sleep.”

  “Promise?” This word floated on a bed of fat green olives.

  He promised her all the sleep she was going to need.

  Trouble started twenty minutes later, when he pulled up into the weedy dirt driveway. As she stared first at the unpromising little tavern next to his actual building, then at him, disbelief widened her eyes. “This place isn’t even open!” (Rancid milk.)

  “Not that one, no,” said the Ladykiller, now nearly on the verge of laughter. “The other one.”

  She swiveled her head and took in the old storehouse with the ghostlike word clinging to a front window. “Goods?” she asked. “If you tell me that’s the name of the place, you’re fulla shit.” (Gunmetal, silver polish.)

  “That’s not a name, it’s a disguise.”

  “Are you really sure about this?”

  “Do you think I brought you all the way out here by mistake?” He opened his door, leaned toward her, and smiled. “Come on, you’ll see.”

  “What is this, an after-hours joint? Like a club?” With a gathering, slow-moving reluctance, she swung the door open on a dissipating cloud of rainwater and fried onions and moved one leg out of the car.

  “Private club.” He moved gracefully around the hood and took her hand to ease her delivery from the car. The temperature of his resolve was doing that thing of turning hot as lava, then as cold as the flanks of a glacier, then back again, in about a second and a half. “Just for us, tonight.”

  “Jesus, you can do that?”

  “You wait,” he said, and searched his pocket for the magic key. It glided into the lock and struck home with the usual heavy-duty sound effects.

  “Maybe we should both wait.” (Chalk-dusty blackboard.)

  He gave her an over-the-shoulder glance of rueful, ironic mock regret. “Wait? I’ll get you back into town in plenty of time.”

  “We just met. You want me to follow you into this old building, and it’s already past twelve . . .”

  “You don’t trust me?” Now he was frankly pouting. “And after all we’ve meant to each other.”

  “I was just thinking my father would be really suspicious right now.”

  “Isn’t that part of the whole point about me, Lori? That your father wouldn’t like me?”

  She laughed. “You may be right.”

  “All right then.” He opened the door ont
o an absolute darkness. “Just give me a sec. It’s one flight down.”

  “A basement? I’m not so . . .”

  “That’s how they keep the place private. Wait, I’ll get the light.”

  He disappeared inside and a moment later flipped a switch. Watery illumination revealed floorboards with a sweeping, half-visible grain. She heard the turning of another vaultlike lock. He again appeared in the doorway, took her hand, and with only a minimum of pressure urged her into the building. Shivering in the sudden cold, she glanced around at the barren cell-like room she had entered. It seemed to be perfectly empty and perfectly clean. He was drawing her toward a door that opened onto a rectangle of greater brightness. It gradually revealed the flat, dimpled platform and gray descending handrail of a metal staircase. No noise came from the dark realm beyond the circle of light at the bottom of the steps.

  “Ladies first,” he said, and she had reached the fifth step down before she realized that he had blocked any possibility of escape. She turned to look at him over her shoulder, and received, as if in payment, a smile of utmost white seductiveness. “I know, it looks like no one’s here. Works in our favor, actually. We’ll have the whole place to ourselves. Do anything we like, absolutely everything.”