The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Where did you get this car? You didn’t tell me you had a car here. Why do you keep a car in Dublin and one here? Where do I fit into all this? I should know these things.”

  “Are you coming, woman?”

  “Woman!” I marched up to him. “Don’t you ever call me that. I’m your wife, whether you like it or not.” More asinine, foolish words that simply voiced naïve, needy emotions that would have been better left unsaid.

  He picked up my suitcase, dragged it across the mud, and shoved it into the backseat. I continued to shout at him like an old fishwife—this was wrong, this was a mistake, I don’t know what I was thinking, how do we get a divorce, was it a legal marriage . . . on and on I went.

  He slammed the car door. “I’ve got the fookin’ flu, Colleen. I want to get home.”

  “You’ve got the fookin’ seasickness, Joe.”

  He put his head to the top of the car. “You haven’t a clue. Get in.”

  I opened and slammed the door, but I did not get in—a stupid gesture, overdramatic, adolescent behavior.

  He leaned across the top. “Damn it, Colleen. I’m sicker than a fookin’ dog.”

  I got in, plopped onto the seat, and folded my arms. What a pathetic sight. He needed someone strong at that moment, and I proved weak. He needed some support, and I proved selfish. He needed a woman on whom he could rely. I proved useless and needy.

  We drove in silence through the wet English countryside. After an hour or so in the dark and rain, I settled down. The sights and smells around me—pine woods, moist soft grasses, the earthy fragrance of wet dirt—were comforting, like home. A warm excitement about seeing his home, my new home, my chance for a new, clean, clear life changed my bad humor. I pictured myself introducing Joe to my friends: This is Joe Donnelly, an international computer specialist. A man with a home in London, an apartment in Germany, an ex-wife in Sweden, a sister in Dublin, an IRA brother in a rebel’s grave. My self-image puffed up with every thought of him.

  Eventually, Joe left the highway and drove toward the lights of a big city. He drove slowly, squinting through the windshield. A mile or so on side streets and we came to a downtown. We stopped in front of a drugstore.

  “There’s a hotel around that corner. We’ll stay there for the night. I can’t drive on.”

  “Aren’t we in London?”

  “No, we’re a couple of hours from London.” He rubbed perspiration from his upper lip, pushed his hair from his forehead, and opened the door. “I’ve got to get to bed.”

  Disappointed, estranged but too tired to fight, I opened my door, pulled up my seat and struggled to remove my suitcase. The suitcase was caught on a small metal case sitting upright on the floor. When I finally dragged the suitcase to the curb, Joe got his bag from the trunk, locked the door, and led me around the corner to the front of the hotel.

  “Wait right here. I forgot something.”

  Both our bags at my feet, I watched as he jogged down the street and around the corner. He disappeared for several seconds, returned quickly.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Never mind.” He took my arm and steered me into the hotel.

  The shabby hotel reminded me of the other side of Grays Harbor—the dankness and musty smell of seaside buildings. Joe registered us as Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Donnelly, which affirmed our marriage. He led me up a dark, narrow stairway and down a stale-smelling hall, rattling his keys all the way. Our corner room, covered with flowered wallpaper, had worn shades and torn curtains.

  “Not much of a honeymoon suite,” I said.

  Joe fell onto the bed and buried his face in the pillow, covered it with his arms. Used to the silence between us, I simply pulled the shades and curtains and peeked into the WC. Both the toilet and sink were clean but old-fashioned. I hated chain-pull toilets and detached bathtubs, coin water-heaters and old sinks—more small-minded chatter in a brain that should have been active, inquisitive, and alert.

  Joe raised his head. “Get me that waste bin. I’m going to retch.”

  I quickly did as I was told. He leaned over the bed, choked and splattered into the basket. Attempting the role of the dutiful new wife, I sat next to him, stroked his head, helped him remove his shoes. He shook me off and tried to stand up, but fell back onto the bed. I emptied the wastebasket into the toilet and washed it out. When I returned, Joe was back in bed, his head buried. I opened my suitcase.

  When Joe spoke again, he said something that sounded like “Stay away from the window.”

  “What did you say?” As I stood, I was flung hard onto the bed by an unnatural force, as though shoved from behind by a giant fist. The window shattered, an explosion lit the room, a blaze of fire rose up then receded. Instinctively, I threw myself onto the floor and buried my head in my arms. My heart pounded, a loud, thumping rhythm. I blocked out the sirens and human screams. A familiar panic overtook me—fear of the dark, horror of strangers in a window, of dark corners, manic behavior, endless black oceans, loose limbs and bodies. Neither of us moved. I dared not speak. I heard Joe say over and over again into the pillow, “Fook, fook, fook.”

  He grabbed the wastebasket and vomited. This time I didn’t move to help him. When finished, he scooted onto his back. I watched through the corner of my eye. He stared at the ceiling, like he was counting the tiles or waiting for something, killing time. In the moments that followed, sirens blazed toward our hotel, but even then I couldn’t hear them—the room was so silent. I sensed the heart-beating shock of death, of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, of two worlds, edges of two planes, teetering between two modes of living, a darkly lit future, fear of ghosts and of the dark. God had found me. I was scared to death of Joe Donnelly.

  It took all of twenty minutes for them to start banging on the door, the landlord shouting, “There they are, the two Irish ones.” Three policemen stood above us.

  “Joseph Donnelly?”

  Joe nodded but didn’t move. One of the policemen pulled him up. “Get to your feet!”

  “I’ve got the fookin’ flu. I just want to sleep.” He plopped back onto the bed.

  The policeman looked at me. I quickly stood. “Who are you?”

  “She’s my wife,” Joe answered.

  Joe must have guessed back in the ferry boat that I would be speechless at this point. I’d be useless. I’d be stunned. His plan would backfire. His smart and urbane woman would fail him. A strong worldly, defiant type was what he needed, not some weak, confused thing.

  “Leave her alone.” Joe pulled himself from the bed. “She’s American. Doesn’t know shit about what’s going on here.”

  “I’m bringing you both in.”

  My hands shook and my chin quivered. The officers’ arrival had me torn between relief and fear. Their accents sounded imperial and brutish after a week of the melodious Irish. Joe pulled a second sweater from his bag and put it on. I picked up my wool coat, but it was soaking wet and covered in fine pieces of glass. I threw it on the floor and grabbed a sweater from my opened suitcase. The three policemen and the landlord led us down the hall, down the damp stairs, and out onto the crowded street.

  All eyes and fingers pointed to us, people pushed and shoved us, shouted obscenities as we drove away. My brain, cleared of the naiveté of the simpering new wife, replayed, almost at a mental distance, what had gone on that night—the insistence and negotiation for the ferry ride during a gale, the meeting on the deck, the suddenly appearing slicker, the hurry to the waiting car, intense drive, hotel instead of the house, his return from the corner, covering his head, the sickness, fear . . . that metal case. That was where my mind stopped. No matter how I urged it on, how I tried to think beyond, how much I tried to see a clear path to a solution, every thought became muddled within what had just happened, where I was, how I got there. We sat in silence as we sped through the countryside, a Nazi-esque siren screaming loudly. I felt like a war criminal in some old movie.

  Joe took my hand. “I didn’t do
it.”

  I pulled away. Joe looked larger to me, more straggly, his sweater hand-knitted and worn. I couldn’t remember when he had changed from shoes to black boots, from trousers to jeans. How could he look like a computer specialist one hour and a terrorist the next?

  We entered the station together. It smelled like the Grays Harbor Police Station. They registered us, took our fingerprints. As they did, Joe hollered, “Better watch your steps, mates. She’s an American, and she’s my wife.”

  An older cop in plain clothes came into the station. “Ah, one of the Donnelly’s. Joe, right?” He became serious. “How long you two been married?”

  With a chuckle, Joe answered, “About a day.”

  “You Donnelly’s get the best alibis. Your brother is still about, I see, even though we got him locked up. How’s our lovely Bridget? Still in the explosives business?”

  “I had nothing to do with this. I don’t know about my fookin’ brother.”

  Muddled . . . I had to think back to our first night. Surely he had told me his brother was dead. The rebel’s grave and all.

  “That’s what they always say, Joseph Patrick Donnelly, and always, always, a Donnelly is where it happens.”

  “Lookit, man, I’m really sick. I need to lie down. I don’t do explosives. I’m here for that factory in Kildare and you know it.”

  This was the nightmare that had been waiting for me since childhood—defenseless, surrounded by lies, explosions, strangers, imprisoned in damp, dark rooms.

  “Just think, Colleen,” Joe shouted as they dragged him toward a cell. “God came looking for you and he found me. Funny how that happens with people who . . .”

  I never heard the rest.

  MARK MAYER

  The Clown

  from American Short Fiction

  The clown counted his murders as he drove the new couple to the house on Rocking Horse Lane. Not few. The Lexus needed air again, according to the little orange light, the man in his passenger seat was offering original commentary on the Clintons, and behind the clown’s left eye a toothache and an earache were collaborating. Not few at all, and some of the murders had been admirably painful, admirably patient. Outside the Lexus it was seventy-two degrees in October, and inside the Lexus, according to a different screen, it was also seventy-two degrees, the car’s climate system blowing hard even so. The clown hated the Lexus and was wearing a blazer he’d bought to match it. In the backseat, the woman, very pregnant, was picking her teeth with the aid of her phone. The clown’s mouth—thirsty—tasted like waffle fries and crispy chicken sandwich, and so did all the rest of him. Salt, grease, a synthetic drive-thru savor—he was likely composed of it by now. No matter how many times he sucked the straw the soda was still out.

  “We hate to leave the downtown,” the man, Seamus, was saying again. “Our apartment is five minutes from Pinche Taco, five minutes from Cerebral Brewing, like two minutes from Über Dog, but how fast I got her pregnant, we’re going to need rooms.”

  “Congratulations,” said the clown, shaking his ice. Any kind of knife murder, some hooks, some rod-and-fire stuff. One dehydration. He tried to recognize himself, his life and effort, in the résumé, but it was like he’d consigned his life effort to a secret man. What was left ate waffle fries, sold houses, awaited the secret man’s return.

  But he had a good feeling about this couple. Early thirties, Apple Watches, fecund. He wanted to kill them. That was something. The woman, Eliza, was very quiet. All she had said since the place on Ridgeway Row was “Hi, Daddy” when they passed a trim tort lawyer’s billboard. Seamus was lavishly freckled, in an overlaundered polo probably assigned to lazy weekend wear, curling collar leaning toward the postnuptial paunch.

  The houses on Vinci Park and Ridgeway Row, where the air still smelled of other people’s lentil soup, had been staged disappointments, unmowed drabnesses after which 404 Rocking Horse would gleam like a mirror. It was the perfect place for Eliza and Seamus; Eliza and Seamus were the perfect pair for it. The clown had been preparing this for a while.

  “We’re thinking high fours, maybe low fives,” Seamus was lowballing already. “They’re reviewing me for associate sooner than anyone in my cohort, so it’s not that. I’m just not ready for the house yet, you know?”

  The clown did know. The man wanted granite counters, sectional couches, a pop-up soccer goal. There was time yet for Japanese fountains. He wanted the yard the kid could mow for iTunes money, not the one that needed a koi specialist. Happiness was not so hard to engineer for the typical, but it did no good to say it. The house on Rocking Horse would speak for him, a three-bedroom with a power study and a crafts room with a guest loft. You had to let the clients spin twice in a living room and recognize themselves. Not just themselves—the selves they knew and also latent selves they just suspected. Only then, when they saw their books in the cases and their mugs in the cabinet, could the murderer emerge from the basement, where he’d been waiting all along.

  “Downtown, it’s fun and all, but it’s not safe for Eliza or the kid. All the money the city has now, you think they’d clean that shit out. Our alleyway, every morning someone’s given them all hot coffee and doughnuts. These bums are glamping.”

  The clown, forty-eight, amicably divorced, amicably depressed, real-estate licensed, was aware that he was a type too. Apart from murder, his interests were no less predictable than Seamus’s. He’d offered lunch after the Ridgeway place—he often took clients out—but now he was thinking about Tums—he loved Tums—about gin, about juice cleanses, about smothering Seamus’s face with the wet side of Seamus’s scalp. He rarely spoke his mind. He let his thoughts imbue his smile.

  He’d set about it in earnest ten years ago, full sails with research and planning, whiteface and greasepaint, professional grade, learned to accentuate a menace, if there was one, already present in his face. The wig had cost a fortune, real hair, bruised strawberry, but it had lasted. The teeth too, cutlery porcelain, filed, stained. Ought to be tax deductible. The nails he made himself with molded tin. It took most of an hour to put it all on, but people did react—more so than they would to rubber stuff, he hoped. “That tall building over there would be your closest hospital, if anything happens,” he said. “Terrific obstetrics center, though I’m sure you’ve already made plans. There’s the Whole Foods coming up and here’s a mosque, should you be needing one of those. I believe it would be your polling place were you to move before the election.”

  Seamus grumbled something about voting early. For the rest of Seamus’s life, a diminishing proposition, indignation would race cholesterol. He would make a colorful choking victim, but the clown had promised himself patience, intentionality. Cruelty and pain were easy quantities, but murder used to express something in him. Take the kings of Greece and Persia who entertained guests with hollow bronze bulls that seemed to bay when wheeled over a fire, when in fact it was condemned queens screaming from inside. It was cruel, it was painful—but it was so kingly too. The court clapping and marveling, pretending they didn’t know, while the king spat seeds from his grapes. The Aztecs murdered like Aztecs, the Nazis murdered like Nazis. The clown, meanwhile, had groomed himself to match the Lexus that was supposed to give him credibility regarding other people’s homes.

  “Been saving this place for a special family,” he said, pulling into the driveway. It was true.

  During the walk-through, Seamus stuck close by, explaining everything to the clown: “I never liked these kind of light switches . . . Chessboard, huh? I want to learn some chess strategy, some real chess systems . . . No disrespect to your grill here, but it’s all about the smoker.”

  Noted. The clown had to remind himself it wasn’t about killing Seamus, no matter how urgently he deserved to be murdered. Murder had to come from the inside. The urgency must be in him.

  “We’re only two crosswalks to Langston Elementary, where Mark Zuckerberg’s nephew went to school,” he said. “Langston’s a recipient of a 2016 tech-ar
ts grant from the George Lucas Foundation, the one on NPR.” That was enough to provoke several more minutes of opinionation from Seamus. It was an old trick: the more a client heard his own voice in a house, the more he felt the house was his. Eliza, meanwhile, was going around seeing how the toilets flushed.

  The clown liked knives, big knives, little knives—but what even was a knife? Something very narrow but no less hard. The set stashed in the crawl space of 404 Rocking Horse had chef’s knives, cleavers, a straightedge razor, a few more theatrical things, toothy, curving. Almost every night since the house had been vacant, he’d let himself in, retrieved his things from the crawl space, and, fully kitted out, sharpened his knives, grind by meditative grind. Just last night, he’d sat thickly painted under this floor. Breathe. Intuit the killer already implied by the house. On the iPhone on his knee, his Facebook feed worked the cud of another late-breaking candidate scandal.

  Touring the basement (“Here’s your water heater . . . These guys here are for bolting a safe . . .”), he found one of his fingernails. “Huh? What do you think this is?” He showed the man, but the shrug was a shrug, not a shiver.

  Whatever. He’d imagined stashing acids and paralyzing agents down there too—imagined how shocked and impressed Eliza and Seamus would be if they woke to find themselves prepped for a chemical flaying or immobilized beneath a swinging blade. He wished he could do something like that, but it was too much contraption. The engineering and constructing, the procurement of regulated chemicals—it was beyond him. He was a knife clown. He could never pretend to be what he was not.

  Eliza said the house was perfect. Seamus, saving face, said they’d “have to do a little thinking through.” The deciders, the clown imagined, were Eliza and her billboard dad. “Well, I think you’re perfect for it,” the clown said. They were. Their smug veneer would rip right through. The clown expected to hear from them Monday or Tuesday at the worst. He would throw in a moving service if the sale called for it, and they’d be dead before Thanksgiving. He promised it to himself the way he’d promised Owen ski camp, which now he would actually be able to pay for. A thing to look forward to, as the boy’s therapist had suggested. Something the best version of you, if not you yourself, would want to do.