Harlan Coben

by The Best American Mystery Stories 2011

  “I won’t walk you all the way back through it. What did you hear?”

  “I hear bang when the police are there. I think it must be a shot.”

  “Any sound of struggling?”

  “No, just bang. Without police I would think it is a door slamming. Doors are slamming there all the time, yelling, like that day. The people, they don’t get along so good.”

  “Are you the one who complained to the police about the domestic disturbance?”

  “I don’t want to get into no trouble.”

  “You won’t.”

  She said it again. I moved on. I was sure now it was her, not that it mattered who’d called. “What about when just the two policemen were there? Did you hear Mr. Vale shouting?”

  “I hear shouting. I don’t know who or what. Then the two go away. Later more come. One comes to this door and says don’t go out, stay away from the windows. I tell him, today is no different from all the rest. I might have stayed in Kiev.”

  I thanked her. She pressed the door in my face and was still snapping locks when I stepped off the porch.

  “I had a sweet shot, a heart shot,” Sergeant Wallace said. “This little-bitty birch you couldn’t even see deflected the arrow and the best rack I’ve seen in years went sailing off over a barbed-wire fence.”

  Veteran cops are masters at dividing their work and home lives. I was there to ask about his part in an affair that had left a woman dead with a slug in her heart and he was telling me about the deer heart he’d missed that afternoon in rural Michigan; no irony in his voice or expression.

  We were sitting in his small kitchen in Redford Township, with a group of mismatched appliances that had been replaced as needed and no two at the same time. The pattern was worn almost completely off the linoleum and the table we sat at was sheet metal over pine. He had a squat brown beer bottle in his squat right fist and I could have connected the broken blood vessels in his broad fleshy face like dots. Mrs. Wallace, a small, wrenlike creature who gave the impression of a nervous type until you noticed the steel wire underneath, was in the laundry washing spray-on doe hormones from her husband’s camo suit. He wore loose-fitting old suit pants and his back hair curled like tropical undergrowth over the shoulder straps of his BVD undershirt.

  I said, “I won’t take up much time. What did Claud Vale say when you showed up at his house?”

  “‘Go away or I’ll shoot right through this door.’”

  “Those words exactly?”

  “They’re in my report.”

  I looked at my notebook. “Your partner said it was, ‘I’ll shoot the first man through the door.’”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “The second version threatened your lives. The first threatened his door.”

  He swigged beer and thunked down the bottle. “You work for a lawyer, all right. You know same as me he meant only one thing either way.”

  “The lawyer I work for would go to town on the difference in phrasing. He’d make it sound like one of you lied and the other backed him up, as partners do, only he got the words wrong. He’d say it was your idea, being the senior man; but anyway he’ll play it so both your testimonies wind up in the ashcan.”

  His face got so dark I couldn’t pick out the burst vessels.

  I said, “I’m just the messenger. If that’s how it went down, fine: tell it on the stand and let Justice do what he can with it. Just don’t lose it there the way you’re losing it here in your own kitchen. I wouldn’t be talking this way if Bender didn’t lash out like a snake when I told him his career might depend on what he said in court. He’s got a guilty conscience.”

  “Finished?” He pointed at the beer he’d given me. I hadn’t touched it, but I put away my notebook and got up. At the front door I heard the hollow snap and whoosh of a fresh bottle being opened.

  Philip Justice subsided into the cushions of his desk chair, closing his eyes and folding his hands across his spare middle as if he’d just finished a feast. “Damn fine work. I had Wallace figured as the weak link, based on that blot on his record. But Bender’s our pigeon. I may not even have to call his partner to the stand.”

  “Thing is,” I said, “I think Wallace is telling the truth. I believe Vale made a threat of some kind. Bender didn’t hear it—making out emotional words through a thick door comes with experience. Bender decided to back him up after they compared notes. You need a good reason for calling for reinforcements when you write your report, especially after what went down.”

  “Made a threat with what? He didn’t have a gun.”

  “Not when a search was made. The next-door neighbor heard doors slamming earlier. A handgun report heard through two walls can be mistaken for a door slamming.”

  He opened his eyes and came forward. The feast had turned into indigestion. “She heard yelling too.”

  “I can go back and find out if any of that yelling sounded like Ernestine Vale’s voice.”

  “I didn’t hire you to make a case for the police. God, you make him sound like a criminal mastermind. You’re saying he shot his wife, then staged a fight to bring the cops to his door and set up the Detroit Police Department for her murder.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time someone tried to get tricky. If he shot her long enough before the complaint went through, he’d have plenty of opportunity to sneak out of the house, dump the gun in a storm drain a dozen blocks away, and sneak back in and fake a fight.”

  “There’d be a record of a firearm purchase. He’s clean. Don’t you think I had that checked out? You’re not the only PI in town.”

  “You’re right. Where would anyone go in Detroit to get a gun without leaving a paper trail?”

  “He’s an unemployed auto worker, not a penny-ante hit man. He wouldn’t know where to look.”

  I played with a cigarette. “All I’m saying is I’d like to run it out. You don’t want this blowing up in your face in public.”

  “What do you want from me?” Now he sounded like a successful man being put upon by a poor relation.

  “Two things. First, when did his wife file for divorce?”

  He fired up the computer on his desk. “April eleventh.”

  “This is part of the first thing. When did the cops screw up and kill that little girl on the East Side?”

  “You can’t think those two things are connected. The circumstances—”

  “—are almost identical. Your words. When?”

  Keys got tickled. He frowned at the screen, showing the kind of reaction he never showed in court. “April fourteenth.”

  I wrote both dates in my notebook, not that I’d forget. “Second thing: Which plant did Vale work for before he was laid off?”

  I found Dix Sommerfield working the employee parking lot at the GM assembly plant in Warren. He was a third-generation member of a Kentucky family that had come north in a body to build tanks for the automobile-factories-turned-defense plants during World War II. He could usually be found, a potbellied presence in a reverse ball cap, selling unlicensed bottles of whiskey and cartons of cigarettes and certain other contraband from the trunk of his wired-together Chevy Nova during shift changes. Tuesdays and Thursdays found him at Chrysler, Mondays at River Rouge, where he spent a lot of time looking over his shoulder for Ford’s private police force. The other days of the week you could depend on his being in Warren, his sentimental favorite; his father and grandfather had been loyal to General Motors ahead of Uncle Sam and the Southern Baptist Church.

  “I’m looking for a thirty-eight revolver,” I said, after we’d exchanged greetings. I’d bought information from him in the past, cash on the barrelhead, and no backlash from the authorities.

  Not that he wasn’t cagey; the balance had shifted after 9/11, and you never knew when interference from the amateurs in Washington might louse up a smooth system. “I don’t deal in that stuff no more,” he said, moving the toothpick that lived in his mouth from one corner to the other. “You want a piec
e, go to Dick’s Sporting Goods.”

  “I want to know about one you sold. Dix, do I have to pull that spare tire out from under all those boxes of Marlboros and look into the well? It was a soft-nose slug, so it couldn’t have come from an automatic.”

  “Wearing a wire?”

  I unbuttoned my shirt and spread it.

  “That ain’t nothing. Drop your pants.”

  I kicked him in the shin, and when he bent to cradle it gave him a chop with the side of my hand on his elbow. Forget the groin: if you really want to make a painful point, go for the little knobs of bone that stick out from the joints. When the tears stopped flowing I took out a Free Press clipping with Claud Vale’s picture and stuck it under his nose.

  He wiped his eyes with his sleeve and squinted. “Jeez. I been praying for days that one wouldn’t come back and bite me in the ass.”

  “God answered. He said stick to cigarettes and booze. You can’t go wrong with the basics.”

  One week after the story broke, Philip Justice announced he was dropping his suit and that he’d resigned as Claud Vale’s attorney. The cops, knowing what that meant, rearrested his former client and went to work on him; no physical abuse, no coercion other than the reliable aggressive questioning in Supreme Court-mandated increments with periods of rest in between, tying the suspect up in his own lies until telling the truth was the only path to sanity. He confessed to murdering his wife, threatening the first responders so that backup was required from 1300, and grabbing the arm of the first cop through the door, forcing his gun to go off, as guns will in that situation. A more thorough search of the crime scene turned up the ERT sergeant’s slug in a place where two baseboards met unevenly in a corner. That had been a break for Vale, who hadn’t considered what would happen if it were recovered anywhere but in Ernestine Vale’s heart. He’d had the foresight to score an X in the nose of the slug he’d used before firing it, making it burst apart on entry so that it couldn’t be traced to the gun he’d used; the rest was beginner’s luck.

  The gun itself was never found, but it was no longer required for evidence. I didn’t have to go to jail for keeping Dix Sommerfield’s name out of the record.

  Philip Justice bought me a drink at the Caucus Club downtown. He was still bothered by the loss of what looked like a big settlement and more crusading glory to his name, but he was grateful not to have been made a clown on the evening news. He sipped at his twelve-year-old cognac. “So you got all this on what a couple of cops told you?”

  “Some of it.” I stirred the ice in my scotch and tossed the swizzle. “The timing cinched it. Vale was brooding about the divorce, losing half of what little he had in the outcome, when that little girl died. He saw a way to get clear and be rich besides.”

  “That was an armed-robbery investigation, not murder.”

  “It was enough the same as what he had in mind. When I first heard of Vale I was in a bar.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “I’ll ignore the implication. I’d told the bartender a joke. I got the idea from a picture of zebras he had on the wall.” I told it.

  He didn’t laugh. “I heard that one. Seems to me a different animal was involved.”

  “Sometimes it’s a hyena sold the place. It’s always a kangaroo behind the bar, for some reason. Who knows what makes these things work?”

  What His Hands Had Been Waiting For

  Beth Ann Fennelly And Tom Franklin

  FROM Delta Blues

  July, 1927

  THEY LEFT THE DEAD LOOTERS in the house and were striding toward their horses, Ham Johnson reloading his .30-.30, when they heard what sounded like a cat.

  “Ain’t no cat,” said Ingersoll.

  “Naw.” Ham clicked a cartridge into the port of his rifle. He clicked in another.

  They followed the squawling past the house’s slanted silhouette—the owners smart enough to leave the doors and windows open, which had let the floodwaters swirl through. Behind the house, a shade tree, now like something dipped in batter halfway up. Snagged in the top branches, a coop filled with dead chickens.

  Anyway, Ingersoll was right about it not being a cat. It was a baby.

  The men stared. A bushel basket on a low branch held the red-faced thing. In the mud, beneath the basket, a shred of blanket it’d kicked away.

  “Mother of God,” Ingersoll said.

  “Wasn’t nothing of God about this one’s mother,” Ham said. He raised his right arm, aiming his shotgun at the door of the house, and closed one eye. “She was the one. Got damn it. When she heard us coming she must’ve up and left this one here and hid herself in the house.”

  Ingersoll considered the baby. It wore a gnarl of diaper and was impossible to name boy or girl. It was bald. Red from crying and he realized they’d been yelling above its noise.

  “You better off,” Ham told it. “Take a chance with the current elements. Maybe a gang of coyote’ll take you in. Isn’t that what happened to you, Ingersoll? Band of coyotes found you in the tundra and raised you as their own?”

  Ham shoved the silver tray they’d taken from the looters into his saddlebag. A white man just over six feet tall with a red face and bright red hair he kept cut short, Ham wore muttonchops (also red) he called burnsides, and a belly nutria derby that he was slightly vain about and endeavored to keep clean. Ingersoll’s hat was bigger and more practical, a black Stetson Dakota.

  “Ain’t no coyotes this far south,” he said.

  “Is too,” Ham said. He kicked his leg to flap his boot sole down—the leather wet so long it’d rotted—and fitted his boot into his stirrup and swung onto his saddle.

  “It’s wild dogs a-plenty, Ham. But it ain’t no coyotes.”

  Ingersoll was looking beyond the house, studying the inland sea of dried and drying mud where cotton plants had once been, the horizon unrelenting brown, flat and cracking like so much poorly thrown pottery. Twice he had seen arms of the dead reaching out of it.

  The levees had ruptured back in April, and even here, twenty-five miles southeast of the Mounds Landing crevasse, the waves had surged six feet. Thunderous breakers of coffee-colored froth had flattened near every tree and building, then just wiped them all away, like something out of Revelation. Ingersoll recalled the buried road to Yazoo City, a bloated mare and in front of its muzzle a bloated Bible as if the horse were verifying the events of the end time when they befell him.

  “Tell Junior goodbye,” Ham said.

  “What you mean?”

  “I mean it’s somebody’ll come along sooner or later and get this damn baby’s what I mean. We got to skedaddle.” He looked over his shoulder at the basket, now swaying in the breeze. “What’s that lullaby? ‘When the bow breaks, the cradle will fall, and down will come baby, cradle and all.’”

  “Ham—”

  “C’mon,” Ham said. “Let’s get to New Orleans, spend some of this looter loot. I got me a mind for a foreign girl. Russian if we can find one. Get a steak and lay some pipe. Then buy me a new pair of boots.”

  “I can’t leave no baby, Ham.”

  “Well we ain’t bringing it, Ing.”

  The foul wind from the east moaned through the leaning mule barn.

  “Adios, Junior,” Ham said, and gigged his sorrel with his heels. “Vaya con dios.”

  Ingersoll stared down at the kicking baby like maybe he’d had a baby himself long ago. And a wife.

  But he hadn’t. He was twenty-seven years old. He had no living family anywhere. He’d never even touched a baby.

  “Ah, hell,” he said and looked at the pewter sky, which gave a chuckle of thunder.

  Wild dogs following. Or coyotes if you asked Ham. Ingersoll rode a quarter mile behind his partner and figured the big man wouldn’t hear the thing fussing in his arms. It smelled like piss and flung its fists out and kicked. As he rode it was the beating and kicking that impressed Ingersoll. Little dickens had some fight.

  In an hour the baby had lulled to a hiccupping slee
p and Ingersoll let the horse follow the deeply etched tracks Ham’s sorrel was carving. Ingersoll had learned to trust Ham’s lead after Ham had spotted and dispatched two of the saboteurs back in Marked Tree, Arkansas. Their next orders, sent via telegram by Coolidge’s men, had brought them to the Old Moore plantation near Greenville, Mississippi, where they were told to monitor local Negroes, some growing seditious, planning to head north, put the lapping Mississippi far behind them. But the landowners—and the officials the landowners elected—couldn’t allow the Negroes to leave. Who would pick the cotton then?

  But the cotton hadn’t mattered. They were perhaps a dozen miles from Mounds Landing, searching for runaway Negroes, when that levee had burst. As if from the sky they heard it, heard the terrible roar, like a twister first but then an earthquake, it seemed, coming from beneath the horses. “Go,” Ham had yelled. They spurred their mounts to a gallop and within minutes the floodtide was upon them, washing trees and bodies past, brown water splashing over the horses’ hooves first, then quickly over their withers to the riders’ legs and then the horses were careening and swimming and the men fighting to stay on, the land gone behind them, there passing in the current a church steeple, there a wagon still hitched to a pair of kicking mules, there a schoolhouse desk.

  Now Ingersoll’s horse gave a lurch. He grasped the baby, which startled it awake, its arms flying outward, and set it to crying. The horse’s back legs had sunk, stuck again. Ingersoll would have to dismount and wrench its hooves free. But what to do with the baby?

  “Ham?”

  He heard a horseshoe clip a rock behind him and lowered his head and shook it.