The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 Read online

  “You like him?”

  “Kinda. Once or twice this look came over his face, though.”

  “What sort of look?”

  “Like he definitely might want to get in my pants.”

  “Carla, we’re having a lousy month and you know it. You might have to sacrifice your body.”

  “Tell me about it,” Carla answered, and they shared a snort of laughter.

  Mary Beth and Carla decided in college that they could run a successful real estate business together, but since that time they had suffered failed marriages, money problems, heartbreaks, and heavy competition from the larger real estate firms in both Austin and over in Blanco County. They struggled to pay rent on their office building, a washed-out abode with noisy plumbing set back in a grove of scrub oaks and windblown mesquite trees halfway out toward Dripping Springs. Mary Beth had a nine-year-old son with asthma, Luke, who sat on the bench for his Little League team and Carla had a demanding mother with too many cats and a series of bad hairdressers who cut too much off. Even so, both Carla and Mary Beth danced the salsa at Miguel’s, the Texas Two-Step at the Broken Spoke, and up close on Sixth Street with assorted telephone linemen, executives, former halfbacks and dull professors. They traded date notes after occasions at Threadgill’s or the Oasis and agreed on just one general rule between them: no musicians.

  They also took care. At the clubs or in business they worried about men.

  When they met male clients at isolated houses or ranch property they went as a team, a caution against unwanted sexual advances. They vowed to watch out for each other, figuring they lived in a masculine ethos: beer and barbeque, football and bullshit, kisses and violence.

  Boomer Smith, of course, had a shy, goofy, awkward way about him and wouldn’t even meet their gaze. Carla felt motherly toward him because his Stetson was somehow tilted wrong and he moved clumsily, bumping chairs and desks with his hip, fumbling, grinning, and getting out of sync even in his best moments.

  “How can he go around making deals? He hardly talks!” Mary Beth observed while they waited to show him the first property.

  “Maybe he does all right with the guys,” Carla offered. “He was probably the nerdy valedictorian in high school. Straight A’s and a member, you know, of the model airplane club.”

  He arrived an hour late after their part-time secretary, Maria, had gone home for the day. Held up at the Driskill Hotel, he told them, and very sorry. He brought them each a single rose and offered to take them to dinner as compensation, but still wouldn’t look directly at either of them.

  They drove out to a small ranch near Driftwood. On the way Mary Beth asked if he meant to raise cattle and he said, “No, maybe horses,” yet he admitted he didn’t ride. Carla asked if he had a family and he said, “No, I’m single and mean to stay that way.” He snapped off that last reply, so that five minutes of silence ensued. Later, the little ranch looked overgrown and wrong.

  “Maybe if you could give us an idea of how much you intend to spend,” Carla ventured cautiously. “I mean, if this place is just too small, what do you have in mind?”

  “I mean to impress,” he instructed them, and that cryptic reply— as they later discussed with one another — was curiously worded and spoken. His voice actually changed when he said it. The drawl vanished. He seemed more out of place than ever, a lost outsider employing a strangely arch diction.

  At the Salt Lick, though, a big barbecue hangout on a nearby farm road, they relaxed. Boomer bought a case of Budweiser, laughed for the first time, and began to tell stories: one about his mother, who lived near Alpine and owned a pet kangaroo, and another about an uncle who lived in a maze of trailers in the middle of nowhere near Amarillo. In such tales his drawl returned and he became an affable and earnest country boy.

  “Six trailers.” he said about his uncle’s place. “Two of ‘em big doublewides. Lashed together with cable, so they won’t blow off in a dust storm! “ In their accompanying laughter they forgave him his peculiarities and he fit, clearly, Carla’s view of him as a former high school nerd, the one with the nutty family, the one who never knew what to do with his hands. While they ate peach cobbler and pecan pie with their coffee, later, Mary Beth went on about her little boy, Luke, who didn’t fit in at school and who occasionally whined that he wanted to live with his drunken daddy. Boomer offered that Mary Beth seemed practical and sure of herself and that she could undoubtedly accomplish more with him than any man. When she smiled at this flattery he went on, saying that a young boy needs his mother, ask any psychologist, and if the teenager, later, needed a stronger hand, then maybe the father. “But for now, Mary Beth, have confidence in your intuitions,” and he placed a big red hand over hers as big, moist, inebriated tears appeared in her eyes.

  “I think Boomer’s just wonderful,” Mary Beth said, turning suddenly to Carla, who watched all this over the rim of her coffee cup.

  “He’s fine,” Carla replied. “But when you drink beer, Mary Beth, you have a tendency to fall in love, to believe in gurus, or to want plastic surgery. “

  Minutes later they reeled through the parking lot arm in arm beneath a gaudy display of stars in a moonless sky. Boomer forgot his Stetson, so Mary Beth volunteered to retrieve it, leaving Carla alone with him. She leaned against the rail fence and gazed up at the Milky Way — a down-home name for a galaxy, she commented— and Boomer moved beside her. For a moment she thought he might try to kiss her, and then she wondered if he intended to say something, but he remained wordless and didn’t make a move. When Mary Beth came back wearing the Stetson down over her ears and grinning, he moved off sideways, awkwardly, in retreat. They were soon all talking at once and driving back.

  A few days went by. Clients materialized, including a young couple with only a thousand dollars for a down payment. When Boomer phoned again, Carla told him about a spread at the edge of Blanco County, a working horse ranch whose owners agreed to let him look at it. No, he said, he didn’t want to deal with occupants, not with anybody except Carla and Mary Beth themselves.

  “Maybe you can drive by the ranch and look at it,” Carla suggested. “I’ll give you directions. If you like it, we’ll arrange to see it when the owners are away.”

  He agreed.

  But he also said that he had business in Galveston, so another week passed before they heard from him again.

  ~ * ~

  Carla lived in an apartment just off the Mopac: four big rooms furnished with light pine furniture and lots of gadgets — an espresso machine, an ice-cream maker, a big music center, a forty-one-inch TV, and dozens of novelty clocks, mobiles, and sculptures that turned on rotating pedestals. That week she and Mary Beth attended another Little League game, watching Luke sit in the dug-out, then play right field after the score was decided. Afterward, walking away from the concession stand, Carla thought she saw Boomer’s big dark Lincoln Continental, and she walked halfway across the parking lot to make sure. It was somebody else’s car. Later, she fretted over the mistake.

  When Boomer came back he gave Carla a friendship ring. Just an item bought in Galveston, he said, but it was too extravagant: a sapphire of about a half-carat. “Payment for all the work you’ve been doing,” he said, and he gently pushed away her hand when she tried to give it back.

  “To tell the truth, I bought it secondhand,” he admitted, not looking at her. “It was a genuine bargain. You take it. Please.”

  They were at the office on Maria’s day off. Carla had been typing out a contract for the young couple, who were probably going to be turned down by loan officers. The toilet down the hallway made an embarrassing noise.

  “Did you drive over and look at that ranch in Blanco County?” Carla asked, trying the ring on her finger. It was a dazzling gift, bigger than the wedding ring she once wore, and she couldn’t analyze the nervousness she felt.

  “Didn’t go by,” he said of the ranch in question. “But I saw another place over that way. Just off Highway 165. A vacant house that
looks new with good grassland.”

  “I’ll find out who handles it and set up an appointment,” she told him, and at that point Mary Beth and Luke drove up, the windshield of her green Toyota flashing at them. Carla felt strange and caught, especially moments later when she showed Mary Beth the ring and tried to explain why she couldn’t accept it, yet had. Boomer hunched down and talked to Luke while Carla followed Mary Beth back to the toilet, where they jiggled the handle, grinned, gave each other looks, and tried to cope with their client.

  “It’s just an inappropriate gift,” Carla said of the ring. “What do you suppose he thinks it means?”

  “Honey, accept it,” Mary Beth advised. “When he chooses a house, we’ll sell the damn thing and split the profit as part of our commission.”

  “He wants to get me in bed, I just know it,” Carla sighed.

  “Well, sure he does. You’re a looker and he’s clumsy as a goose. He didn’t know what to do, so he just bought that damn ring.”

  When they emerged, Boomer was showing Luke how to throw a curve ball and, somehow, baseball made everything natural again. Mary Beth actually flirted, bumping Boomer with her hip, and they all grinned and went out for burgers. At the Dairy Dip, Boomer played pinball and, later, showed Luke a switchblade knife with a curved ivory handle, but something happened so that Luke came over with his root beer float and sat beside his mother as if he didn’t want anything more to do with Boomer.

  “What happened, Honey?” Mary Beth asked, but Luke wouldn’t respond.

  “Did Boomer hurt your feelings?” Carla persisted, but Luke just crushed his baseball cap in his fist — a pinstripe cap in the New York Yankees style — and sucked the straw of his empty root beer float. Meanwhile, Boomer slapped the sides of the pinball machine, his face and raw hands illumined in its glow.

  “What, Luke? Tell me,” his mother kept on.

  “Oh, it’s some male conspiracy thing,” Carla decided, so they let it go.

  ~ * ~

  The weekend arrived and Carla continued to fret. It was illegal to run a credit report, but she considered it. She didn’t want to ask Boomer to allow himself to be investigated because she might offend him and lose a sale. Too awkward, she told herself, yet her skepticism annoyed her, especially since she had accepted the ring. She scolded herself for having doubts.

  The weather turned hotter.

  According to the listing information, the house out on 165 had sixteen adjoining acres, no pool, no stable, and no view, but Boomer wanted to see it that weekend, so Carla made arrangements. Mary Beth would attend another Little League game with Luke, Carla would show another house to the young couple with only a thousand dollars, then they would meet Boomer out in the hill country late on Saturday.

  A wind blew up, but hot: swirls of dust in the flats, trees bending on the ridges, great pavilions of cloud rising on the southern zephyrs. Deadly humidity, too: Carla’s blouse stuck to her back and the young couple perspired and whined. She wanted Boomer to write a big fat check, so she could go off to the mountains, up in New Mexico, say, where the nights turned cold even in summertime.

  She drove west behind an old slow pickup and couldn’t pass in the traffic, then turned off on a farm road quivering with a mirage of rising heat. The twang of an irritating guitar jangled her nerves, so she turned off the radio.

  Following another realtor’s instructions she found the house: an angular rock, cypress, and glass monstrosity — no architect would do such a thing — along a dry creek bed in a stand of live oak and cottonwood trees. The house could barely be seen from the highway and she wondered how Boomer had found it, but there he was, waiting, leaning against his big Continental beside a rock archway and gate, grinning and waving. He had sweated through his T-shirt and his Stetson was pushed back on his head.

  “Found me,” he said, as Carla got out of her car.

  “Lordy, I feel like I’ve driven all day,” she managed in reply, and she manufactured a smile. The heat bore down on them.

  “The house is already open,” Boomer told her. “I peeked inside.”

  With that they started up the flagstone walkway. She felt relieved to be rid of the young couple and confident that Mary Beth and Luke would soon be along.

  “You know, I like this place,” he said when they stood in the living room.

  “Nice,” Carla agreed, though she didn’t completely mean it.

  The high windows let in a brass-colored and stifling heat of late afternoon.

  “It’s nothing like I wanted,” he admitted. “But it has a good feel to it.”

  “This happens a lot,” she said, as they made their way toward the kitchen. “A client will have a very specific idea about what he wants, then buy something completely different. Just goes to show.”

  “I’m not anybody’s usual client,” Boomer reminded her, and his voice did that thing again: formality crept in in an aloof arch tone.

  “No, I don’t want to imply that you are. You’re one of a kind, Boomer, really, I mean it.”

  “Hey, you’re not wearing the ring.”

  “It’s in my purse. I intend to have it sized right away.”

  They admired the kitchen and breakfast nook decorated with bright Mexican tiles, then they stepped outside on the wide deck across the back of the house. At one corner of the deck an outdoor shower surrounded by glass brick emptied into a drain that led through the cottonwood grove to the dry creek. Boomer stepped inside the shower and found that the water could be turned on.

  “Look at this! Nice, huh?”

  “It’s a great outdoor shower,” Carla agreed.

  “Tell you what. Let’s take a shower and cool off.”

  “You go ahead,” she managed, and that nervous laugh came out of her. Before she knew it, he began to skin out of his T-shirt and sat down abruptly on a wooden bench to remove his boots.

  “Now come on, don’t leave,” he instructed her. “At least stand guard, so Mary Beth doesn’t barge in on me.” He had a wide grin and as he fumbled with his belt his effort seemed frantic, childlike, as though his big hands couldn’t keep up with his enthusiasm.

  She watched until he began to stumble around in his jeans, trying to get them off, then she turned away, laughing, and thinking, no, you’re certainly not the usual client, you’re a doofus, you’re too much, and she caught a glimpse of his bare butt as he entered the shower stall. Above the glass bricks, then, she could see his grinning face and the curve of the chrome showerhead.

  “Whoa!” he yelled when the water came on. “That’s cold!”

  “I’ll bet it’s nice,” she called to him. He made a noise like a goat and ran his long fingers through his hair.

  When she started to leave, he once again called her back, saying, “You know, I think I’ll buy this place. I’d have to add a stable, but it could be small. I only intend to keep a coupla horses.”

  She found herself getting used to this silliness of his: talking business while buck-naked underneath a shower.

  “You haven’t even seen the upstairs,” she reminded him.

  “Five bedrooms, five baths, all tucked away, very private. I like it. You know, I think I’ll make out a check.”

  She began to feel lightheaded. Cash, a solid commission. Then he started talking about an apartment in Austin, too: Something close to the center for nights he might want to stay in town. She sat down on the wooden bench while he yelled out his thoughts. Was there anything for sale around Town Lake? Some real nice condos?

  “Carla, are you there?”

  “Right here,” she said, standing up again, so he could see her. “Standing guard as ordered.”

  ‘Just drape my T-shirt over the stall,” he said. “I’ll dry with it. And if you don’t mind, lay my jeans over the side, too.”

  While he dressed, she suggested that he should make a low bid on the house, but he rejected that. No, the asking price seemed fair, he said, and they went back to a discussion of condos. Maybe something around the
university, he added. He liked to watch the kids come and go.

  By the time he came out of the shower, dressed, they were laughing so naturally that when he suggested that she should hop into the cold water, too, she considered it.

  “I won’t watch, promise,” he told her. “In fact, I’ll go get a big ol’ beach towel outta my car. I bought it in Galveston, never used it, and you can dry off with it afterward.”

  “Well, maybe,” she allowed, and by now, somehow, all of Boomer’s unpredictability was part of a general charm.

  “We’ll do it this way,” he said. “Wait until I bring the towel to you, then I’ll go away again. I’ll go wait for Mary Beth and Luke and when you’re finished you can show me upstairs. Or we can walk off some of the land. How about it?”