The Best American Mystery Stories 2005

“Don’t you want it in the papers?” Davis asked. “I believe that’s known as clearing your name.”

“Let’s go,” Callahan Jeffers said to Bruno. “She’s not going to help me if she thinks I did it.”

“I don’t think you did it,” Davis said. “But I still don’t help people who get rude in my bar.”

“What have I done that’s rude?” Jeffers asked. “You’ve been mocking me since I sat down.”

“You haven’t sat down,” Davis said. “You know what I mean.”

“What I mean,” Davis said, “is why don’t you sit down, drink some good Scotch, and ask me what you want to ask me?”

Callahan Jeffers looked at her for a second or two, and put his hat down on the bar. “Ice,” he said, “and lemon.”

“For two,” Bruno said.

Davis poured, and the gentlemen took their drinks — like you might take a hike if a very dangerous person suggested it. Bruno laid a bill on the table Davis couldn’t see, but from her bored glance it must have been enormous. She turned around and rang out change, placing her hard-earned cash on the bar before she even picked up the bill. The men let it stand. They were going to tip her later. I hated those guys. They weren’t gentlemen after all.

Jeffers took a seat and took a sip and nodded. “So,” he said, “there’s no invisibility potion in a Delmonico, right? Or the gin, brandy, and whatever don’t turn into an invisibility potion?”

“When your mother told you that there was no such thing as a stupid question,” Davis said, “you didn’t believe her, did you?”

“He’s not used to women like you is all,” Bruno said. “Since I’ve known him he goes for a different type.”

“I don’t want to hear about the type,” Davis said. “I want to hear about the girl.”

“She’s no girl,” Jeffers said. “She’s my wife. Or was. Or is. She’s gone.”

“So you say,” Davis said. “Do me a favor and don’t tell me things I know already. You’re Callahan Jeffers. You’re very rich. You’ve never worked a day in your life, and neither did your father. You were sent to Europe for what rich people call ‘schooling’ and what everybody else calls ‘school.’ When you returned you made a big splash as an eligible bachelor. You invested in things for what we might call a living. You beat up a room-service waiter during a seventy-two-hour birthday party in an enormous suite, and you gave him a lot of money and two years later the mayor had you on some special citizens’ commission on crime.”

“I was drunk,” Jeffers said. “That night in the hotel. I was very drunk and it was wrong. I’ve said it a thousand times. I had a drinking problem, and I worked it out.”

“There are many people who come into my bar and order Scotch,” Davis said. “None of them are reformed alcoholics.”

“I just said I worked it out,” Jeffers said. “That’s what I believe. What you say about paying off the waiter was true. He was a fag and I bought him what fags want, which is a condo on the beach and a handsome face. I don’t think that’s a crime. People who resent me for money would do the same thing if they had it.”

“And yet,” Davis said, “with these statements, the police nevertheless suspect you of some sort of crime.”

Callahan Jeffers stood uh, although not without first taking another gulp of his drink. If you spend time in a bar you hear a number of men snarl. I don’t know if they snarl more in bars or if that’s just where I hear them snarl, but they snarl, like some animal you find messing around in the trash, or out in the angry woods where stupid people camp. “I didn’t kill my wife!” he said. “I don’t know how she did it, but she set me up. She’s a bitch, a bitch someplace laughing at me. And she’ll keep laughing until I’m all locked up.”

“They’re not going to lock you up,” Bruno said.

“Says you.” Callahan didn’t sit down but he finished his drink. It made him look weak, the grab for the glass but still standing like he might leave.

“Says everyone, including the lawyer,” Bruno said. “There’s no body, so there’s no crime. You haven’t even been arrested.”

“Arrested,” Jeffers said. “Everything’s gone now even if the police never touch me. I killed her is what everyone thinks. Mayor’s special commission. I was going to be Mayor.”

“He was weighing the odds of running, yes,” Bruno said. “Those odds have changed.”

“My whole odds have changed with this,” Jeffers said. He looked around like he was going to spit on the floor and then looked at Davis again. What would have happened if this guy had spat on the floor’ I think of that sometimes on sleepless nights, when the sugar from the bourbon wakes me up and makes me look at life. “I’m not the mayor now. I’m just a man who killed his wife. I’m gone and she’s laughing. She’s not dead any more than I’m Santa Claus. She fucked me somehow. I don’t get it. No one gets it. Bruno said maybe you might.”