The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

  “We have to talk,” Bonnie said.

  “I got to go.”

  “No.”

  “Bonnie.”

  “His name is Jogaye Cham,” she said. “We, we talked on the plane when everybody else was asleep. He talked about Africa, our home, Easy. Where we came from.”

  “I was born in southern Louisiana, and I still call myself a Texan ‘cause Texas is where I grew into a man.”

  “Africa,” she said again. “He was working for democracy. He worked all day and all night. He wanted a country where everyone would be free. A land our people here would be glad to migrate to. A land with black presidents and black professionals of all kinds.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He worked all the time. Day and night. But one time there was a break in the schedule. We took a flight to a beach town he knew in Madagascar.”

  “You could’a come home,” I said, even though I didn’t want to say anything.

  “No,” she said, and the pain in my chest grew worse. “I needed to be with him, with his dreams. “

  “Would you be tellin’ me this if them flowers didn’t come?”

  “No. No.” She was crying. I held back from slapping her face. “There was nothing to tell.”

  “Five days on a beach with another man and there wasn’t somethin’ to say?”

  “We, we had separate rooms.”

  “But did you fuck him?”

  “Don’t use that kind of language with me.”

  “Okay,” I said. “All right. Excuse me for upsetting you with my street-nigger talk. Let me put it another way. Did you make love to him?”

  The words cut much deeper than any profanity I could have used. I saw in her face the pain that I felt. Deep, grinding pain that only gets worse with time. And though it didn’t make me feel good, it at least seemed to create some kind of balance. At least she wouldn’t leave unscathed.

  “No,” she whispered. “No. We didn’t make love. I couldn’t with you back here waiting for me. “

  A thousand questions went through my mind. Did you kiss him? Did you hold hands in the sunset? Did you say that you loved him? But I knew I couldn’t ask. Did he touch your breast? Did he breathe in your breath on a blanket near the water? I knew that if I asked one question they would never stop coming.

  I stood up. I was dizzy, light-headed, but didn’t let it show.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “I got a job to do for Etta. A woman already paid me, so I got to move it on.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “Nuthin’ you need to know about. It’s my business.” And with that I showered and shaved, powdered and dressed. I left her in the house with her confessions and her lies.

  ~ * ~

  With no other information available to me, I went to see Etta at the Merchants’ seaside retreat. She only pulled the door open enough to see me.

  “Go away, Easy,” she said.

  “Open the door, Etta.”

  “Go away. “

  “No.”

  Maybe I had gained some strength of will working for the city schools. Or maybe Etta was getting worn down between losing her husband and working for the rich. All I knew was that at another time she could have stared me down. Instead the door swung open.

  Inside, sitting on the blue couch with golden clamshell feet, was a young black man and young white woman, both of them beautiful. They were holding hands and huddling like frightened children. They were frightened children. If it wasn’t for the broken heart driving me, I would have been scared too.

  “They came after you called me, Easy,” Etta said.

  “Why didn’t you call back?”

  “You did what I asked you to already. You found them. That’s all I could ask. “

  “I’m Easy,” I said to the couple.

  “Willis,” the boy said. He made a waving gesture, and I noticed that his hands were bloody and bandaged.

  “Sin,” the girl said. There was something crooked about her face, but that just stoked the fires of her dangerous beauty.

  “What happened to Big Art, Sin?”

  Her mouth dropped open while she groped for a lie.

  “I already know you called your father,” I said.

  “I was just mad at Art,” she said. “He didn’t have to beat up Willis and hurt his hands. I thought my father would come and maybe do something.” Her eyes grew glassy.

  “What happened?”

  “I told Art that I was going down to the liquor store and then I called Daddy. I told him that I was with a guy but I was scared to leave, and he said to wait somewhere near at hand. Then I waited in the coffee shop across the street. When I saw Abel, I got scared and went to get Willy. When we came back to get my clothes he was ...” She trailed off in the memory of the slaughter.

  I turned to Willis and said, “You’d be better off holding a gun to your head.”

  “I didn’t mean for him to get killed,” Sinestra said angrily.

  “What now?” I asked Etta.

  “I’m tryin’ to talk some sense to ‘em. I’m tryin’ to tell Sin to go home and Willis to get away before he ends up like that Art fella.”

  “I’m not going back,” Sinestra proclaimed.

  “And I’m not leavin’ her or L.A.”

  “She just had a big man break your fingers, and then she went and fucked him.”

  “She didn’t know. She was just flirtin’ and it got outta hand. She’s just innocent, that’s all.”

  My mouth fell open, and I put my hand to cover it.

  Etta started laughing. Laughing hard and loud.

  “What are you laughing at?” Sinestra asked.

  I started laughing too.

  “Shut up, shut up,” Sinestra said.

  “Yes. Please be quiet,” Abel Snow said from a door in the back.

  He had a pistol in his hand.

  “There’s a man in a car parked out front, Sinestra,” Snow said. “Go out to him. He’ll take you home.”

  Without a word, the young white woman went for the door.

  Etta looked into my eyes. Her stare was hard and certain.

  “Sin,” Willis said.

  She hesitated and then went out the door without looking back.

  “Well, well, well,” Abel Snow said. “Here we are. Just us four.”

  Willis was sitting on the couch. Etta and I were standing on either side of the boy. He turned on the blue sofa to see Snow.

  “You gonna kill us?” I asked, my voice soaked with manufactured fear.

  “You’re gonna go away,” he said, and smiled.

  I took a step to the side, away from Etta.

  “You gonna let us go?” Willis asked, playing his part well, though I’m sure he didn’t know it.

  Snow was amused. He was listening for something.

  Etta put her hands down at her side. She raised her face to look at the ceiling and prayed, “Lord, forgive us for what we do.”

  At a picnic table Snow’s grin would have been friendly.

  I took another step and bumped into the wall.

  “Nowhere to run,” Snow apologized. “Take it like a man and it won’t hurt.”

  “Please God,” Etta said beseechingly. She bent over slightly.

  A car horn honked. That was what Snow was waiting for. He raised his pistol. I closed my eyes, the left one a little harder than the right.

  Then I forced my eyes open. Abel Snow brought his left heel off the floor, preparing to pivot after killing me. EttaMae pulled a pistol out of the fold of her dress, aimed it at his head, and sucked in a breath. It was that breath that made Snow turn his head instead of pulling the trigger. Etta’s bullet caught him in the temple. He crumpled to the floor, a sack of stones that had recently been a man.

  “Oh no,” Willis cried. He pulled his legs up underneath himself. “Oh no.”

  Etta looked at me. Her face was hard, her jaws were clenched in victory.

  “I knew you had to be armed
, baby,” I said. “If he was smart, he would’a shot you first.”

  “This ain’t no joke, Easy. What we gonna do with him?”

  “What caliber you use?” I asked.

  “Twenty-five caliber,” she said. “You know what I carry.”

  “Didn’t even sound that loud. Nobody live close enough to have heard it.”

  “They gonna come in here sooner or later. And even before that he ain’t gonna report in to Mr. Merchant.”

  “Tell me somethin’, Etta.”

  “What?”

  “You plannin’ to go back to work for them?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Then call your boss. Tell him that Abel’s not comin’ home and that there’s a mess down here.”

  “Put myself on the line like that?”

  “It’s him on the line. I bet the gun in Abel’s hand was the one he used on Art. And if that girl of his finds out about any killing in this house, she’d have somethin’ on her old man till all the money runs out. “

  “What about Willis?”

  “I’ll take care of him. But we better get outta here now.”

  ~ * ~

  I drove Etta to a bus station in Santa Monica. She kissed me goodbye through the car window.

  “Don’t feel guilty about Raymond,” she said. “Much as was wrong with him, he took responsibility for everything he did.”

  ~ * ~

  “What you gonna do with me?” Willis Longtree asked as we drove toward L.A.

  “Take you to a doctor. Make sure your hand bones set right.”

  “I’m still gonna stay here an’ try an’ make it in music,” he told me.

  “Oh? What they call you when you were a boy?” I asked.

  “Little Jimmy,” he said. “Little Jimmy because my father was James and everybody said I looked just like him.”

  “Little Jimmy Long,” I said, testing out the name. “Try that on for a while. I can get you a job as a custodian at my school. Do that for a while and try to meet your dreams. Who knows? Maybe you will be some kinda star one day.”

  “Little Jimmy Jones,” Willis said. “I like that even better.”

  ~ * ~

  I got home in the early afternoon. Bonnie wasn’t there, but her clothes were still in the closet. I went to the garage and got my gardener’s toolbox. I clipped off all the roses, put them in a big bowl on the bedroom chest of drawers. Then I took the saw and hacked down both rosebushes. I left them lying there on either side of the door.

  The little yellow dog must have known what I was doing. He yelped and barked at me until I finished the job.

  I went off to work then. I got there at the three o’clock bell and worked until eleven.

  When I got home, the bushes had been removed. Bonnie, Jesus, and Feather were all sleeping in their beds. There were no packed suitcases in the closet, no angry notes on the kitchen table.

  I lay down on the couch and thought about Mouse, that he was really dead. Sleep came quickly after that, and I knew that my time of mourning was near an end.

  >

  ~ * ~

  JOYCE CAROL OATES

  The Skull

  FROM Harper’s Magazine

  Contrary to popular belief, the human cranium isn’t a single helmet-shaped bone but eight bones fused together, and the facial mask is fourteen bones fused together, and these, in the victim, had been smashed with a blunt object, smashed, dented, and pierced, as if the unknown killer had wanted not merely to kill his victim but to obliterate her. No hair remained on any skull fragments, for no scalp remained to contain hair, but swaths of sun-bleached brown hair had been found with the skeleton and had been brought to him in a separate plastic bag. Since rotted clothing found at the scene was a female’s clothing, the victim had been identified as female. A woman, or an older adolescent girl.

  “A jigsaw puzzle. In three dimensions.” He smiled. Since boyhood he’d been one to love puzzles.

  ~ * ~

  He was not old. Didn’t look old, didn’t behave old, didn’t perceive himself as old. Yet he knew that others, envious of him, wished to perceive him as old, and this infuriated him. He was a stylish dresser. Often he was seen in dark turtleneck sweaters, a wine-colored leather coat that fell below his knees. In warm weather he wore shirts open at the throat, sometimes T-shirts that showed to advantage his well-developed arm and shoulder muscles. When his hair had begun to thin in his mid-fifties he had simply shaved his head, which tended to be olive-hued, veined, with the look of an upright male organ throbbing with vigor, belligerence, good humor. You couldn’t help but notice and react to Kyle Cassity: to label such a man a “senior citizen” was absurd and demeaning.

  Now he was sixty-seven, and of that age. He would have had to concede that as a younger man he’d often ignored his elders. He’d taken them for granted, he’d written them off as irrelevant. Of course, Kyle Cassity was a different sort of elder. There was no one quite like him.

  A maverick, he thought himself. Unlabelable. Born in 1935 in Harrisburg, Pa., a long-time resident of Wayne, N.J.: unique and irreplaceable.

  Among his numerous relatives he’d long been an enigma: generous in times of crisis; otherwise distant, indifferent. True, he’d had something of a reputation as a womanizer until recent years, yet he’d remained married to the same devoted wife for four decades. His three children, when they were living at home, had competed for their father’s attention, but they’d loved him, you might have said they’d worshiped him, though now in adulthood they were closer to their mother. (Outside his marriage, unknown to his family, Kyle had fathered another child, a daughter, whom he’d never known.)

  Professionally, Dr. Kyle Cassity was something of a maverick as well. A tenured senior professor on the faculty of William Paterson University in New Jersey, as likely to teach in the adult night division as in the undergraduate daytime school, as likely to teach a sculpting workshop in the art school as a graduate seminar in the School of Health, Education, and Science. His advanced degrees were in anthropology, sociology, and forensic science; he’d had a year of medical school and a year of law school. At Paterson University he’d developed a course entitled “The Sociology of ‘Crime’ in America” that had attracted as many as four hundred students before Professor Cassity, overwhelmed by his own popularity, retired it.

  His public reputation in New Jersey was as an expert prosecution witness and a frequent consultant for the New Jersey Department of Forensics. He’d been the subject of numerous media profiles, including a cover story in the Newark Star-Ledger Sunday magazine bearing the eye-catching caption “Sculptor Kyle Cassity fights crime with his fingertips.” He gave away many of his sculptures, to individuals, museums, schools. He gave lectures, for no fee, throughout the state.

  As a scientist he had little sentiment. He knew that the individual, within the species, counts for very little; the survival of the species is everything. But as a forensic specialist he focused his attention on individuals: the uniqueness of crime victims and the uniqueness of those who have committed these crimes. Where there was a victim there would be a criminal or criminals. There could be no ambiguity here. As Dr. Kyle Cassity, he worked with the remains of victims. Often these were badly decomposed, mutilated, or broken, seemingly past reconstruction and identification. He was good at his work and had gotten better over the years. He loved a good puzzle. A puzzle no one else could solve except Kyle Cassity. He perceived the shadowy, faceless, as-yet-unnamed perpetrators of crime as human prey whom he was hunting and was licensed to hunt.

  ~ * ~

  This skull! What a mess. Never had Kyle seen bones so broken. How many powerful blows must have been struck to reduce the skull, the face, the living brain, to such broken matter. Kyle tried to imagine: twenty? thirty? fifty? A frenzied killer, you would surmise. Better to imagine madness than that the killer had been coolly methodical, smashing his victim’s skull, face, teeth, to make identification impossible.

  No fingertips — no f
ingerprints — remained, of course. The victim’s exposed flesh had long since rotted from her bones. The body had been dumped sometime in the late spring or early summer in a field above an abandoned gravel pit near Toms River in the southern part of the state, a half-hour drive from Atlantic City. Bones had been scattered by wildlife, but most had been located and reassembled: the victim had been approximately five feet two, with a small frame, a probable weight of 100 or 110 pounds. Judging by the hair, Caucasian.