The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 Read online

  “At least I’m good at what I do,” he said to no one. “At least that.”

  ~ * ~

  After the bath Leonid called Gert again. This time the phone rang and rang with no interruption. That was very odd. Gert had it set up so that her service picked up when she was on the line.

  Sometimes he didn’t talk to Gert for months at a time. She had made it clear that they could never be intimate again. But he still felt something for her. And he wanted to make sure that she was okay.

  ~ * ~

  When Leonid got to Gert’s near four he found the downstairs door had been wedged open.

  Her front door was crisscrossed with yellow police ribbon.

  “You know her?” a voice asked.

  It was a small woman standing at a doorway down the hall. She was old and gray and wore gray clothes. She had watery eyes and mismatched slippers. There was a low-grade emerald ring on the index finger of her right hand and the left side of her mouth lagged just a bit.

  Leonid noticed all of this in a vain attempt to work away from the fear growing in his stomach.

  “What happened?”

  “They say he must’a come in last night,” the woman said. “It was past midnight, the super says. He just killed her. Didn’t steal anything. Just shot her with a gun no louder than a cap pistol, that’s what they said. You know you’re not safe in your own bed anymore. People out here just get some crazy idea in their head and you find yourself dead with no rhyme or reason.”

  Leonid’s tongue went dry. He stared at the woman so in­tensely that she stopped rambling, backed into her apartment, and closed the door. He leaned against the doorjamb, dry-eyed but stunned.

  Leonid had never cried. Not when his father left home for the revolution. Not when his mother went to bed and never came out again. Never.

  ~ * ~

  There was a different bartender serving drinks at Barney’s Clover that afternoon. A woman with faded blue-green tattoos on her wrists. She was thin and brown-eyed, white and past forty.

  “What you have, mister?”

  “Rye whiskey. Keep ‘em comin’.”

  ~ * ~

  He was on the sixth shot when his cell phone sounded. The ring had been programmed by his son Twill. It started with the sound of a lion’s roar.

  ‘“lo?”

  “Mr. DuBois? Is that you?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Richard Mallory. Are you sick, Mr. DuBois?”

  “Hey, Dick. Sorry I didn’t recognize you. I got some bad news today. An old friend of mine died.”

  “I’m so sorry. What happened?”

  “It was a long illness,” Leonid said, finishing one shot and gesturing for another.

  “Should I call you later?”

  “You got me a lobby, Dick?”

  “Um, well yes. A fairly large building on Sutton Place South. The super is a friend of mine and I promised him five hundred.”

  “That’s the way to do business, Dick. Share the wealth. That’s what I’ve always done. Where are you?”

  “It’s a Brazilian place on West Twenty-six. Umberto’s. On the second floor, between Sixth and Broadway. I don’t know the exact address.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll get it from information. See you about nine. Looks like we’re gonna be doing some business, you and me.”

  “Okay, um, all right. I’m sorry about your loss, Mr. DuBois. But please don’t call me Dick. I hate that name.”

  ~ * ~

  Umberto’s was an upscale restaurant on a street filled with wholesalers of Indian trinkets, foods, and clothing. Leonid sat across the street in his 1963 Peugeot.

  It was after ten and the fat detective was drinking from a pint bottle of bourbon in the front seat. He was thinking about the first time he had met Gert, about how she knew just what to say.

  “You’re not such a bad man,” the sultry New Yorker had said. “It’s just that you been making your own rules for so long that you got a little confused.”

  They spent that night together. He really didn’t know that she’d be upset about Katrina. Katrina was his wife but there was no juice there. He remembered the hurt look on Gert’s face when she finally found out. After that came the cold anger she treated him with from then on.

  They’d remained friends but she would never kiss him again. She would never let him into her heart.

  But they worked well together. Gert had been in private se­curity for a dozen years before they met. She enjoyed his shady cases, as she called them. Gert didn’t believe that the law was fair and she didn’t mind getting around the system if that was the right thing to do.

  Maybe Joe Haller didn’t rob Amberson’s, but he’d beaten and humiliated both men and women pursuing his perverse sexual appetites.

  Leonid wondered if Nestor Bendix could have had some­thing to do with Gert’s killing. But he’d never told anyone her name. Maybe Haller got out and somehow traced his problem back to her. Maybe.

  A lion roared in his pocket.

  “Yeah?”

  “Mr. McGill? This is Karma.”

  “Hey. I’m on the case. He is on a date but I haven’t seen her yet. I’ll have the pictures for you by tomorrow afternoon. By the way, I had to lay out three hundred to get this address.”

  “That’s all right, I guess,” she said. “I’ll pay for it if you can bring me proof about his girlfriend.”

  “All right. Let me off now. I’ll call you when I have some­thing for sure.”

  When Leonid folded the phone a colony of monkeys began chattering.

  “Yeah?”

  “You knew Gert Longman, didn’t you?” Carson Kitteridge asked.

  Ice water formed in Leonid’s lower intestine. His rectum clenched.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You asked me if I knew someone and I told you. Yeah. We were close there for a while.”

  “She’s dead.”

  Leonid remained silent for a quarter face sweep of his Timex’s second hand. That was long enough to seem as if he was shocked by the news.

  “How did it happen?”

  “Shot.”

  “By who?”

  “A man wielding a long-barreled .22 pistol.”

  “Do you have a suspect?”

  “That’s the kinda pistol you like to use, isn’t it, Leon?”

  For a moment Leonid thought that the lieutenant was just blowing smoke, trying to get under his skin. But then he re­membered a gun that he’d lost. It was seventeen years before. Nora Parsons had come to him scared to death that her hus­band, who was out on bail before sentencing in his embezzle­ment trial, was going to come kill her. Leonid had given her his pistol, and after her husband, Anton, was sentenced, she’d told him that she was afraid to have the pistol in the house so she threw it into a lake.

  It was a cold piece. Nothing to it.

  “Well?” Detective Kitteridge asked.

  “I haven’t owned a gun in twenty years, man. And even you can’t think that I’d use my own piece if I wanted to kill some­body.”

  But still he thought he might give Nora Parsons a call. Maybe.

  “I’d like you to come in for voluntary questioning, Leon.”

  “I’m busy right now. Call me later,” Leonid said, and then he disconnected the call.

  He didn’t want to be so rude to a member of New York’s Finest but Richard was coming out of the front door of Umberto’s Brazilian Food. He was accompanied by the haughty receptionist from the real estate company. Now she was wearing a red slip and black pumps with a gossamer pink shawl around her bare shoulders. Her limp brown hair was up.

  Richard glanced around the street, probably looking for Mr. DuBois, then hailed a cab.

  Leonid turned over the engine. He watched as a cab swooped down to pick them up. The driver wore a Sikh tur­ban.

  They went up to Thirty-second Street, headed east over to Park and then up to the Seventies.

  They go
t out at a building with big glass doors and two uniformed doormen.

  Almost as if they were posing, the two stopped on the street and entwined their lips in a long soul kiss. Leonid had been taking photographs since he’d hung up on the cop. He had shots of the taxi’s numbers, the driver, the front of the build­ing and the couple talking, holding hands, dueling tongues, and grasping at skin.

  They reminded Leonid of Gert, of how much he wanted her. And now she was dead. He put down his camera and bowed his head for a moment. When he raised it again Richard Mallory and the receptionist were gone.

  ~ * ~

  “You awake?” Leonid whispered in bed next to Katrina.

  It was early for him, only one-thirty. But she had been asleep for hours. He knew that.

  In the old days she was always out past three and four. Sometimes she wouldn’t come in till the sun was up-smelling of vodka, cigarettes, and men.

  Maybe if he had left her and gone to Gert. Maybe Gert would still be alive.

  “What?” Katrina said.

  “You wanna talk?”

  “It’s almost two.”

  “Somebody I been working with the last ten years died tonight,” Leonid said.

  “Are you in trouble?”

  “I’m sad.”

  For a few moments Leonid listened to her hard breath.

  “Will you hold hands with me?” the detective asked his wife.

  “My hands hurt,” she said.

  For a long time after that he lay on his back staring at the darkness before the ceiling. There was nothing he could think that did not damn him. There was nothing he had done that he could remember with pride.

  Maybe an hour later Katrina said, “Are you still up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you have a life insurance policy? I’m just worried for the kids.”

  “I got better than that. I got a life insurance philosophy.”

  “What’s that?” Katrina asked.

  “As long as I’m worth more alive than dead I won’t have to worry about banana peels and bad broth.”

  Katrina sighed and Leonid climbed out of the bed.

  Just as he got to the small TV room Twill came in the front door.

  “It’s three in the morning, Twill,” Leonid said.

  “Sorry, Dad. But I got into this thing with the Torcelli sis­ters and Bingham. It was their parents’ car so I had to wait until they were ready to go home. I told them that I was on probation but they didn’t care-”

  “You don’t have to lie to me, boy. Come on, let’s sit.”

  They sat across from each other over a low coffee table. Twill lit up a menthol cigarette and Leonid enjoyed the smoke secondhand.

  Twill was thin and on the short side but he carried himself with understated self-importance. The bigger kids left him alone and the girls were always calling. His father, whoever he was, had some Negro in him. Leonid was grateful for that. Twill was the son he felt closest to.

  “Somethin’ wrong, Dad?”

  “Why you ask that?”

  “ ‘Cause you’re not ridin’ me. Somethin’ happen?”

  “An old friend died today.”

  “A guy?”

  “No. A woman named Gert Longman.”

  “When’s the funeral?”

  “I, I don’t know,” Leonid said, realizing that he never won­dered who would bury his ex-lover. Her parents were dead. Her two brothers were in prison.

  “I’ll go with you, Dad. Just tell me when it is and I’ll cut school.”

  With that Twill got up and headed for his bedroom. At the door he stopped and turned.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  “What?”

  “What happened to the guy slammed you in the jaw?”

  “They had to carry him out.”

  Twill gave the father of his heart a thumbs-up and then moved into the darkness of the doorway.

  ~ * ~

  Leonid was at work at five. It was dark in Manhattan and in New Jersey across the river. He’d put twenty-five hundred dol­lars in Katrina’s wallet, dropped the film off at Krome Addict Four Hour Developing Service, and bought an egg sandwich with Bermuda onions and American cheese. He didn’t turn on the lights. As the morning wore on the dawn slowly invaded his room. The sky cleared and then opened-after a while it turned blue.

  Carson Kitteridge came to the door a little before seven.

  Leonid ushered him to the back office where they took their regular seats.

  “Did you and Gertie have a fight, Leo?” the cop asked.

  “No. Not really. I mean I might’a got a little fresh and she had to show me the door but I was sorry. I wanted to take her out to dinner. You’re not dumb enough to think that I would have killed Gert?”

  “If somebody gave me information that you were involved with John Wilkes Booth I’d take the time to check it out, Leon. That’s just the kind of guy I think you are.”

  “Listen, man. I have never killed anybody. Never pulled a trigger, never ordered a job done. I didn’t kill Gert.”

  “You called her,” Kitteridge said. “You called her from that phone on your desk just about when she was getting killed. It speaks to your innocence but one wonders what you had to talk to her about at that hour, on that night? What were you apologizing for?”

  “I told you-I got a little fresh.”

  “And here I thought you had a wife.”

  “Listen. She was my friend. I liked her-a lot. I don’t know who did that to her but if I find out you can be sure that I’ll let you know.”

  Kitteridge made a silent clapping gesture.

  “Get the fuck out of my office,” Leonid said.

  “I have a few more questions.”

  “Ask ‘em out in the hall.” Leonid stood up from his chair. “I’m through with you.”

  The policeman waited a moment. Maybe he thought that Leonid would sit back down. But as the seconds ticked by on the wall clock it began to dawn on him that Leonid’s feelings were actually hurt.

  “You’re serious?” he asked.

  “As a heart attack. Now get your ass outta here and come back with a warrant if you expect to talk to me again.”

  Kitteridge stood.

  “I don’t know what you’re playing here, Leon,” he said. “But you can’t put out the law.”

  “But I can put out an asshole who doesn’t have a warrant.”

  The lieutenant delayed another moment and then began to move.

  Leonid followed him down the hall and to the door, which he slammed behind the lawman. He kicked another hole in the wall and marched back to his office, where his gut began to ache from whiskey and bile.

  ~ * ~

  “Yes, Ms. Brown,” Leonid was saying to his client on the tele­phone later that afternoon. “I have the photographs right here. It wasn’t an older woman like you suspected.”

  “But it was a woman?”

  “More like a girl.”

  “Is there any question about their, um… their relationship?”

  “No. There’s no doubt of the intimate nature of their relationship. What do you want me to do with these pictures and how will we settle accounts?”

  “Can you bring them to me? To my apartment? I’ll have the money you put out and there’s one more thing that I’d like you to do.”

  “Sure I’ll come by to you if that’s what you want. What’s the address?”

  ~ * ~

  Karmen Brown lived on the sixth floor. He pressed the num­ber she gave him, sixty-two, and found her waiting at the door.

  The demure young thing had on a dark brown leather skirt that wouldn’t keep her modest if she sat without crossing her legs. Her blouse had the top three buttons undone. She wasn’t a large-breasted girl but what she had was mostly visible.

  Her delicate features were serious but Leonid wouldn’t have called her brokenhearted.

  “Come in, Mr. McGill.”