The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

  “The papers don’t always say. The police cover it up while they look for who did it. But that boy didn’t drown. He was murdered first, then dropped in the drink.”

  “You saw him?” I said.

  Nicodemus shrugged. “Sure.”

  “What’d he look like?”

  “You really wanna know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He was all gray and blown up, like a balloon. The gas does that to ‘em, when they been in the water.”

  “What about his eyes?”

  “They were open. Pleading.”

  “Huh?”

  “His eyes. It was like they were sayin’ please.”

  I needed a drink. I had some gin.

  “You ever heard of a Pinkerton man?” I said.

  “Sure,” said Nicodemus. “A detective.”

  “Like the police?”

  “No.”

  “What, then?”

  “They go to work with other guys and pretend they’re one of them. They find out who’s stealing. Or they find out who’s trying to make trouble for the boss. Like the ones who want to make a strike.”

  “You mean, like if a guy wants to get the workers together and make things better?”

  “Yeah. Have meetings and all that. The guys who want to start a union. Pinkertons look for those guys.”

  We drank the rest of the gin. We talked about his kid. We talked about Schmeling and Baer, and the wrestling match that was coming up between Londos and George Zaharias at Griffith Stadium. I got up from my seat, shook Nicodemus’s hand, and thanked him for the conversation.

  “Efcharisto, patrioti.”

  “Yasou, Vasili.”

  I walked back to my place and had a beer I didn’t need. I was drunk and more confused than I had been before. I kept hearing John’s voice, the way he called me “friend.” I saw his eyes saying please. I kept thinking, I should have gone to his goddamn meeting, if that was gonna make him happy. I kept thinking I had let him down. While I was thinking, I sharpened the blade of my Italian switch knife on a stone.

  The next night, last night, I was serving Wesley Schmidt his dinner after we closed. He was sitting by himself like he always did. I dropped the plate down in front of him.

  “You got a minute to talk?” I said.

  “Go ahead and talk,” he said, putting the spoon to his stew and stirring it around.

  “I wanna be a Pinkerton man,” I said. Schmidt stopped stirring his stew and looked up my way. He smiled, showing me his white teeth. Still, his eyes were cold.

  “That’s nice. But why are you telling me this?”

  “I wanna be a Pinkerton, just like you.”

  Schmidt pushed his stew plate away from him and looked around the dining room to make sure no one could hear us. He studied my face. I guess I was sweating. Hell, I know I was. I could feel it dripping on my back.

  “You look upset,” said Schmidt, his voice real soft, like music. “You look like you could use a friend.”

  “I just wanna talk.”

  “Okay. You feel like having a beer, something like that?”

  “Sure, I could use a beer.”

  “I finish eating, I’ll go down and get my car. I’ll meet you in the alley out back. Don’t tell anyone, hear, because then they might want to come along. And we wouldn’t have the chance to talk.”

  “I’m not gonna tell no one. We just drive around, eh? I’m too dirty to go to a saloon.”

  “That’s swell,” said Schmidt. “We’ll just drive around.”

  I went out to the alley where Schmidt was parked. Nobody saw me get into his car. It was a blue, ‘31 Dodge coupe with wire wheels, a rumble seat, and a trunk rack. A five-hundred-dollar car if it was a dime.

  “Pretty,” I said, as I got in beside him. There were hand-tailored slipcovers on the seats.

  “I like nice things,” said Schmidt. He was wearing his suit jacket, and it had to be 80 degrees. I could see a lump under the jacket. I figured, the bastard is carrying a gun.

  We drove up to Colvin’s, on 14th Street. Schmidt went in and returned with a bag of loose bottles of beer. There must have been a half-dozen Schlitzes in the bag. Him making waiter’s pay, and the fancy car and the high-priced beer.

  He opened a coupla beers and handed me one. The bottle was ice cold. Hot as the night was, the beer tasted good.

  We drove around for a while. We went down to Hanes Point. Schmidt parked the Dodge facing the Washington Channel. Across the channel, the lights from the fish vendors on Maine Avenue threw color on the water. We drank another beer. He gave me one of his tailor-mades and we had a couple smokes. He talked about the Senators and the Yankees, and how Baer had taken Schmeling out with a right in the tenth. Schmidt didn’t want to talk about nothing serious yet. He was waiting for the beer to work on me, I knew.

  “Goddamn heat,” I said. “Let’s drive around some, get some air moving.”

  Schmidt started the coupe. “Where to?”

  “I’m gonna show you a whorehouse. Best secret in town.”

  Schmidt looked me over and laughed. The way you laugh at a clown. I gave Schmidt some directions. We drove some, away from the park and the monuments to where people lived. We went through a little tunnel and crossed into Southwest. Most of the street lamps were broke here. The row houses were shabby, and you could see shacks in the alleys and clothes hanging on lines outside the shacks. It was late, a long time past midnight. There weren’t many people out. The ones that were out were coloreds. We were in a place called Bloodfield.

  “Pull over there,” I said, pointing to a spot along the curb where there wasn’t no light. “I wanna show you the place I’m talking about.”

  Schmidt did it and cut the engine. Across the street were some houses. All except one of them was dark. From the lighted one came fast music, like the colored music Laura had played in her room.

  “There it is right there,” I said, meaning the house with the light. I was lying through my teeth. I didn’t know who lived there and I sure didn’t know if that house had whores. I had never been down here before. Schmidt turned his head to look at the row house. I slipped my switch knife out of my right pocket and laid it flat against my right leg.

  When he turned back to face me he wasn’t smiling no more. He had heard about Bloodfield and he knew he was in it. I think he was scared.

  “You bring me down to niggertown, for what?” he said. “To show me a whorehouse?”

  “I thought you’re gonna like it.”

  “Do I look like a man who’d pay to fuck a nigger? Do I? You don’t know anything about me.”

  He was showing his true self now. He was nervous as a cat. My nerves were bad, too. I was sweating through my shirt. I could smell my own stink in the car.

  “I know plenty,” I said.

  “Yeah? What do you know?”

  “Pretty car, pretty suits . . . top-shelf beer. How you get all this, huh?”

  “I earned it.”

  “As a Pinkerton, eh?”

  Schmidt blinked real slow and shook his head. He looked out his window, looking at nothing, wasting time while he decided what he was gonna do. I found the raised button on the pearl handle of my knife. I pushed the button. The blade flicked open and barely made a sound. I held the knife against my leg and turned it so the blade was pointing back. Sweat rolled down my neck as I looked around. There wasn’t nobody out on the street. Schmidt turned his head. He gripped the steering wheel with his right hand and straightened his arm.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  “I just wanna know what happened to John.”

  Schmidt smiled. All those white teeth. I could see him with his mouth open, his lips stretched, those teeth showing. The way an animal looks after you kill it. Him lying on his back on a slab.

  “I heard he drowned,” said Schmidt.

  “You think so, eh?”

  “Yeah. I guess he couldn’t swim.”

  “Pretty hard to swim, you got a bulle
t in your head.”

  Schmidt’s smile turned down. “Can you swim, Bill?”

  I brought the knife across real fast and buried it into his armpit. I sunk the blade all the way to the handle. He lost his breath and made a short scream. I twisted the knife. His blood came out like someone was pouring it from a jug. It was warm and it splashed onto my hands. I pulled the knife out and while he was kicking at the floorboards I stabbed him a coupla more times in the chest. I musta hit his heart or something because all the sudden there was plenty of blood all over the car. I’m telling you, the seats were slippery with it. He stopped moving. His eyes were open and they were dead.

  I didn’t get tangled up about it or nothing like that. I wasn’t scared. I opened up his suit jacket and saw a steel revolver with wood grips holstered there. It was small caliber. I didn’t touch the gun. I took his wallet out of his trousers, pulled the bills out of it, wiped off the wallet with my shirttail, and threw the empty wallet on the ground. I put the money in my shoe. I fit the blade back into the handle of my switch knife and slipped the knife into my pocket. I put all the empty beer bottles together with the full ones in the paper bag and took the bag with me as I got out of the car. I closed the door soft and wiped off the handle and walked down the street. I didn’t see no one for a couple of blocks. I came to a sewer and I put the bag down the hole. The next block I came to another sewer and I took off my bloody shirt and threw it down the hole of that one. I was wearing an undershirt, didn’t have no sleeves. My pants were black so you couldn’t see the blood. I kept walking toward Northwest.

  Someone laughed from deep in an alley and I kept on.

  Another block or so I came upon a group of mavri standing around the steps of a house. They were smoking cigarettes and drinking from bottles of beer. I wasn’t gonna run or nothing. I had to go by them to get home. They stopped talking and gave me hard eyes as I got near them. That’s when I saw that one of them was the cook, Raymond, from the kitchen. Our eyes kind of came together but neither one of us said a word or smiled or even made a nod.

  One of the coloreds started to come toward me and Raymond stopped him with the flat of his palm. I walked on.

  I walked for a couple of hours, I guess. Somewhere in Northwest I dropped my switch knife down another sewer. When I heard it hit the sewer bottom I started to cry. I wasn’t crying ‘cause I had killed Schmidt. I didn’t give a damn nothing about him. I was crying ‘cause my father had given me that knife, and now it was gone. I guess I knew I was gonna be in America forever, and I wasn’t never going back to Greece. I’d never see my home or my parents again.

  When I got back to my place I washed my hands real good. I opened up a bottle of Abner Drury and put fire to a Fatima and had myself a seat at the table.

  This is where I am right now.

  Maybe I’m gonna get caught and maybe I’m not. They’re gonna find Schmidt in that neighborhood and they’re gonna figure a colored guy killed him for his money. The cops, they’re gonna turn Bloodfield upside down. If Raymond tells them he saw me I’m gonna get the chair. If he doesn’t, I’m gonna be free. Either way, what the hell, I can’t do nothing about it now. I’ll work at the hotel, get some experience and some money, then open my own place, like Nick Stefanos. Maybe if I can find two nickels to rub together, I’m gonna go to church and talk to that girl, Irene, see if she wants to be my wife. I’m not gonna wait too long. She’s clean as a whistle, that one. I’ve had my eye on her for some time.

  >

  ~ * ~

  SCOTT PHILLIPS

  Sockdolager

  from Measures of Poison

  1. Upholstery

  After cashing the last of the summer’s commission checks I had stopped at home for a shower and a change of clothes, then headed straight for the Royal Crown Club on East Douglas. I sat for a while shooting the bull with old Gleason, the prehistoric bartender, and trying in vain to ignore the oppressive, wet heat of the tail end of a Kansas summer. I was morbidly watching a drop of sweat work its way down Gleason’s piebald temple to his flabby cheek when a woman walked in through the front door and took a seat, her perfunctory show of disinterest given lie to by the fact that she’d planted her nicely upholstered rump a mere two stools to the right of me. The bar was empty except for me and Gleason, and if she didn’t want company she would have taken a table.

  Gleason, who was my father’s oldest friend, had been a widower for twenty years, and he stared enraptured and without shame at her knockers; she helpfully pretended not to notice. With his slobbery, loose jowls, his peculiar dusty odor, and earlobes hanging damn near down to his chin, he was old enough to have tended bar before the state outlawed booze, and Kansas had done it thirty years ahead of the rest of the country. It was still contraband in the Sunflower State, despite the passage of the Twentieth Amendment, but it could be had with a minimum of effort if you knew where to look.

  The woman shifted her ass on the stool and pulled at the neckline of her thin summer dress, giving her tits a quick bounce for old Gleason. She looked to be about thirty-five, with black hair coiled in a permanent wave, and a little extra baggage at her waist and hips and under her kohl-smeared eyes. None of that bothered me at all, in fact all summer I’d been wondering what it would be like screwing a woman her age. I mean one who liked it, not one of those you hear about who just lies back and goes limp and thinks about something else, waiting for it to be over so she can go back to her bonbons and movie magazines and radio serials. That was too much like the high school girls I’d been nailing since I turned fourteen, girls who traded sex for status, for the sake of being known as the quarterback’s or the student council president’s girl. Nuts to that.

  But I couldn’t act on my impulses, despite the many opportunities sales work afforded me. First of all, I was a professional salesman with a code of ethics. Secondly, if such a breach of that code were found out it could have meant the loss of my position, even if it was only a summer job. Thirdly, times were tough, and most of the offers I’d had over the last three summers had involved a quid pro quo, a blow job for a new coffeepot or a plain screw for a cast-iron frying pan. One careworn and brazen mother of five proposed paying me fifty cents on the dollar plus three (3) incidents of sexual intercourse per week all summer for a full set of stainless steel kitchenware, a sort of carnal installment plan that would have wrecked me financially. If I hadn’t had a girlfriend from school to take the physical pressure off a couple of nights a week, I might have been tempted.

  I wasn’t on the job now, though, and the lady to my right wasn’t a customer. On top of her fresh permanent and florid perfume I could smell the sauce she’d already downed before coming in, and I calculated I could find out what I wanted to know for the price of two to four more drinks, judging from the thickness of her slur as she’d ordered the first. My wallet had a small fortune in it, thirty-six dollars before I’d started buying drinks, and when she swallowed the last of her drink I pulled out a two-dollar bill and signaled to Gleason.

  “Another gimlet for the lady,” I said, and she swiveled the stool around to face me, recrossing her legs as she did so. They were long, and her flimsy red and white dress was short enough to reveal a certain slackness of thigh that I found unexpectedly appealing.

  “How genteel,” she said, softening the “g.”

  “My pleasure,” I said, raising my own glass. “Wayne Ogden.”

  “Mildred Halliburton. Pleased to meet you, Dwayne.” She moved over to the stool next to mine, and when her thigh met my knee she didn’t move it away.

  “That’s Wayne.”

  She giggled as Gleason served her, his watery blue pupils blatantly following her nipples like twin searchlights. “I’m awfully sorry, Wayne. And what, as they say, is your line?”

  “I’m a salesman for the Lanham Company.” At least I had been until two days before; I didn’t think it would help to mention that the next week I would be starting my senior year of high school.

  ?
??Oh. Selling pots and pans, door to door?”

  “Kitchenware of all kinds.”

  “How inneressting,” she slobbered. “I myself am a user of kitchenware.” I braced myself for the inevitable offer of a trade, but she surprised me. “I got all I need, though, so you can forget about that.” She laughed again, and I started to think my one drink might be my ticket into her short-and-silkies.

  “I’m not on duty anyway,” I said.

  She knocked the drink back in a gulp, then placed her palm flat on her breast. “Oh.” Her eyes were wide open for a second, and then she laughed again, a melodious, low sound. “These drinks are starting to hit me, I think.”