The Best American Mystery Stories 2002
- Автор: Грейди Джеймс, Камински Стюарт Мелвин
- Год: 2002
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-12494-7
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2002». Краткое содержание книги:
He was a tall, athletic blond man in his early thirties, with a surfer’s tan, a hawk nose, and cold blue eyes that just saved his face from true male beauty. He was also a repo man for Daniel Kearny Associates at 340 Eleventh Street in San Francisco.
“Nobody needs a frozen Milky Way,” Bart Heslip pointed out.
He too was very well conditioned, early thirties, shorter, thicker, plum black, and with the shaved head currently in favor among African American males. After winning thirty-nine out of forty pro fights, he had quit the ring to become a repo man for DKA.
“I’ve been working out really hard,” explained Ballard. “My blood-sugar level is way down.”
“We can’t have you going hypoglycemic before you win that black belt,” said Heslip. “Ray Chong’s it is — after you take me back to my car in Pacific Heights.”
Above the door of the narrow Eleventh Street storefront sandwiched between a tire repair shop and an auto supply store run by Persians in turbans was the legend PEKING GROCERY STORE — CHINESE DELICACIES in English letters and Chinese characters.
The owner, Ray Chong Fat, was anything but. Ray was skinny and stooped, with a thin face, not much chin, a long upper lip, and lank black hair. As always, he wore a highly starched white shirt, the cuffs rolled up two turns over his skinny wrists, the collar two sizes too big for his scrawny neck.
Ray was a widower with seven, count ’em, seven daughters. And not even one lousy little son. One daughter in grad school, two in college, two in high school, one in elementary school, one just about to enter kindergarten. Seven daughters meant a lot of expenses, which meant a lot of hard work for Ray.
But he was a satisfied man, whistling tunelessly to himself as he stocked the shelves with assorted cans of exotic fruit: rambutan canned with pineapple; soursops; jackfruit in syrup; and of course Chinese lychees.
The rest of the narrow store was jammed with Chinese yams and cabbage; mandarins and mangoes and pawpaws and star fruit; dried and salted squid; frozen ducks and fish, frozen candy bars and ice cream bars, green tea and chow mein noodles and dried rice noodles and sweet rice candies, all redolent with the smell of strange spices. The shelves in the back room bulged with rental videos, all in Chinese and most shot in Hong Kong. Romance and martial arts were the favorites.
The front door jangled its little bell. The familiar salt-and-pep-per team from down the street came in.
“Hey, got riddle,” exclaimed Ray in his high-pitched singsong voice. “Why Chinese so smart?”
“I don’t know, Ray,” said Ballard. “Why are they?”
“No blondes.” Ray went off into gales of high hee-hee-hee-hee laughter. Heslip shook his shaved head.
“It’s what I always tell you, Larry. Inscrutable.”
Two jokes and a riddle later, they headed for the door. A slight man was getting a violin case out of a red Lexus when they emerged. Ballard waved the frozen Milky Way after him.
“Not my idea of the third violin at the symphony.”
“Maybe it isn’t a violin in the case,” chuckled Bart.
The bell tinkled. A short, swarthy man with a nose as big as a parrot’s was coming up the aisle toward Ray. The man wore a very expensive suit and carried a violin case. Ray wreathed his lean face in a welcoming smile full of prominent teeth.
“Yessir, yessir, help you, sir?”
“Yeah, you freaking slope, you can help me,” said Knuckles.
Ray Chong Fat’s eyes became flat and stupid.
“No savvy,” he said.
Knuckles set his violin case on the counter.
“Know what I hear? I hear some Chinaman is running an unsanctioned Asian card club for the really high rollers in this town once or twice a month, on the weekends.”
“No savvy,” said Ray Chong Fat.
“I hear this freaking Chink’s got a game planned this weekend. I hear a certain gentleman in the South Bay don’t like that shit, get my drift?”
“No savvy.” A drop of sweat ran down Ray Chong Fat’s nose.
Knuckles Colucci unsnapped the violin case. He opened it. “Take a look at that,” he said.
Ray Chong Fat looked into the case. He paled.
“Yeah, you savvy that okay, slope,” said Knuckles. He closed the case, resnapped it, waggled a finger under Ray’s nose. “Don’t do it no more,” he said.
“I need a beer,” said Bart Heslip.
It was nine-thirty that same night, and he and Ballard, working in tandem, had scored two repos each.
“Nobody needs a beer,” Larry Ballard pointed out.
“This is thirsty work.”
“Okay. Ray’ll be open for another half-hour at least.”
But Ray Chong Fat’s store had the CLOSED sign out, even though light still glowed from the back room. They rapped on the glass and rattled the door. In this neighborhood, even DKA had alarms on the doors and heavy mesh screens on the ground-floor windows. Ray had neither.
“How many years have we been coming here and he’s never been closed before ten o’clock?” asked Ballard.
Bart said softly, “Maybe it wasn’t a violin.”
Ray’s door was no proof against their lockpicks. They were halfway down the length of the store when the door of the back room opened and Ray came out. Even in the dim light he looked drawn and wasted.
“Go ’way! We closed.”
“After you tell us what’s wrong.”
Over green tea and delicate almond cakes in the video room, they got the story out of him. The little man with his threats and the violin case with anything but a violin inside.
“It’s easy,” said Bart. “Just cancel the game.”
“Two year ago, number three daughter real sick, ’member?”
“We remember.” They had gotten up a cash donation at DKA.
“Go to Chinese Benevolent Association, borrow money. Lots of money.” He opened his arms wide. “Big interest.”
“Not so benevolent?” suggested Bart.
Ray nodded morosely, sipped tea. They ate almond cakes.
“Man come, say I gotta run weekend Asian card club to pay off loan. If I won’t, he say they do things to my daughters.”
“They needed a front,” said Larry. “At least the loan—”
“Never get loan paid off. Only pay off interest.”
“You know the guy with the violin case?” asked Bart.
Ray shook his head vigorously.
“Know who sent the guy with the violin case?”
“Somebody in South Bay.” Ray started wringing his hands with the theatricality of true emotion. “What I do?”
“You hold the game and save your daughters,” said Ballard.
“Then man with violin come back and kill me.”
The two repo men looked at each other.
“No,” said Heslip.
“Why is sex like insurance?” asked Rosenkrantz.
“The older you are, the more it costs,” said Guildenstern.
“Their jokes are worse than Ray’s,” said Bart Heslip.
It was six A.M. Thursday. He and Larry were with the two bulky SFPD homicide cops in the upstairs conference room at DKA, where they had total privacy because nobody could get up the stairs without making noise. The cops had insisted on this since they were outside department regs just being there.
Rosenkrantz was bald as Kojak and Guildenstern had hair that looked fake but wasn’t. It was rumored in the department that even their wives called them by their nicknames.
When they did good cop/bad cop, Guildenstern was always the bad cop. He had the eyes for it. He said, “You guys been talking for ten minutes and you ain’t given us anything we’d be ashamed to tell our mothers.”
“Only thing could embarrass your mothers is that they are your mothers,” said Heslip.