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:
Lana had included a copy of the letter to her mother in the lawyer’s envelope. She asked him to help her get justice for her father.
Leonid washed his hands carefully and then removed any sign that he had been in the girl’s apartment. He rubbed down every surface and the glass he drank from. He gathered the evidence he’d brought and the unmailed letters, then buttoned his coat over the bloody shirt and hurried away from the crime scene.
Twill was wearing a dark blue suit with a pale yellow shirt and maroon tie that had a wavering blue line orbiting its center. Leonid wondered where his son got such a fine suit but he didn’t ask.
They were the only two in the small funeral parlor chapel where Gert Longman lay in an open pine coffin. She looked smaller than she had in life. Her stiff face seemed to be fashioned from wax.
The Wyant brothers fronted him fifty-five hundred dollars for the funeral. They gave him their preferential rate of two points a week.
Leonid lingered at the casket while Twill stood to the side-half a step behind him.
Behind the pair two rows of folding chairs sat like a mute crowd of spectators. The director had set the room for a service but Leonid didn’t know if Gert was religious. Neither did he know any of her friends.
After the forty-five minutes they were allotted Twill and Leonid left the Little Italy funeral home. They came out onto I he bright sun shining on Mott Street.
“Hey, Leon,” a voice called from behind them.
Twill turned but Leonid did not.
Carson Kitteridge, dressed in a dark gold suit, walked up.
“Lieutenant. You met my son Twill.”
“Isn’t it a school day, son?” the cop asked.
“Grief leave, Officer,” Twill said easily. “Even prison lets up in cases like that.”
“What you want, Carson?” Leonid said.
He looked up over the policeman’s head. The sky was what Gert used to call blue-gorgeous. That was back in the days when they were still lovers.
“I thought that you might want to know about Mick Bright.”
“Who?”
“We got an anonymous call five days ago,” Carson said. “It was about a disturbance in an apartment building on the Upper East Side.”
“Yeah?”
“When the officers got there they found a dead girl named Lana Parsons and this Mick Bright-also dead.”
“Who killed ‘em?” Leonid asked, measuring his breath.
“Looks like a rape and robbery. The kid was an addict. He knew the girl from the Performing Arts high school.”
“But you said that he was dead too?”
“I did, didn’t I? Best the detectives could tell the kid was high and fell on his own gun. It went off and nicked his heart.”
While saying this Carson stared deeply into McGill’s eyes.
Twill glanced at his father and then looked away.
“Stranger things have happened,” Leonid said.
Leonid had long since realized that Lana found the pistol in her mother’s metal box too. He knew why she’d killed Gert and had Bright kill her. She wanted to hurt him and then send him off to prison like he’d done to her father.
It was as good a frame as he would have thought up himself. The lawyer would make the letters available to the cops. Once they suspected Leonid they’d match his semen inside her. She would expect him to have kept the expensive jewelry. Robbery, rape, and murder and he would have been as innocent as Joe Haller.
I’d die for him, she’d said. She was talking about her father.
“I been knowing about the case for days,” Kitteridge said. “The girl’s name stuck in my head and then I remembered. Lana Parsons was the daughter of Nora Parsons. You ever hear of her?”
“Yeah. I brought her information about her husband. She was considering a divorce.”
“That’s right,” Kitteridge said. “But he wasn’t fooling around. He was embezzling money from their own company. They sent him to jail on the dirt you dug up.”
“Yeah.”
“He died in prison, didn’t he?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Leonid burned the letters Lana had intended to incriminate him.
His work for Lana’s mother had driven the girl to murder and suicide. For a while he considered sending the photograph of Richard and his girlfriend to Lana’s mother. At least he could accomplish one thing that she intended to do. But he decided against it. Why hurt Nora when he was just as guilty?
He kept the picture, though, in the top drawer of his desk.
The shot of Richard with his hand up under the receptionist’s red dress, out on Park Avenue after a spicy Brazilian feast. Next to that he had placed an item from the New York Post. It was a thumbnail article about a prisoner on Ryker’s Island named Joe Haller. He’d been arrested for robbery. While waiting to stand trial he hung himself in his cell.
Joyce Carol Oates
So Help Me God
From The Virginia Quarterly Review
Phone rings. My cousin Andrea answers.
It’s a pelting-rain weekday evening last April, just past 7 P.M. and dark as midnight.
Without so much as glancing toward me Andrea picks up the receiver as if she’s in her own home and not mine, shifting her infant daughter onto her left hip in a way to make you think of a migrant farm wife in a classic Walker Evans photograph of the 1930s.
Phone rings! I will wish I’d snatched the receiver from her hand, slammed it down before any words were exchanged.
But Andrea is answering in her wishing-to-be-surprised high school voice, not taking time to squint at the caller ID my husband, a St. Lawrence County law enforcement officer, has had installed for precisely these evenings when he’s on the night shift and his young wife is alone in this house in the country except for the accident of Andrea dropping by with the baby and interfering with my life.
“Yes? Who is this?”
Andrea laughs, blinking and staring past me. Whoever is on the other end of the line is intriguing to her, I can see.
I’m checking the digital code which has come up UNAVAILABLE. Sometimes it reads NO DATA GIVEN which is the same as UNAVAILABLE and a signal you don’t want to pick up. At least, I don’t. In Au Sable Forks, which is the center and circumference of my world, everyone is acquainted with everyone else and has been so since grade school. It’s rare that an unknown name comes up for on the fingers of one hand I can count the people likely to be calling me at this or any hour which is why ordinarily I’d have let UNAVAILABLE leave a message on the machine figuring it must be for my husband.
UNAVAILABLE could be anyone. Like seeing on your doorstep a hulking individual wearing a paper bag over his head, or a ski mask. Do you throw open the door?
I could wring Andrea’s neck the way she’s smiling, shaking her head, “Which one? Who?” opening the damn door wide. Wish I’d never called her this afternoon hinting I was lonely.
This pelting rain! The kind of rain that hammers at your head like unwanted thoughts.
Andrea hands over the phone saying in a low thrilled voice, “It’s this person won’t identify himself but I think it’s Pitman.”
Pitman! My husband. His first name is Luke but everyone calls him Pitman.
Andrea shivers giving me the receiver. There has been this shivery thing between her and Pitman dating back to before Pitman and I were married. When I’m in a suspicious mood I think it might predate my meeting Pitman when I was fourteen, an honors student vowing to remain a virgin all my life. I’ve never confronted either of them.