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:
“Me? Nothin’. Nada. This isn’t about what anybody did to Maurie. It’s about what Maurie did to somebody else.” Elstner looked into his Diet Coke while the racket of the restaurant swelled around us. “This is obviously a story I shouldn’t be telling anybody,” he said.
“OK,” I answered, meaning I was not asking for more. Elstner rattled the cubes in his drink, chasing a necklace of tiny brown bubbles to the sides of the glass, plainly reconsidering it all, the secret and its consequences.
“This was a long time ago,” he finally said. “Before the earth had cooled. No more than a year after you and I finished law school. I was still working for Jack Barrish. You remember Jack. Wacky stuff was always going on around that office. He’s defending hookers and taking it out in trade, or trying to give me something hot — a camera, a suit — instead of half my salary. You remember.”
“I remember,” I said.
“Anyway, Jack, you know, his business clients are all Kehwahnee hustlers just like him, and this guy Maurie Moleva is one of them. Dr. Moleva. PhD. Research chemist who went into business. A few years back now, he sold off his company to some New York Stock Exchange outfit, Tinker and Something, one of those conglomerates. I read about it in the Journal, forty million bucks, fifty million, you know, pocket money to them but a piece of change. Back then, the time I’m talking about, the company was still Maurie’s.
“Moleva started out making household products, bleach and spot remover, off-brand stuff that they’d sell at the independent grocers, but by then he’s really ringing the gong selling to the military. One of his biggest contracts is for windshield washer fluid. For jeeps. Airplanes. Tanks. Helicopters. And of course, the kind of guy he is, whatever he’s got, he wants more, so the government is like, We need some chemical, HD-12 or whatever, in the washer fluid, in case we’re in the desert, the sand won’t stick. And Maurie, he’s a smart guy, we’ve got several hundred thousand troops in the jungles of Nam, no sand there, and the HD-12, I don’t know, it adds two bucks a gallon, so he tells them on the assembly line, ‘Leave it out.’
“Now the guys on the line, they’re all to a man Maurie’s people from the old country. Including Maurie’s cousin Dragon. When Cousin Dragon was about nine years old, he started in writing to Maurie, ‘America’s my dream, I need to come to America, I hate these commies over here, they’re godless tyrants, they crush the spirit of every man,’ and Maurie read these letters for about a decade. He’d never set eyes on Dragon, but like every tough SOB I ever met, he’s sort of a softie on his own time, very sentimental. So Maurie pays Dragon’s way, meets his plane, kisses Dragon’s cheeks, gives him a diamond medallion with the American flag surrounded by some vines that are a big symbol in the homeland, and puts Dragon to work on the line. Then Maurie goes off to tell everybody at the church men’s club what a hero he is for rescuing his young cousin.
“Anyway, Dragon’s here for a while and he begins to get the low-down. Maurie’s sons are driving shiny cars, they got lovely wives and big houses, and Cousin Dragon is bustin’ his hump on the line, starting at six am every day because Maurie doesn’t like his employees stuck in traffic. And long story short, Dragon begins to remember what’s so great about communism. He starts in asking, Where’s a litde more for the workin’ stiff? He even, God save the poor son of a bitch, talks on the assembly line about a union. Not smart. Maurie gets his two sons and they throw Dragon’s butt out. Literally. They toss him through the door in the middle of winter without his hat and gloves. ‘I bought your fuckin’ hat, I bought your gloves, I brought your ungrateful pink heinie here from the old country. Go.’
“Bad news for Dragon. And worse news it turns out for Maurie. Because within a few months, an Army helicopter gets caught in a desert storm and goes kerplunk in the Mojave. One survivor. Who says they went down because they couldn’t get the sand off their frigging windshield.
“So we have a big federal grand jury investigation started up. Which is where my boss Jack comes in. The G, of course, has figured out that their windshield wiper fluid doesn’t have any HD-12 in it and Maurie’s answer is, ‘Darn it, can you believe what knuckle-balls I got on my line? I need better help.’ That’s not so bad, right? As a defense? That could sell?”
It sounded OK to me, but I’d never practiced criminal law.
“It didn’t,” Elstner said. “Nope. The AUSA says, ‘Nope, we’re gonna put Maurie in the pokey, let the big boys call him Sweetie. We’re gonna forfeit Maurie’s great business ‘cause he’s a racketeer.’ ‘How you gonna do that?’Jack says. ‘This is a terrible accident.’ ‘Nope,’ says the AUSA. ‘Nope, I got a witness.’”
“Dragon.”
“You can move on to the Jeopardy round.”
“So Maurie did some time?”
“Hardly. Negative on that one, flight commander. Maurie strolled. Here’s where I come into the picture,” Elstner said.
1 made a sound to show I was getting interested.
“There was this night,” Paul said. “I get a call. Past midnight. It’s Maurie. Says he’s been phoning Boss Jack everywhere and can’t find him. When I tell Maurie that Jack went to take an emergency dep in Boston, you’d think from the sound that old Maurie was passing a stone. Finally he tells me to meet up with him instead. Now, I don’t even own a car. I have to go wake up my sister across (own. And I’m following Maurie’s directions, which take me to East Bumblefuck. There are moons of Jupiter that are closer. I’m in cornfields. And here near one of these roadside telephone booths, here at two-thirty in the goddamn morning, here is Maurie Moleva. It’s springtime. The earth is soft. Stuff is growing. The air smells of loam. There’s a bright moon. He’s in a rumpled seersucker suit. With mud up to his knees. He’s got on a straw fedora and he’s carrying a briefcase. He gets in the car and tells me to drive him home. That’s all he says. Not hello. Not thanks. Just, ‘Drive.’ The Great Communicator. At his feet he’s got the briefcase, which won’t quite close because the wooden handle of something is sticking out of it. He’s got a ring of grime under his polished fingernails, and every so often he’s jiggling a chain in one palm. In time I see the medallion — diamond, flag, vines. I didn’t have a clue right then whose it was, but still and all, this is bad voodoo. I’m definitely scared, especially a few days later when it turns out that good old Cousin Dragon is AWOL.”
“Isn’t that big trouble for Maurie?” I asked. “Prosecutors aren’t going to have to summon the oracle to figure out who’d want to disappear Dragon.”
“Yeah, well, Maurie’s not stupid. Nobody will ever hang that on him. In about a week, Dragon’s beater car turns up at the airport. So the FBI searches all the flight manifests and, can you imagine, one of them shows Dragon boarded a plane home the same night Maurie was taking mud baths in the boonies. Had a reservation and all, paid his ticket in cash. Bureau questions the guys on Maurie’s line and some are saying Dragon was talking about making some bigtime money. Couple of them are even hearing from Aunt Tatiana who heard from Cousin Lugo how Dragon’s back in the old country and acting real flush.
“Now the G, of course, they’re up Maurie’s hind end with a miner’s light, because they just know he paid off dear old Dragon to boogie. Feebies tear up every bank account, they stick Maurie’s bookkeeper in the grand jury, hoping to trace the money, but no luck. So they call Interpol to find Dragon, but he left no trail once he stepped off the plane.
“And of course, I’m young and dumb, and this is really killing me. Attorney-client, I can’t talk about what I know, and I’m too petrified to do it anyway, but one Sunday I mosey back to where I picked Maurie up, just hoping to figure all this out for my own sake. Which I pretty much do. Maurie’s in the chemical business, right? Ever hear of hazardous waste?”