The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

  We both sat silent for a moment. “I tried to just forget about it,” Charlie finally said, “but I couldn’t. Maybe Tragovic was a criminal, but it didn’t matter what he was; what mattered was what I was, and I was a murderer.

  “The paper said that Tragovic had a wife. Marlee was her name, and for some reason I couldn’t get her out of my mind. I’d not only committed a crime against Tragovic, but I had committed a crime against her as well. It got to where I couldn’t stand being in San Diego. I thought if I could get out of town, I could put this behind me, so I volunteered for duty on a river patrol boat in Vietnam.” He fixed me with his rheumy eyes. “But I could never stop thinking about it, John.” He lifted his hand and formed a fist. “Every single day for the last thirty-five years, I have remembered the feel of hitting that man — beating him. Not a day went by that I didn’t think of him and his wife. I wanted to find her and tell her how sorry I was, but I couldn’t do it. I knew if I ever found her, the truth would come out, and I couldn’t face what that would mean. Eventually I had a family of my own, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell them.” His eyes filled, and he shook his head. “I was too much of a coward to let them know what kind of a man I really am.”

  As soon as he said that, he gave a gasp, and his body jerked. He clenched his eyes and sucked in a quick, shallow breath. It was clear he was in severe pain.

  “Charlie,” I said, “what can I do?”

  He didn’t answer. He just lay there with his eyes clasped and his teeth gritted. After a bit he seemed to relax, but when the pain passed, he looked thinner and even more frail. The angles where the sheet touched his body seemed sharper. In a matter of seconds the pain had come and gone, but when it left, it had taken a piece of Charlie with it. It seemed that there was less of him lying in front of me now than there had been only a moment before.

  Slowly he rubbed his eyes, but there was a shadow there — a darkness — he could not rub away. “I tried to be good,” he said in a raspy whisper, “but it didn’t matter what kind of a man I tried to be, I could never change what I became that night so long ago.”

  There was a faint rapping at the door, and a middle-aged man wearing a white clerical collar stuck in his head.

  “Father Delaney,” Charlie said, “give us another second, would you?”

  The man nodded. “I’ll be right out here when you’re ready.” He stepped back into the hall and closed the door.

  “I need to make my confession, John.”

  I stood and looked back toward the door that led into the hallway. “Sure, I’ll leave and send the priest right in.”

  “No, no,” he said, “that’s not what I mean. I am going to confess to Father Delaney and to Janey and the kids, too, but that wasn’t what I meant when I said I need to make my confession. What I meant was I need to make my confession to Marlee Tragovic. I have to tell her what I did to her husband and beg her to forgive me.” He lifted his eyes to mine, and I saw the sadness that had always been there. I had seen it before, but I had never recognized it for what it was. “I want you to find her for me,” he said. “I want you to bring her here.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “My God, Charlie, it’s been thirty-five years.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed, and the shadow in his eyes darkened. “Thirty-five long years.” He swallowed hard. “You can do it, though, John. I have faith in you. But you better hurry. I’m not getting any younger.” Then he added with a feeble smile, “Or much older, either, for that matter.”

  ~ * ~

  I avoided the freeway and went home the long way around Mission Bay, through Pacific Beach, La Jolla, and past the cliffs at Torrey Pines. The constant gear shifting, stopping, and starting provided the activity I needed to prevent myself from thinking. But as I rolled down the ramp into the underground garage at my house in Del Mar, despite my best efforts, the thoughts flooded in.

  I doubted I was the right person to do the job Charlie asked. I had been out of the business for over three years, but it was more than that. This was important to Charlie, and I was afraid I would let him down.

  I climbed the stairs from the garage into the house, dropped an old Crusaders CD into the player, sloshed some brandy into a glass, and sat down in front of the computer. The e-mail was the usual junk. I trashed it all and clicked on to the ‘Net. I did a search for “Marlee Tragovic” and got nothing. It didn’t surprise me, really. After so long, if she were still alive, it was likely she had remarried. Even these days, more often than not a woman took her husband’s name, and the divorce rate being what it was in the last thirty-five years, it was possible her last name had changed more than once.

  The Internet was just coming into common use when I retired, and I never got to take full advantage of all the things it offered private investigators. I knew, though, that the investigations side of my old company used it extensively, and they had access to databases that I didn’t. The office was manned twenty-four hours a day, so I fired off an e-mail asking them to run a check for me. I was on my third brandy when they wrote back saying they couldn’t find anything either.

  So much for the easy way.

  My breakfast the next morning consisted of one poached egg, two cups of coffee, and four aspirin. The aspirin was the price I paid for drinking more than one brandy the night before.

  I had no confidence in my ability to accomplish what Charlie asked, but I knew that I had to try, so I made a call to Sergeant Al Bruun, a friend of mine on the SDPD. We were the same age and had hit the streets of San Diego at about the same time. The two of us had been trading favors for years.

  “Damn, Pry,” he said, “I had no idea Charlie was even sick.”

  “Yeah, it came on fast.” Without mentioning Charlie’s involvement, I told him about the homicide thirty-five years earlier. He said he would have to send someone to the warehouse to scrounge around for the file, but with any luck, he could have a copy to me by the end of the day.

  “Do you still have the same fax number?” Al asked. I told him I did, and we said good-bye.

  After one more coffee and a fast shower, I climbed on my bike and rode into San Diego. The city had changed a lot since Charlie was a young man. In those days Broadway was lined with strip bars and clip joints. Slick guys in shiny suits would stand in front of the businesses hawking whatever scam they were trying to work on the sailors. The city fathers had cleaned that up in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and, as in all major U.S. cities, they had redirected their efforts to a more sophisticated kind of scam — the kind they worked on the tourists.

  I rode up Broadway, and the farther east I got, the seedier things were. The city had dumped millions into cleaning up downtown, but the fringes were apparently invisible to the big-money boys, and these areas had not aged well.

  Before I had left Charlie the night before, he had given me a little more information. There was still a bar where the killing had taken place. It was located in the middle of the block, and I whipped a quick U-turn and backed the rear wheel of my bike into the curb. The place was called the Silk Hat Lounge, and there was the unlit neon outline of a top hat above the front door — tacky, maybe, but still the bright spot in an even tackier neighborhood. The place wasn’t opened yet, but I could see through the window that there was a woman behind the bar counting bottles and making notations on a piece of paper.

  I rapped on the window to get her attention, and she called out, “We open at eleven.”

  “I’d like to ask you a few questions. It won’t take but a minute.”

  She was a redhead who looked to be in her early sixties. She had melonlike breasts that threatened the stitching of her nylon blouse. She had obviously seen me pull up on my chopped Harley-Davidson. “I don’t like bikers,” she said. She flipped a backhand through the air as though shooing a fly. “Beat it.”

  I dug into the pocket of my jeans and pulled out some bills. I peeled off a twenty and held it flush to the plate glass. I expect ol’ Andy Jackson had been an acco
mplished public speaker in his day, which was only fitting since his picture these days spoke with such eloquence. She stared at it for a moment, snuffed her cigarette, and stepped around the bar.

  She wore tight, hot-pink slacks and had a surprisingly tiny waist. “One minute’s what you asked for,” she said as she opened the door, “and by a strange coincidence, that’s just what you get for a twenty.”

  She reached for the bill, but I pulled it back. “This’ll be yours in sixty seconds,” I said, “assuming you’ve got something to sell.”

  “What are you in the market for, biker?” She said “biker” with a sour tone.

  “Information,” I said. “Do you own this place?”

  She seemed wary. “Yeah, what’s it to you?”

  “How long’ve you had it?”

  “‘Bout fifteen years. I waited tables here for eight years before that.”

  I could tell that at some point in her distant past this woman had been very attractive. Now, though, she had the kind of face that harsh morning light did not improve.

  I asked who she had bought the bar from, and she said a name but added, “He only had it a couple of years. I got the place at a bargain ‘cause he was forced to sell.” She gave a smile that multiplied her wrinkles by a factor of three. “He suffered from a common problem in the bar business.”

  “Yeah, what’s that?” I asked.

  “He drank his profits.” She dug into her front pocket and pulled out a semicrushed pack of Winstons. She lit one with a disposable lighter that was encased in a chrome holder trimmed with plastic jade. “He’d bought the bar from Parker Heath. Parker owned the place for close to thirty years. He built it right after he got back from Korea. “

  Her eyes cut to the twenty.

  “Now, now,” I said, “don’t get greedy. You have fifteen seconds to go. Is Mr. Heath still around?”

  “That depends.”

  “Let me guess. It depends on why I want to know, right?”

  “You’re a real smart boy, aren’t you?” She gave me a look that communicated she might be inclined to set aside her prejudice against bikers after all. I suspected it was a look she had tossed at more than a few men over the years. When I didn’t respond, she shrugged and said, “I worked for Parker a long time. I don’t think it would be very nice of me to help just anybody hunt him down.”

  “All I want is a few answers. “

  She dragged deep from her smoke and exhaled through her nose. “Twenty bucks,” she pointed out, “buys a few answers, but addresses cost extra.”

  I could hear Charlie’s clock ticking, and I didn’t have time to haggle. I dug out another twenty and handed her both bills. She tucked them into the pocket with her Winstons, lifted the two fingers that held her cigarette, and pointed at a spot over my left shoulder. I turned around. Across the street was a ratty apartment building, and peering down at us from a second-story window was an old man munching on a sandwich.

  Parker Heath’s rooms smelled of fried baloney. When he let me in, his sandwich was half gone, and in an apparent defiance of gravity, a dollop of mayonnaise clung to the stubble on his chin. I explained that I did not want much of his time, but I needed to visit with him about something that had taken place thirty-five years before. When I said that, the width of his smile suggested he was a man who enjoyed discussing the past.

  I followed him through his living room and into a small kitchen. Waggling his sandwich at one of the two vinyl-covered aluminum chairs beside the table, he said, “Have a seat.” I pulled the chair out and sat down. “You’re a lucky one,” he said as he looked through the fly-spotted window next to the table. He had a perfect view of the bar on the other side of Broadway. “Ain’t many fellas able to escape Arlene with their pants still on.” He cackled a high-pitched, old man’s laugh, and I couldn’t help but smile.

  “She looks like she might’ve been a tiger in her day,” I allowed.

  “In her day, hell. The sun set on her day years ago, and she’s still a tiger. I could tell you some tales about Arlene, I could.” He took a big gulp of milk from a tumbler beside his plate. “Care for some cow juice?” he asked.

  “No, thanks.” I jerked my thumb toward the street. “Arlene says you used to own the bar. “

  “I did. Built it with my own two hands in the summer a ‘53.” He rapped his knuckles against his right temple. “Thanks to a Chinese hand grenade, the army had to stick a steel plate in my noggin. I’d been out of the hospital about six months, but I was still gettin’ dizzy spells every time I had ta climb the damned ladder.” He looked down at the bar. “I got her built, though,” he said. “I surely did.” He reached a hoary hand up and wiped the mayonnaise from his chin, then sucked it from his finger. “Sold out in ‘82, but I moved in here so I could keep an eye on the place.” He directed a wistful gaze out the window. “Old habits die hard, I guess.”

  “Do you remember a time, Mr. Heath, in the late ‘60s when a man named Tragovic was murdered outside the bar?”

  “Sure, I remember.”

  “What can you tell me about that?”

  He shook his head. “Not much to tell, really. Tragovic was just this runt who used to hang around; that’s all. I never liked him. No one did.”

  “Do you remember seeing him the night of the murder?”

  “Boy, you’re goin’ back a ways.” He popped the last of the baloney sandwich into his mouth and continued talking without slowing down. “‘Bout all I remember is someone found the body, and when the ambulance arrived, all my customers headed out to watch ‘em load Tragovic up. That was maybe an hour before closing time. Once the ambulance left, everybody filed back in. I ended up selling more drinks in that last hour than I ever sold in an hour’s time before or since. I reckon death tends to make folks thirsty.”

  “Was Tragovic talking to anyone that night that you recall — maybe involved in some kind of an argument with a sailor?”

  He dug his pinky into his ear and then gave a close inspection to whatever it was he fished out. “I remember the cops asking me that same question the next day. From what I heard, there was some winos sharing a bottle on the street corner who said they had seen a sailor beatin’ the hell out of some guy in the alley out back. But, no, I never knew anything was going on. Fights’d happen from time to time. That was just the nature of the business. Hell, sailors were in and out a lot, ‘specially then what with Vietnam and all.”

  “I understand Tragovic was married.”

  “Yep, he was. His wife came in some, not much, though. She wasn’t old enough to drink, which is just as well. Tragovic was the sort of fella who’d use what little drinking money they had on hisself, I’m sure. I don’t recall much about her, ‘cept she was a mousey little thing. Pretty, I think, but timid, like.”

  “Whatever became of her? Do you know?”

  He gave his head a slow shake. “I’ve got no idea.” He peered again through the window. “She’s just one a the many that came and went.” A somber cast settled across the old man’s brow. “There was thousands of ‘em I knew over the years,” he said. “Thousands.” After a bit, he cleared his throat and turned back to me. With a frown he added, “I don’t even remember her name.”

  “Marlee,” I said.

  “Was that it? Hell, you coulda fooled me. I do remember she had a couplea brothers who were regulars for a while there. Likable fellas, too, as I recall.”

  “Do you remember their names?”

  He scratched the spot where the army had installed the steel plate. “Boy,” he said, “you make a fella shake the dust off, don’t ya?”

  “Anything you could remember would help.”

  He pondered it for a moment, then the edges of his mouth crinkled into a smile. “Abbott and Costello,” he said.

  “Abbott and Costello?”

  “Yeah, that’s what everyone used to call ‘em ‘cause their real names was Bud and Lou. Get it? Abbott and Costello.”

  I nodded. “Sure, I get it. The
old comedy team. Do you remember a last name?”

  “A last name, huh? Now that’s tougher, ain’t it?” He gave a long pause, then turned to face me with a sly look on his face. I started to dig into my pocket for another one of the twenties that had worked so well on Arlene across the street. Before I could pull it out, though, Heath smiled and said, “I don’t want your money.” He then told me the name, and when he did, I realized his long pause was just an old bartender’s skill at building a little suspense. He was a man who had shared thousands of chats over the years, and he knew how to make a conversation interesting. “Bickman,” he said. “Bud and Lou Bickman. If you don’t mind me askin’, why is it that you are rummaging around so deep in the long ago?”