The Best American Mystery Stories 2006
- Автор: Дивер Джеффри, Хантер Эван
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-51746-6
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2006». Краткое содержание книги:
“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.
“Io?”
“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 got 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?”