The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

  I shrugged. “I’m just trying to do a favor for a friend.”

  “A friend,” he said, and with a nod, he added, “That’s good.”

  Even though some of what the old man said didn’t add up, it was clear he’d told me all he knew. I had to ask, anyway. “Is there anything else you can remember? I’d like to find Marlee, if I could.”

  “Find her, huh? I expect the trail’s damned cold after thirty-five years.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, “it is.”

  “There’s nothin’ more I can tell you,” he said. “People come along, and then they’re gone. That’s just the way it works. You never see ‘em again.”

  I pushed away from the table and stood. “Well, thanks. Mr. Heath, you’ve been a lot of help. I appreciate it.”

  “They come then go. That’s what they do — come and go.”

  I let myself out, and just before I shut the apartment door, I thanked him again. I don’t think he heard me, though. He didn’t respond. He just sat there drinking his milk and staring out the window at the Silk Hat Lounge.

  I called directory assistance on my cell phone. There was a Louis Bickman listed in El Cajon. I got both the address and phone number, but I decided to ride out rather than call. I fired up the Harley, made my way to the freeway, and headed east.

  The Bickman residence was a small but tidy place on the outskirts of town. As I pushed the button for the doorbell, I thought I could hear the sound of a television game show coming from somewhere in the house, but no one answered, and I wrote a note saying if the Louis Bickman at this residence had a sister named Marlee, to please give me a call. I said I wished to discuss with her the death of her husband, Duane Tragovic. I gave my name, address, and phone number. I closed the note by writing, “This is an urgent matter. I need to speak to Mrs. Tragovic right away. Please call as soon as possible.”

  I tucked the note into the Bickman mailbox, climbed on my bike, and headed home.

  I noticed Al Bruun’s fax when I dropped the chopper’s keys onto my computer desk. It consisted of six pages that I could tell had been originally produced by a manual typewriter. Some of the letters were darker or slightly higher on the line than others. It was a nostalgic reminder of a less polished time. The light was flashing on the answering machine, so I pushed “play,” and as the tape rewound, I scanned the three-and-a-half-decade-old file on the homicide of Duane Tragovic.

  “Hi-ya, Pry,” said the tinny voice that came from the answering machine’s speaker, “this is Al. I just faxed you what we had on that case you asked about. As you can see from the report, they didn’t have much. One of the bar patrons called for an ambulance, but the guy was dead when they showed up. A half-dozen winos had seen a sailor beating on someone earlier that evening. The uniformed boys interviewed as many of the winos as they could round up, but they didn’t get much info. Homicide detectives asked a few questions around the neighborhood over the course of the next day or so, but there were no leads. Tragovic had a wife. She was young, only seventeen years old, and apparently pretty hysterical over her husband’s killing. They questioned her, of course, but didn’t get much from her, either. She said she didn’t know any sailors, and as far as she knew, neither did her husband. They kept the file open, but there was nothing to go on, and it doesn’t look like they ever did much more with it. I sent along a copy of Tragovic’s rap sheet. You can tell by his record that he must have been a real sweetie-pie. I expect the guys doing the investigation knew him pretty well, and it doesn’t look like they killed themselves working the case. I also sent along the autopsy report. No surprises there. The mechanism of death was a fractured skull.

  “I know it’s not much, but it’s all we have. If you need anything else, just give me a call. And tell Charlie we’re pulling for him.” The machine clicked to a stop.

  I took what Al had faxed outside to the deck that overlooked the beach. I dropped into a chair, slipped off my boots, and propped my feet on the rail. It didn’t take long to read the little that was there, but when I was finished, my palms were sweating and there was a lump in my throat the size of a softball.

  I lay the pages in my lap and looked toward the water. There was a young die-hard on a surfboard a few hundred feet out doing his best to snag one of the pathetic waves that stumbled toward shore. He was a very small man — tiny, really; the board was much too big for him, and despite all his effort, he wasn’t having any luck. I watched for a while; then I picked up the papers and reread that portion of Tragovic’s autopsy report that described the deceased.

  I gave Lou Bickman until six o’clock that night to call; when he didn’t, I set my telephone to forward calls to my cellular in case he tried while I was out, and I headed back to El Cajon. I parked in front of the Bickman house and made my way up the cracked walk. There was a pickup truck in the carport, and I could hear voices coming from the open windows that lined the front of the house. They must have heard me climb the three steps to the small stoop because the voices went silent, and just as I raised my hand to ring the bell, a large man came to the door.

  “What do you want?” he asked. He had wide, heavy shoulders and a neck as thick as my thigh.

  I heard a soft voice from behind him say, “It’s him, isn’t it, Louis?”

  “It’s okay,” the man said over his shoulder. “I’ll take care of this.” The man was at least two inches taller than my six-one, and he must have outweighed me by sixty pounds. “What’s on your mind, mister?” he asked.

  “I’m John Pryor,” I said. “I’m the guy who left the note in your mailbox this afternoon. I’m looking for a woman by the name of Marlee Tragovic.” It was a long shot, but I decided to play a quick bluff. “I know you’re her brother, Mr. Bickman. I’d like to talk to her about the death of her husband back in the 1960s.” I could tell by the expression that hit his face that I had found the right man. “I don’t mean you or your family any harm. I just need to find your sister; that’s all.”

  The voice spoke again. “Please, Louis, let him in.”

  He turned in the doorway, and I got a look at the woman behind him. If she was who I thought she was, she couldn’t have been more than fifty-two, but she looked a decade older. She was thin and frail, and she leaned with both hands on an aluminum walker. “You gotta trust me,” Bickman said. “This is a bad idea.”

  Her voice had an even, resigned tone. “You’ve been a good brother, Louis, but, please, just let the man in.”

  Bickman hesitated, but finally he moved back, and I stepped into the house.

  “Have a seat,” the woman said. She motioned toward a couch across the room, and I sat down. She was wearing a terrycloth bathrobe, and she pulled it tighter around her slight frame. She touched her limp hair and said, “I have a back problem. Sometimes it’s worse than others.” I took this as an excuse for her appearance. “It’s been very bad lately,” she added as she eased herself into a chair across from the couch. Bickman continued to stand at the front door, his large arms folded across his chest.

  “Your name is Marlee, isn’t it?”

  She held the lapels of the robe so tightly her knuckles were white. “Yes,” she said.

  “Is it still Tragovic?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said again. “I never married after Duane.”

  I glanced across the room at Bickman. “Where’s Bud?” I asked.

  “We don’t have to talk to this man, Marlee.”

  “I know, but it’s okay. Bud died of a heart attack in 1983,” she said. “Why are you here, Mr. Pryor? What is it you want?”

  “What I don’t want is to hurt you, Mrs. Tragovic. If it wasn’t for a friend of mine, I would not be here at all. I think I understand what happened to your husband, some of it, anyway. “

  “It’s been a long time,” she said. “It’s been a lifetime.”

  I waited for her to offer more; when she didn’t, I said, “Duane Tragovic was a difficult man to live with, wasn’t he?”

  She didn’t
speak; she just gave a quick nod.

  “He used to hurt you. “

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “I’ve seen his record, Mrs. Tragovic. He was charged a half-dozen times with battery against you. Twice he served jail time for it, but he didn’t stop, did he?”

  She shook her head.

  “Finally he did it once too often, and either you or one of your brothers killed him.”

  Bickman’s arms came unfolded, and he moved to the center of the room. “Marlee, you do not have to talk to this man. You don’t have to tell him a thing.” He turned to me and came to the couch. Looking down, he said, “I don’t know who the hell you think you are coming in here like this.”

  “I’m not the police, Mr. Bickman. I don’t intend to go to the police. I’m here for my friend, nothing more. I’ve read the reports, Mrs. Tragovic, and what I think happened is that your husband was not killed in the alley behind the Silk Hat Lounge as everyone assumed at the time. I think he was dumped there by your brothers.” I looked at Bickman. “How big was Bud, Mr. Bickman?”

  He hesitated but finally answered. “I don’t know. Five-eight, five-nine. Hundred and seventy-five pounds.”

  I nodded. “I believe that you and your brother wanted to throw the police off. To do that, one of you — and I think it was you, Mr. Bickman — picked a fight with a young, drunk sailor. You wanted the fight to be witnessed, but you also knew who those witnesses would be, and you were confident that they would not be able to give the police a very good accounting of what happened.”

  The big man stood silent, staring down at me, his eyes wide and unblinking.

  “You picked a fight, Mr. Bickman, but it was never your intention to win that fight. You just wanted the winos to see someone getting worked over in that alley, and when Tragovic’s body was found, the police would look for a sailor.”

  “You have no way of knowing that,” Bickman said, but he said it softly, without force.

  “The sailor you picked for your fight was my friend. He explained to me that the man he fought that night was big, but according to the fella who owned the Silk Hat at the time, Duane Tragovic was a runt. The autopsy report put him at five-foot-four and a hundred and forty pounds. My friend said he hit the man repeatedly in the face, but Tragovic had no injuries to his face. The only injury he had was to the back of the skull, as though he had banged his head against the pavement in a fight, or —” I looked to Marlee Tragovic. “— maybe someone hit him with something from behind.”

  “He’s guessing, Marlee,” Bickman said.

  Marlee whispered, “He’s a good guesser, though, isn’t he, Lou?” When she said that, a rush of air escaped from the big man, and he dropped, deflated, to the couch. We were all silent for a long moment.

  It was Bickman who broke the silence. “All right, smart guy,” he said, “I killed the son of a bitch. You figured it out. Good work.”

  “Oh, stop, Louis,” Marlee said. “Just stop it. You and Bud have taken care of me all my life, even to the point where you had no lives of your own, but it’s time I faced what happened.” She turned to me. “My brothers would do anything for me, Mr. Pryor. They devoted themselves to me. They would have gladly killed Duane — Bud even threatened to more than once — but they didn’t. I did. I was only seventeen, but every time I moved, I ached from Duane’s beatings. He would hit me in the small of the back where it was particularly painful, but where the marks wouldn’t show. The last time was especially bad, and I have never recovered from it. I’ve lived in constant pain all these years because of that last beating. But it was the last beating, Mr. Pryor. When Duane turned his back, I took a saucepan from the kitchen counter, and I hit him. I just hit him once, but I hit him hard. When I realized he was dead, I called my brothers. They said they would take care of it, and they did. They took care of it then, and together they’ve taken care of me ever since.” She reached over and placed her small hand on her brother’s massive forearm. “When one passed on,” she added, “the other took care of me by himself. “

  I nodded and offered a smile that I hoped would show them both that I understood.

  Bickman ran his thick fingers through his hair and asked, “What is it you want?”

  When he asked that, I turned to his sister and explained what I needed her to do.

  ~ * ~

  Bickman had to carry Marlee up to Charlie’s room. She’d had three back surgeries over the years, and it was impossible for her to climb stairs. She lived in constant pain, but both Marlee and her brother agreed that it was a miracle she could still walk at all. Once we were on the landing, Bickman put her down.

  “Let me go in first,” Janey said. “I’ll tell him that you’re here, Pry, and that you need to see him.” The puffiness in Jane’s face was even more pronounced than it had been the night before. She knocked once on the closed door and stepped inside.

  “I’ve got to do this alone, now, Lou,” Marlee said. “You wait with Mrs. Thatcher and don’t worry. I’ll be fine.” Bickman still seemed reluctant to have anything to do with this, but it was clear he was devoted to his sister.

  When Janey came back out, she was crying openly. I guessed she had stopped trying to hide her tears from Charlie. “Don’t be too long, Pry. He took a turn for the worse today.”

  I nodded, and she and Bickman started down the stairs. I faced Marlee. “Are you ready?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. And she did seem ready. She even seemed eager.

  I put my hand against the door, but before I pushed it open, I said, “This will mean everything to Charlie.”

  A wisp of a smile tugged at her mouth. “It’s funny, isn’t it? He was going to make his confession to me, but as it turns out, it’ll be the other way around.”

  “I want to thank you. He’s spent his life carrying the guilt of this thing.”

  Marlee’s eyes brimmed with tears. “And guilt is a heavy burden,” she said. “Believe me, Mr. Pryor, I know.”

  >

  ~ * ~

  WALTER MOSLEY

  Lavender

  FROM Six Easy Pieces

  It was a Tuesday morning, about a quarter past eleven. The little yellow dog hid in among the folds of the drapes, peeking out now and then to see if I was still in the reclining living room chair. Each time he caught sight of me, he bared his teeth and then slowly withdrew into the pale green fabric.

  The room smelled of lavender and cigarette smoke.

  The ticking of the wind-up clock, which I had carried all the way from France after my discharge, was the only sound except for the occasional passing car. The clock was encased in a fine dark wood, its numerals wrought in pale pink metal — copper and tin, most probably.

  The cars on Genesee sounded like the rushing of wind.

  I flicked my cigarette in the ashtray. A car slowed down. I could hear the tires squealing against the curb in front of our house.

  A car door opened. A man said something in French. Bonnie replied in the same language. It was a joke of some sort. My Louisiana upbringing had given me a casual understanding of French, but I couldn’t keep up with Bonnie’s Parisian patter.

  The car drove off. I took a deep drag on the Pall Mall I was nursing. She made it to the front step and paused. She was probably smelling the mottled yellow and red roses that I’d cultivated on either side of the door. When I’d asked her to come live with us she said, “As long as you promise to keep those rosebushes out front.”

  The key turned in the lock and the door swung open. I expected her to lag behind because of the suitcase. She always threw the door open first and then lifted the suitcase to come in.

  My chair was to the left of the door, off to the side, so the first thing Bonnie saw was the crystal bowl filled with dried stalks of lavender. She was wearing dark blue slacks and a rust-colored sweater. All those weeks in the Air France stewardess uniform made her want to dress down.

  She noticed the flowers and smiled, but the smile quickly turn
ed into a frown.

  “They came day before yesterday.”

  Bonnie yelped and leapt backward. The little yellow dog jumped out of hiding, looked around, and then darted out through the open door.

  “Easy,” she cried. “You scared me half to death.”

  I stood up from the chair.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I thought you saw me.”

  “What are you doing home?” Her eyes were wild, fearful.

  For the first time I didn’t feel the need or desire to hold her in my arms.

  “Just curious,” I said.