The Best American Mystery Stories Part 28

The shrill ring of the phone wakes me. I know it is Eleanor before I roll across the bed to the phone and pick it up; no one else calls me.

"Look," she says, "I can't come out there." Her voice has lost its brittle, bullying edge and is softer, almost apologetic.

"I didn't ask you to."

"Well, I can't. I stayed with that man for him. And look what it did." She begins to sob into the phone. "They'll stone me right out of town. I should be stoned. But I can't travel five hundred miles just for that. I've got a bad back."

The strength of her guilt overwhelms me and I sit down on the floor. "You don't have to come out, Eleanor. That's all right."

Her jagged sobs travel across the phone lines to me. "He's still my son, though. Maybe he didn't do it, Darlene. Maybe not. But if he did, he's a monster, and I created him."

I stay sitting cross-legged on the bed with the phone pressed against my ear and listen to her cry for what seems like hours, before she slips the phone onto the receiver and the dial tone buzzes across the line.

I stay seated, with the phone cradled in my lap. I watch the light crawl across the floor toward me as the sun rises. Eleanor has not disowned him, and she will not disown him, despite her anger and sadness. But I might still be able to cut myself off from him, to save one of us from this mess. I know I have to see him first, though, with the same kind of irrational deep-in-my-bones knowledge that Eleanor knows that she cannot come out. I need to know what I pushed him to. I wash my face and get dressed in a pair of gray slacks and a cream sweater, then slap on some makeup so that I don't look like a ghost. The rouge only succeeds in making me look like an eerie combination of a corpse and a clown. 1 shrug and walk out the door.

I get into my car and begin to drive the silvery blue convertible, the one that my husband gave me for my last birthday, that I now think of as a guilt present, and hear the ba.s.s-voiced DJ mention him on the radio. It's nothing more than they've been saying for the past month: crimes committed, neighbors interviewed, victims' mothers crying, but somehow, it seems like it means something. Perhaps there are no coincidences, and, when our fat Elvis married us, after he asked, "Is there anyone to object to these two getting hitched?" and the Priscilla look-alike in a white minidress and tall black beehive who was taking pictures at the ceremony fainted, it meant something. I put my foot on the accelerator and drive faster toward the county jail, tell them who I am, submit to their weapons check, and find myself sitting across a scarred wooden table from my husband.

His hair looks darker than it has before, smoothed tightly against his skull, and his dry lips are riddled with cracks. "Darlene," he says, then falls silent.

We stare at the table. My nail polish has chipped, and I can't seem to move my eyes away from the jagged red. I blink, and, with my eyes closed, say, "Did you do it? To those girls? When I was at home, sleeping, did you?"

He says my name again, softer.

"I need to know." I open my eyes, but I still can't look at him.

"Are you leaving me?" His voice breaks.

"I'm trying." I look up now at his face, the lines that have deepened, that I did not even notice when staring at him across our dining room table. "What, I mean, did I. . ."

He cuts me off, his voice stronger now. "Do you remember that last fight that we had? When I told you that you pushed me to elope? I was glad you pushed me, I am glad. If you leave, I understand, but I'm glad. Since I've been here, I've had this dream . . ."

"You've been sleeping?"

"Listen, I've had this dream," he continues. He sounds so certain, more certain than I've ever heard him before. He looks so weak, but his voice, his conviction, seems so solid. I can't quite find my soft-spoken husband in this Henry. "In it, you were cutting out my patient's wisdom teeth, and then you handed things over to me to finish up."

"Oral surgery?" I mumble. "I was performing oral surgery?"

He continues. "That dream." He takes a deep breath. "The good stuff, Darlene, that was because of you."

He is only saying this, I think, to get me to stay. I can't only be responsible for the good parts, and imagine I had nothing to do with the rest. I wonder how many times I let him lie to me in the past several years. "Is this what you prayed about?" I ask.

"No, that was about us."

I shake my head at him. I don't believe him.

"Darlene, it'll be all right," he whispers, as though my name means something to him, as though it will mean something to me to hear it on his dry lips, and I recognize the man that I lived with, the way he chanted the same words again and again, until the words became a soothing white noise like the sounds of a heavy rain, when we waited together for the results of my lumpectomy.

"I'll plead, if that's what you want me to do. I'll plead any way you'd like. We can still settle."

"Stop. Please," I shake my head. I do not want to know these details.

Then, he looks down at his hands, and I follow his glance. His hands look stiff, and weak, no longer the strong, smooth hands that had wrapped around my shoulders, and I suddenly know for certain, in a way that I had not known until now, that he did it, and that I loved him, all of him, while he did it. My chest heaves. Hadn't I loved his strength, his ability to move all the furniture into our first apartment without help, and tried to make him stronger, to make him more forceful? Hadn't that been how he did it, force, muscles?

These are the same hands that touched me, caressed my belly and b.r.e.a.s.t.s with shaky, unsure strokes and left those bruises, heavy welts, swollen eyes, and split lips on those girls, wrapped ropes around their wrists, shook them and tore them and held them down in their own beds. My lungs tighten and seem to quiver within me, then I close my eyes, stand up, and walk out of the room. He calls after me, but I do not answer. I'm afraid of what I'll push him to, what lies I'll let myself believe, if I stay. I always wanted a more aggressive lover, someone to grab me and dispense with the foreplay, someone who I would not have to seduce. That was what our arguments were always about - he was not strong enough, not man enough. Not to me, at least. It is horrible, what happened to those girls, but my shame is that I feel worse that it was not enough for him to do those things to me. If he had truly wanted me, with an overpowering desire that obliterates all thoughts, wouldn't he have done those things to me? My hair would have been ripped from my skull, welts left on my neck from his grip, nose bloodied when he shoved me into the headboard, bite marks left on my b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Isn't this what I dreamed about, the love of a strong man, a man who, in the middle of the night, stormed into my room and threw me down on the bed, twisted my arms behind me swiftly, tore off my nightgown and, with it, bits of my flesh, and left me covered with his sweat and s.e.m.e.n and my own blood, forever changed by him? Had he truly loved me, it would have been me, and not them, and I have to leave him. This is the truly unspeakable, I think, as I look down at my own thin hands, their bony frailness, desperately in need of a manicure.

SCOTT TUROW.

Loyalty.

From Playboy.

THIS HAPPENED, the first part, four or five years before everything else. In those days I was still sweeping a lot of stuff under the rug with Clarissa, and we didn't see the Elstners often, because my wife, given the history, was never really at ease around Paul and Ann. Instead, every few months, Paul Elstner and I would take in a game on our own -- basketball in the winter, baseball in the summer - meeting first for an early dinner usually at Gil's, near the University Field House, formerly Gil's Men's Bar and still a bastion of a lost world, with its walls wainscoted in sleek oak.

And so we were there, feeling timeless, telling tales about our cases and our kids, when this character came to a halt near our table. I could feel Elstner start at the sight of him. The man had a generation on us, putting him near seventy at this point. He was in a longhair cashmere topcoat, with a heavy cuff link winking on his sleeve and his spa.r.s.e hair puffed up in a fifty-dollar do. But he was the kind you couldn't really dress up. Fie was working a toothpick in his mouth, and on his meaty face there was a harsh look of ingrained self-importance. He was a tough mug, you could see it, the kind whose father had come over on the boat and who had grown up hard himself.

"Christ," Elstner whispered. He'd raised his menu to surround his face. "Christ, don't look at him. Oh, Christ." Elstner has always run a little over the margins. Never mind the dumb stuff twenty years before when we were law school roommates. But even now, a married grownup with two daughters, Paul would ride around in the dead of winter with his car windows open so he wouldn't kill himself with his own cigar smoke, a pair of yellow headphones mounted over his earm.u.f.fs so he could rock with the Rolling Stones despite the onrushing wind. Looking at him with the two sides of the menu pushed against his ears, even though he was twice the size of the guy he was hiding from, I figured, It's Elstner.

"Maurie Moleva," Paul said when the old guy at last had moved on. "I just didn't want him remembering I'm still alive." Elstner swallowed hard on the hunk of schnitzel he'd stopped chewing when Moleva appeared.

I asked what it was Paul had done to Maurie.

"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 c.o.ke 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 gla.s.s, 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 a.s.sembly 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 G.o.dless 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, G.o.d save the poor son of a b.i.t.c.h, talks on the a.s.sembly line about a union. Not smart. Maurie gets his two sons and they throw Dragon's b.u.t.t out. Literally. They toss him through the door in the middle of winter without his hat and gloves. 'I bought your f.u.c.kin' 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-b.a.l.l.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 b.u.mblef.u.c.k. 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 h.e.l.lo. 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. n.o.body 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?"

"That's how Clarissa describes our marriage."

Elstner stopped to laugh. "Yeah, right. Well, this place, these days you'd call it a brownfield, a disposal site. My guess, it was owned by the outfit that hauled Maurie's stuff. Today, with the EPA, you probably have to have the Marines posted at the perimeter, but back then there's just a chainlink fence, and you can see somebody did a number on the padlock. Inside there are all these trenches, each longer than a football field, set about twenty yards apart and filled with rock and soil. The last one's open, maybe three, four feet deep with Styrofoam liner, and a couple dozen fifty-five-gallon drums of s.h.i.t in there waiting to be buried."

"And 'RIP Dragon' written on one of the drums. Is that how it adds?"

"That's my arithmetic. I figure Dr. Maurie told Dragon he'd send him home rich, then took the guy down instead. Fella like Maurie, he'd kill you sooner than let you put the squeeze on him."

"And who got on the airplane with Dragon's pa.s.sport?"

"My bet? One of the sons. Cousins, there's probably some resemblance. Besides, something like this stays at home."

"That's why you quit on Jack?"

"Hey, after this one, a nice real estate deal, that sounded just right. And even so, I've been scared all these years Maurie was gonna come for me with his meat ax or his latrine shovel or whatever it was he had in that briefcase. That's why this tale never got told. I mean," Elstner said, looking across the table, "how can you tell anyone a story like this?"

So that was what my pal Paul Elstner had told me several years before. By now I was seeing a good deal of Paul, because I had left Clarissa. I barely got out at first, but one of Paul's partners had deserted Elstner on their season tickets for the Hands basketball games over at the university, and I was happy to buy in.

Like most people who split up, I had told myself that I was starting a new life, a better life, a life in which I'd finally become my true self, but turmoil consumed most of my private moments, confining me within walls of pain. It is such a mystery, really, that you can stop loving someone. You grow up believing love is one of the epic forces of nature, like tidal patterns and the creeping of the earth's crust, an indomitable element. So how can it just go away? I would turn this question over in my head for hours at a time, sitting in my bare high-rise apartment and watching the city twinkle desolately at night.

I didn't know if I had married Clarissa for the wrong reasons or if she had changed, with the babies, the years at home, the death of her older sister and her mother. I could not explain why a somewhat wry, laconic woman, whom I'd found thrillingly bright when I first met her, became so obsessed with her children's health that barely a week pa.s.sed without a visit to the pediatrician, or why at the age of forty' a person who had been a defiant atheist returned to the Catholic Church and insisted, with the same ferocity with which she had once spurned religion, that the boys be baptized in a faith I did not share. I could not explain any of it, the pa.s.sions or the quirks that had grown unbearably grating over time, but we had ended up like most couples who don't make it - embittered rivals who saw each other as emblems of life's shortcomings.

My sons had remained with their mother. At all moments, I seemed to feel them behind me, like pa.s.sengers left on some pier. They were both in high school, a soph.o.m.ore and a senior. I felt awful for them. But I felt worse for myself.

I moved into an apartment building in Center City, not far from work. The building's population was mostly young, late-twenties just-getting-starteds. I was weirdly aware of the number who moved out each week. Common sense suggested that they had fallen in love and were relocating to begin a life with someone else. The sight of furniture on dollies, of bags and boxes piled in the service elevator, seemed to seize all of my attention, like somebody calling my name.

I turned into one of those people who arrive home for a night alone, carrying as much as possible - the cleaning, something I'd had repaired, and a few groceries for dinner. Twice a week I saw my sons. The other nights I tried not to drink too much, certain that this cataclysm would finally make me the gentle alcoholic my father was in his later years, always waiting for sunset and the first Manhattan. I had been told that women would find a successful single man in his late forties magnetic, but I felt too sad even to start in that direction. Eventually, I began attending the kind of tony intellectual events around the city at which I'd envisioned myself when I first came here for law school and which Clarissa for years had derided as a complete bore - art openings, symphonies, lectures. There were few singles at these events, and I often felt out of place, but I was desperate to make some effort at self-improvement.

One of these evenings, involving a fundraising dinner and a reading by a poet celebrated in circles too narrow to mean much to me, was held in the West Bank condo of old acquaintances, Leo Levitz, a shrink, and his wife, Ruth, whose industrial-design firm has been an off-and-on client of mine for years. In their late sixties, the Levitzes had achieved an enviable settled grace. Vivid paintings and objects of primitive art they'd gathered from around the world crowded the track-lit corridors of their apartment. Alone, I studied each piece, deeply struck that a congenial married life could be reflected by such tangible beauty.

By ten, the gathering had thinned and I prepared to shirk the pretense I had made of being cheerful, humorous, of feeling I was of interest to other people. Shortly, I would again be on my own. I bade the Levitzes goodbye. Waiting in the small corridor outside their door for the elevator, I heard a vague thudding. I swore out loud when I realized it was the skylight overhead.

"I'm sorry?" A tall woman with straight black hair was working the key into the lock of her apartment across the hall. I'd noticed her once or twice during the evening, especially as she'd departed immediately before me. She smiled sociably, revealing a front tooth lapped over its neighbor. She had a long face and dark eyes, a woman close to my age who knew she still retained much of the appeal of youth.

"Is it raining out there?" I asked. It was fall, late November, and the prediction had been snow rather than rain. Without an umbrella, my topcoat would become sodden and emit a repellent scent that would taint the close air of my apartment.

"Take a look." Across the threshold, she gestured to her living room window. Staring down, I could make out both rain and snow, leaving a lethal glister on the streets. The smarter taxi drivers, who valued their lives and property, would already have called it a night.

She introduced herself as Karen Kolmar. Her apartment had soft yellow walls and deep Chinese rugs. A book about Coco Chanel was open on a c.o.c.ktail table. We talked about the poet who'd read.

"His work seemed cold to me," she said. "But I suppose a lot of it was just over my head." She shrugged, not much concerned.

I would have said the same thing, I told her, but lacked the strength of character to admit it.

"I'm at peace as a middlebrow," she answered. I liked her. Self-awareness seemed a particularly appealing trait at the moment.

She asked whether it was the Levitzes or poetry that had brought me around, and in no time I had explained my situation in life, saying far too much about Clarissa. Karen Kolmar smiled philosophically. She was not wearing a wedding ring and no doubt had encountered her share of guys like me.

In fact, I soon picked out a photo of a fellow I figured for her beau, given the prominence with which the picture was displayed on the closed ebony lid of a baby grand in the corner. A healthy-looking older guy, he seemed mildly familiar, if only for his buoyant smile that appeared all too obviously manufactured for the sake of the camera. Looking at the photograph, I sized up my hostess's situation. A divorce. Some money. This guy who was at least ten years too old for her but who probably paid a lot of attention. That, I was slowly coming to realize, was one more sadness in divorce, not merely getting to the middle of your life and confessing that the most basic things had not worked out but finding that you're one of life's bench players waiting to get on the court again with the rest of the second string.

"That's my father," she told me when she caught my eye. "I just put up his picture a couple of days ago. We're having a rapprochement. My mother died and so we're being nice to one another. It might not last. We didn't speak for two years before this."

She asked if my parents were living. Neither was. Like her, I'd lost my mother recently. I wondered all the time if I would have left Clarissa but for that, if I'd hung on to my marriage for years for my mother's sake. I thought I might have. I told her that - I seemed willing to say anything, and she to listen to it appreciatively.

"I'm trying to figure out if my father is why I have trouble with men," she said.

She didn't seem to me to have much problem with men. She knew what she was doing.

"Three-time loser," she added and waggled the fourth finger of her left hand.

"G.o.d, three times," I said, before I could catch myself. "I'd throw myself under a train."

That could have gone badly, but her look was sadly sympathetic.

"It gets easier," she said. "Unfortunately." She didn't have kids, though. That was different. She asked if I was thinking of going back. I wasn't, although Clarissa, after weeks in which she'd been shrill and recklessly accusing - no one person could ever love me as much as I wanted to be loved; I was trying to change her because I could not change myself - had recently turned plaintive. After all this time, she asked me. After all this time? It was the only thing that ever had any resonance.

When I got ready to leave, Karen emerged from another room with an umbrella.

"I won't melt," I said.

"You can bring it back." She smiled, enjoying the fact that she was so far ahead of me. Walking me to the door, she took my arm.

I was quite happy until, halfway downstairs in the elevator, it came to me that she looked a good deal like Clarissa.

I brought the umbrella back, naturally. I called ahead, and then it started to rain as soon as I got there, which led to a pretty good laugh. We just dashed around the corner and sat on the stools in a little coffee bar, talking about ourselves.