The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 (6 page)

“Mrs. Stahl,” she whispered.

But the woman was no longer on the sofa across from her.

Somehow Penny was on her feet, inching across the room.

The bedroom door was ajar, Mrs. Stahl sprawled on the mattress, the painted dragon on her robe sprawled on top of her.

On the bed beside her was the book she'd been reading in the courtyard. Scarlet red, with a lurid title.

Gaudy Night,
it was called.

Opening it with great care, Penny saw the inscription:

To Mrs. Stahl, my dirty murderess.

Love, Lawrence.

She took the book, and the teacup.

She slept for a few hours in her living room, curled on the zebra-print sofa.

She had stopped going into the kitchen two days ago, tacking an old bath towel over the doorway so she couldn't even see inside. The gleaming porcelain of the oven.

She was sure she smelled gas radiating from it. Spotted blue light flickering behind the towel.

But still she didn't go inside.

And now she was afraid the smell was coming through the walls.

It was all connected, you see, and Mrs. Stahl was behind all of it. The light spots, the shadows on the baseboard, the noises in the walls, and now the hiss of the gas.

Mr. Flant looked at the inscription, shaking his head.

“My god, is it possible? He wasn't making much sense those final days. Holed up in Number Four. Maybe he was hiding from her. Because he knew.”

“It was found on his body,” Penny said, voice trembling. “That's what she told me.”

“Then this inscription,” he said, reaching out for Penny's wrist, “was meant to be our clue. Like pointing a finger from beyond the grave.”

Penny nodded. She knew what she had to do.

“I know how it sounds. But someone needs to do something.”

The police detective nodded, drinking from his Coca-Cola, his white shirt bright. He had gray hair at the temples and he said his name was Noble, which seemed impossible.

“Well, miss, let's see what we can do. That was a long time ago. After you called, I had to get the case file from the crypt. I can't say I even remember it.” Licking his index finger, he flicked open the file folder, then began turning pages. “A gas job, right? We got a lot of them back then. Those months before the war.”

“Yes. In the kitchen. My kitchen now.”

Looking through the slim folder, he pursed his lips a moment, then came a grim smile. “Ah, I remember. I remember. The little men.”

“The little men?” Penny felt her spine tighten.

“One of our patrolmen had been out there the week before on a noise complaint. Your bookseller was screaming in the courtyard. Claimed there were little men coming out of the walls to kill him.”

Penny didn't say anything at all. Something deep inside herself seemed to be screaming and it took all her effort just to sit there and listen.

“DTs. Said he'd been trying to kick the sauce,” he said, reading the report. “He was a drunk, miss. Sounds like it was a whole courtyard full of 'em.”

“No,” Penny said, head shaking back and forth. “That's not it. Larry wasn't like that.”

“Well,” he said, “I'll tell you what Larry was like. In his bedside table we found a half-dozen catcher's mitts.” He stopped himself, looked at her. “Pardon. Female contraceptive devices. Each one with the name of a different woman. A few big stars. At least they were big then. I can't remember now.”

Penny was still thinking about the wall. The little men. And her mice on their hind feet. Pixies, dancing fairies.

“There you go,” the detective said, closing the folder. “Guy's a dipso, one of his high-class affairs turned sour. Suicide. Pretty clear-cut.”

“No,” Penny said.

“No?” Eyebrows raised. “He was in that oven waist deep, miss. He even had a hunting knife in his hand for good measure.”

“A knife?” Penny said, her fingers pressing her forehead. “Of course. Don't you see? He was trying to protect himself. I told you on the phone, detective. It's imperative that you look into Mrs. Stahl.”

“The landlady. Your landlady?”

“She was in love with him. And he rejected her, you see.”

“A woman scorned, eh?” he said, leaning back. “Once saw a jilted lady over on Cheremoya take a clothes iron to her fellow's face while he slept.”

“Look at this,” Penny said, pulling Mrs. Stahl's little red book from her purse.

“
Gaudy Night,
” he said, pronouncing the first word in a funny way.

“I think it's a dirty book.”

He looked at her, squinting. “My wife owns this book.”

Penny didn't say anything.

“Have you even read it?” he asked wearily.

Opening the front to the inscription, she held it in front of him.

“ ‘Dirty murderess.' ” He shrugged. “So you're saying this fella knew she was going to kill him, and instead of going to, say, the police, he writes this little inscription, then lets himself get killed?”

Everything sounded so different when he said it aloud, different from the way everything joined in perfect and horrible symmetry in her head.

“I don't know how it happened. Maybe he was going to go to the police and she beat him to it. And I don't know how she did it,” Penny said. “But she's dangerous, don't you get it?”

It was clear he did not.

“I'm telling you, I see her out there at night, doing things,” Penny said, her breath coming faster and faster. “She's doing something with the natural gas. If you check the gas jets maybe you can figure it out.”

She was aware that she was talking very loudly, and her chest felt damp. Lowering her voice, she leaned toward him.

“I think there might be a clue in my oven,” she said.

“Do you?” he said, rubbing his chin. “Any little men in there?”

“It's not like that. It's not. I see them, yes.” She couldn't look him in the eye or she would lose her nerve. “But I know they're not really little men. It's something she's doing. It always starts at two. Two a.m. She's doing something. She did it to Larry and she's doing it to me.”

He was rubbing his face with his hand, and she knew she had lost him.

“I told you on the phone,” she said, more desperately now. “I think she drugged me. I brought the cup.”

Penny reached into her purse again, this time removing the teacup, its bottom still brown-ringed.

Detective Noble lifted it, took a sniff, set it down.

“Drugged you with Old Grandad, eh?”

“I know there's booze in it. But detective, there's more than booze going on here.” Again her voice rose high and sharp, and other detectives seemed to be watching now from their desks.

But Noble seemed unfazed. There even seemed to be the flicker of a smile on his clean-shaven face.

“So why does she want to harm you?” he asked. “Is she in love with you too?”

Penny looked at him and counted quietly in her head, the dampness on her chest gathering.

She had been dealing with men like this her whole life. Smug men. Men with fine clothes or shabby ones, all with the same slick ideas, the same impatience, big voice, slap-and-tickle, fast with a backhanded slug. Nice turned to nasty on a dime.

“Detective,” she said, taking it slowly, “Mrs. Stahl must suspect that I know. About what she did to Larry. I don't know if she drugged him and staged it. The hunting knife shows there was a struggle. What I do know is there's more than what's in your little file.”

He nodded, leaning back in his chair once more. With his right arm he reached for another folder in the metal tray on his desk.

“Miss, can we talk for a minute about
your
file?”

“My file?”

“When you called, I checked your name. S.O.P. Do you want to tell me about the letters you've been sending to a certain address in Holmby Hills?”

“What? I . . . There was only one.”

“And two years ago, the fellow over at MCA? Said you slashed his tires?”

“I was never charged.”

Penny would never speak about that, or what that man had tried to do to her in a back booth at Chasen's.

He set the file down. “Miss, what exactly are you here for? You got a gripe with Mrs. Stahl? Hey, I don't like my landlord either. What, don't wanna pay the rent?”

A wave of exhaustion shuddered through Penny. For a moment she did not know if she could stand.

But there was Larry to think about. And how much she belonged in Number Four. Because she did, and it had marked the beginning of things. A new day for Penny.

“No,” Penny said, rising. “That's not it. You'll see. You'll see. I'll show you.”

“Miss,” he said, calling after her. “Please don't show me anything. Just behave yourself, okay? Like a good girl.”

Back at Number Four, Penny lay down on the rattan sofa, trying to breathe, to think.

Pulling Mrs. Stahl's book from her dress pocket, she began reading.

But it wasn't like she thought.

It wasn't dirty, not like the brown-papered ones. It was a detective novel, and it took place in England. A woman recently exonerated for poisoning her lover attends her school reunion. While there, she finds an anonymous poison-pen note tucked in the sleeve of her gown: “You Dirty Murderess . . . !”

Penny gasped. But then wondered: Had that inscription just been a wink, Larry to Mrs. Stahl?

He gave her books she liked,
Benny had said.
Stiff British stuff that he could tease her about.

Was that all this was, all the inscription had meant?

No, she assured herself, sliding the book back into her pocket. It's a red herring. To confuse me, to keep me from finding the truth. Larry needs me to find out the truth.

It was shortly after that she heard the click of her mail slot. Looking over, she saw a piece of paper slip through the slit and land on the entryway floor.

Walking over, she picked it up.

Bungalow Four:

You are past due.

—Mrs. H. Stahl

“I have to move anyway,” she told Benny, showing him the note.

“No, kid, why?” he whispered. Mr. Flant was sleeping in the bedroom, the gentle whistle of his snore.

“I can't prove she's doing it,” Penny said. “But it smells like a gas chamber in there.”

“Listen, don't let her spook you,” Benny said. “I bet the pilot light is out. Want me to take a look? I can come by later.”

“Can you come now?”

Looking into the darkened bedroom, Benny smiled, patted her forearm. “I don't mind.”

Stripped to his undershirt, Benny ducked under the bath towel Penny had hung over the kitchen door.

“I thought you were inviting me over to keep your bed warm,” he said as he kneeled down on the linoleum.

The familiar noise started, the
tick-tick-tick.

“Do you hear it?” Penny said, voice tight. Except the sound was different in the kitchen than in the bedroom. It was closer. Not inside the walls but everywhere.

“It's the igniter,” Benny said. “Trying to light the gas.”

Peering behind the towel, Penny watched him.

“But you smell it, right?” she said.

“Of course I smell it,” he said, his voice strangely high. “God, it's awful.”

He put his face to the baseboards, the sink, the shuddering refrigerator.

“What's this?” he said, tugging the oven forward, his arms straining.

He was touching the wall behind the oven, but Penny couldn't see.

“What's what?” she asked. “Did you find something?”

“I don't know,” he said, his head turned from her. “I . . . Christ, you can't think with it. I feel like I'm back in Argonne.”

He had to lean backward, palms resting on the floor.

“What is it you saw back there?” Penny asked, pointing behind the oven.

But he kept shaking his head, breathing into the front of his undershirt, pulled up.

After a minute, both of them breathing hard, he reached up and turned the knob on the front of the oven door.

“I smell it,” Penny said, stepping back. “Don't you?”

“That pilot light,” he said, covering his face, breathing raspily. “It's gotta be out.”

His knees sliding on the linoleum, he inched back toward the oven, white and glowing.

“Are you . . . are you going to open it?”

He looked at her, his face pale and his mouth stretched like a piece of rubber.

“I'm going to,” he said. “We need to light it.”

But he didn't stir. There was a feeling of something, that door open like a black maw, and neither of them could move.

Penny turned, hearing a knock at the door.

When she turned back around, she gasped.

Benny's head and shoulders were inside the oven, his voice making the most terrible sound, like a cat, its neck caught in a trap.

“Get out,” Penny said, no matter how silly it sounded. “Get out!”

Pitching forward, she leaned down and grabbed for him, tugging at his trousers, yanking him back.

Stumbling, they both rose to their feet, Penny nearly huddling against the kitchen wall, its cherry-sprigged paper.

Turning, he took her arms hard, pressing himself against her, pressing Penny against the wall.

She could smell him, and his skin was clammy and goose-quilled.

His mouth pressed against her neck roughly and she could feel his teeth, his hands on her hips. Something had changed, and she'd missed it.

“But this is what you want, isn't it, honey?” the whisper came, his mouth over her ear. “It's all you've ever wanted.”