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:
“Why did your brother burglarize his home? Was that something else he did to supplement his paycheck? Is that something he still does?”
“My brother,” Miss Harrison said, drawing herself up so she gained yet another inch, “is not a thief.”
“But—”
“I don’t like talking to you,” she said abruptly. “I thought you were on our side, but I see now I was foolish. I know what happened. You called the police. You talked about pressing charges. If it weren’t for you, none of this would have happened. You’re a terrible person. Forty years, and trouble never came for us, and then you undid everything. You have brought us nothing but grief, which we can ill afford.”
She stamped her feet, an impressive gesture, small though they were. Stamped her feet and went back inside the house, taking a moment to latch the screen behind her, as if Tess’s manners were so suspect that she might try to follow where she clearly wasn’t wanted.
The shoeshine man did work at Penn Station, after all, stationed in front of the old-fashioned wooden seats that always made Tess cringe a bit. There was something about one man perched above another that didn’t sit quite right with her, especially when the other man was bent over the enthroned one’s shoes.
Then again, pedicures probably looked pretty demeaning, too, depending on one’s perspective.
“I’m really sorry, Mr. Harrison, about the mess I’ve gotten you into.” She had refused to sit in his chair, choosing to lean against the wall instead.
“Got myself into, truth be told. If I hadn’t thrown that soda can, none of this would have happened. I could have gone another forty years without anyone bothering me.”
“But you could go to prison.”
“Looks that way.” He was almost cheerful about it.
“You should get a lawyer, get that confession thrown out. Without it, they’ve got nothing.”
“They’ve got a closed case, that’s what they’ve got. A closed case. And maybe I’ll get probation.”
“It’s not a bad bet, but the stakes are awfully high. Even with a five-year sentence, you might die in prison.”
“Might not,” he said.
“Still, your sister seems pretty upset.”
“Oh, Mattie’s always getting upset about something. Our mother thought she was doing right by her, teaching her those Queen of Sheba manners, but all she did was make her perpetually disappointed. Now, if Mattie had been born just a decade later, she might have had a different life. But she wasn’t, and I wasn’t, and that’s that.”
“She did seem... refined,” Tess said, thinking of the woman’s impeccable appearance and the way she loved to stress big words.
“She was raised to be a lady. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a lady’s job. No shame in washing clothes, but no honor in it either, not for someone like Mattie. She should have stayed in school, become a teacher. But Mattie thought it would be easy to marry a man on the rise. She just didn’t figure that a man on the rise would want a woman on the rise, too, that the manners and the looks wouldn’t be enough. A man on the rise doesn’t want a woman to get out of his bed and then wash his sheets, not unless she’s already his wife. Mattie should never have dropped out of school. It was a shame, what she gave up.”
“Being a teacher, you mean.”
“Yeah,” he said, his tone vague and faraway. “Yeah. She could have gone back, even after she dropped out, but she just stomped her feet and threw back that pretty head of hers. Threw back her pretty head and cried.”
“Threw back her pretty head and cried — why does that sound familiar?”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“Threw back her pretty head... I know that, but I can’t place it.”
“Couldn’t help you.” He began whistling a tune, “Begin the Beguine.”
“Mr. Harrison — you didn’t kill that man, did you?”
“Well, now, I say I did, and why would anyone want to argue with me? And I was seen coming from his house that night, sure as anything. That neighbor, Edna Buford, she didn’t miss a trick on that block.”
“What did you hit him with?”
“An iron,” he said triumphantly. “An iron!”
“You didn’t know that two days ago.”
“I was nervous.”
“You were anything but, from what I hear.”
“I’m an old man. I don’t always remember what I should.”
“So it was an iron?”
“Definitely, one of those old-fashioned ones, cast iron. The kind you had to heat.”
“The kind,” Tess said, “that a man’s laundress might use.”
“Mebbe. Does it really matter? Does any of this really matter? If it did, would they have taken forty years to find me? I’ll tell you this much — if Maurice Dickman had been a white man, I bet I wouldn’t have been walking around all this time. He wasn’t a nice man, Mr. Dickman, but the police didn’t know that. For all they knew, he was a good citizen. A man was killed, and nobody cared. Except Edna Buford, peeking through her curtains. They should have found me long ago. Know something else?”
“What?” Tess leaned forward, assuming a confession was about to be made.
“I did put the mayonnaise on that man’s shoe. It had been a light day here, and I wanted to pick up a few extra dollars on my way home. I’m usually better about picking my marks, though. I won’t make that mistake again.”
A lawyer of Tess’s acquaintance, Tyner Gray, asked that the court throw out the charges against William Harrison on the grounds that his confession was coerced. A plea bargain was offered instead — five years probation. “I told you so,” Mr. Harrison chortled to Tess, gloating a little at his prescience.
“Lifted up her lovely head and cried,” Tess said.
“What?”
“That’s the line I thought you were quoting. You said ‘threw,’ but the line was lifted. I had to feed it through Google a few different ways to nail it, but I did. ‘Miss Otis Regrets.’ It’s about a woman who kills her lover, and is then hanged on the gallows.”
“Computers are interesting,” Mr. Harrison said.
“What did you really want? Were you still trying to protect your sister, as you’ve protected her all these years? Or were you just trying to get away from her for a while?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Mattie did no wrong in our mother’s eyes. My mother loved that girl, and I loved for my mother to be happy.”
So Martin Tull got his stat and a more-or-less clean conscience. Miss Harrison got her protective older brother back, along with his Social Security checks.
And Tess got an offer of free shoeshines for life, whenever she was passing through Penn Station. She politely declined Mr. Harrison’s gesture. After all, he had already spent forty years at the feet of a woman who didn’t know how to show gratitude.
Tim McLoughlin
When All This Was Bay Ridge
From Brooklyn Noir
Standing in church at my father’s funeral, I thought about being arrested on the night of my seventeenth birthday. It had occurred in the train yard at Avenue X, in Coney Island. Me and Pancho and a kid named Freddie were working a three-car piece, the most ambitious I’d tried to that point, and more time-consuming than was judicious to spend trespassing on city property. Two Transit cops with German shepherds caught us in the middle of the second car. I dropped my aerosol can and took off, and was perhaps two hundred feet along the beginning of the trench that becomes the IRT line to the Bronx, when I saw the hand. It was human, adult, and severed neatly, seemingly surgically, at the wrist. My first thought was that it looked bare without a watch. Then I made a whooping sound, trying to take in air, and turned and ran back toward the cops and their dogs.