The Best American Mystery Stories 2005
- Автор: Хиггинс Джордж, Камински Стюарт Мелвин
- Год: 2005
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-51744-2
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2005». Краткое содержание книги:
“I told her that night to just go, just put as much country as she could between you and her until I got out. I told her to trust no one. I told her you’d stay hot on her trail even when all logic said you’d quit. I told her even if I told you 1 had it, you’d have to cover your bets — you’d have to come looking for her.”
Your father looks at his watch, looks off at the sky again.
“I told her if you ever caught up to her, to take you to the fairground.”
“Who’s this we’re talking about?”
“Gwen.” Saying her name to the air, to the flapping tarps, to the cold.
“You don’t say.” Your father’s gun comes out now. He taps it against his outer knee.
“Told her to tell you that’s all she knew. I’d hid it here. Somewhere here.”
“Lotta ground.”
You nod.
Your father turns so you are facing, his hands crossed over his groin, the gun there, waiting.
“The kinda money that stone’ll bring,” your father says, “a man could retire.”
“To what?” you say.
“Mexico.”
“To what, though?” you say. “Mean old man like you? What else you got, you ain’t stealing something, killing somebody, making sure no one alive has a good fucking day?”
The old man shrugs, and you watch his brain go to work, something bugging him finally, something he hasn’t considered until now.
“It just come to me,” he says.
“What’s that?”
“You’ve known for, what, three years now that Gwen is no more?”
“Dead.”
“If you like,” your father says. “Dead.”
“Yeah.”
“Three years,” your father says. “Lotta time to think.”
You nod.
“Plan.”
You give him another nod.
Your father looks down at the gun in his hand. “This going to fire?”
You shake your head.
Your father says, “It’s loaded. I can feel the mag weight.”
“Jack the slide,” you say.
He gives it a few seconds and then tries. He yanks back hard, bending over a bit, but the slide is stone.
“Krazy Glue,” you say. “Filled the barrel too.”
You pull your hand from your pocket, open up the knife. You’re very talented with a knife. Your father knows this. He’s seen you win money this way, throwing knives at targets, dancing blades between your fingers in a blur.
You say, “Wherever you buried her, you’re digging her out.”
The old man nods. “I got a shovel in the trunk.”
You shake your head. “With your hands.”
Dawn is coming up, the sky bronzed with it along the lower reaches, when you let the old man use the shovel. His nails are gone, blood crusted black all over the older cuts, red seeping out of the newer ones. The old man broke down crying once. Another lime he got mean, told you you weren’t his anyway, some whore’s kid he found in a barrel, decided might come in useful on a missing-baby scam they were running back then.
You say, “Was this in Las Vegas? Or Idaho?”
When the shovel hits bone, you say, “Toss it back up here,” and step back as the old man throws the shovel out of the grave.
The sun is up now, and you watch the old man claw away the dirt for a while, and then there she is, all black and rotted, bones exposed in some places, her rib cage reminding you of the scales of a large fish you saw dead on a beach once in Oregon.
The old man says, “Now what?” and tears flee his eyes and drip off his chin.
“What’d you do with her clothes?”
“Burned ’em.”
“I mean, why’d you take ’em off in the first place?”
The old man looks back at the bones, says nothing.
“Look closer,” you say. “Where her stomach used to be.”
The old man squats, peering, and you pick up the shovel.
Until Gwen, you had no idea who you were. None. During Gwen, you knew. After Gwen, you’re back to wondering.
You wait. The old man keeps cocking and recocking his head to get a better angle, and finally, finally, he sees it.
“Well,” he says, “I’ll be damned.”
You hit him in the head with the shovel, and the old man says, “Now, hold on,” and you hit him again, seeing her face, the mole on her left breast, her laughing once with a mouth full of popcorn. The third swing makes the old man’s head tilt funny on his neck, and you swing once more to be sure and then sit down, feet dangling into the grave.
You look at the blackened, shriveled thing lying below your father, and you see her face with the wind coming through the car and her hair in her teeth and her eyes seeing you and taking you into her like food, like blood, like what she needed to breathe, and you say, “I wish...” and sit there for a long time with the sun beginning to warm the ground and warm your back and the breeze returning to make those tarps flutter again, desperate and soft.
“I wish I’d taken your picture,” you say finally. “Just once.”
And you sit there until it’s almost noon and weep for not protecting her and weep for not being able to know her ever again, and weep for not knowing what your real name is, because whatever it is or could have been is buried with her, beneath your father, beneath the dirt you begin throwing back in.
Laura Lippman
The Shoeshine Man’s Regrets
From Murder... and All That Jazz
“Bruno Magli?”
“Uh-uh. Bally.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Some kids get flashcards of farm animals when they’re little. I think my mom showed me pictures of footwear cut from magazines. After all, she couldn’t have her only daughter bringing home someone who wore white patent loafers, even in the official season between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Speaking of which — there’s a full Towson.”
“Wow — white shoes and white belt and white tie, and ten miles south of his natural habitat, the Baltimore County courthouse. I thought the full Towson was on the endangered clothing list.”
“Bad taste never dies. It just keeps evolving.”
Tess Monaghan and Whitney Talbot were standing outside the Brass Elephant on a soft June evening, studying the people ahead of them in the valet parking line. A laundry truck had blocked the driveway to the restaurant’s lot, disrupting the usually smooth operation, so the restaurant’s patrons were milling about, many agitated. There was muttered talk of symphony tickets and the Orioles game and the Herzog retrospective at the Charles Theatre.
But Tess and Whitney, mellowed by martinis, eggplant appetizers, and the perfect weather, had no particular place to go and no great urgency about getting there. They had started cataloging the clothes and accessories of those around them only because Tess had confided to Whitney that she was trying to sharpen her powers of observation. It was a reasonable exercise in self-improvement for a private detective — and a great sport for someone as congenitally catty as Whitney.
The two friends were inventorying another man’s loafers — Florsheim, Tess thought, but Whitney said good old-fashioned Weejuns — when they noticed a glop of white on one toe. And then, as if by magic, a shoeshine man materialized at the elbow of the Weejun wearer’s elbow.
“You got something there, mister. Want me to give you a quick shine?”
Tess, still caught up in her game of cataloging, saw that the shoeshine man was old, but then, all shoeshine men seemed old these days. She often wondered where the next generation of shoeshine men would came from, if they were also on the verge of extinction, like the Towson types who sported white belts with white shoes. This man was thin, with a slight stoop to his shoulders and a tremble in his limbs, his salt-and-pepper hair cropped close. He must be on his way home from the train station or the Belvedere Hotel, Tess concluded, heading toward a bus stop on one of the major east-west streets farther south, near the city’s center.