The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

From Murdaland

I.

It takes me and Frank Eking about an hour to get to the dirt road outside the little town of Kingman, where half a dozen emergency vehicles sit, leading the way to a tiny clapboard farmhouse, inside which an old woman lays bludgeoned to death on the kitchen linoleum. The house reminds me of the one my grandfather had in Wichita when I was little, tidy and freshly painted white with green trim. Next to a rusted-out Model A, a sheriff s deputy is bagging a spade, its blade mottled with dirt clods and blood, less lighthearted about it than city policemen would be, and as we get out of the car, Frank feels the need to remind me not to be a smartass in front of the locals.

Outside, the dead woman’s husband, eighty-seven years of age, a formerly big man shrunken and stripped of muscle, sits on the tailgate of an ambulance with an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. Inside, the couple’s son, fiftyish with a farmer’s sun-wrinkled skin and badly scarred hands, the left one crippled-looking, sits without evident emotion on a swaybacked sofa in the middle of the big main room of the house, next to the kitchen. At a dining room table at the far end of the same room, a pair of sheriff s deputies are grilling the killer, who has already confessed, in an attempt to find out why she brained her eighty-four-year-old mother-in-law with a garden spade. While Frank Elting tries to coax a quote from the son about his dear mother’s death-by-entrenching-tool, I get a nice shot of the killer in mid-phrase, one cuffed hand upraised and pointing as she explains her afternoon’s work.

“Some of your wives and mothers is on that committee, and any one of them will tell you what she was like. Day in and day out, but especially around rummage sale time.” She adopts what I assume is a shrill impression of her late mother-in-law: “ ‘That Doris Upchurch thinks she can get away with donating junk she wouldn’t even have in her own home. Maelynn Murray sure made herself scarce when it was time to stick prices on them donations. Last year that Warcroft boy come in and bought all the funnybooks and told me he was going to sell them to the other little boys for a profit and I by God won’t let him have a one this year. I’m the only one does any real work around this church and that includes Pastor’s wife. Me me me me me.’ ” She takes a deep breath and resumes speaking in her own voice. “You ask any woman at that church if that’s what Mother Carling wasn’t like. Well by God if it’s bad listening to for a few minutes at church a couple three times a week just you imagine what it’s like living with the old biddy. This afternoon she got to talking about that rummage sale and how if it wasn’t for her the whole church might as well just shut its doors and I thought all right, let’s find out how the church does without you, you old butterball, and I went outside and took the spade Jacob’d left by the side of the house and went back inside and you know what? She hadn’t even noticed I’d left the kitchen, she was just talking into the air. So I just hauled off and smacked the blade of it up the side of that old gray head of hers and by God that shut her up good. She dropped down to the floor and I thought I’d better get her again, I didn’t want her to suffer. Lord knows, and I swung it that time just like a hockey stick. That’s how my shoes and stockings got all bloody.”

After I’ve taken four or five nice loony-looking pictures of the younger Mrs. Carling, I set about photographing her victim in the kitchen. One of the deputies comes in to announce that the ambulance is going to take the freshly minted widower to St. Francis in Wichita and, looking askance at me, questions my shooting photos of the corpse. “You’re not going to print them pictures of Mrs. Carling, are you?”

“We’ve printed worse,” I tell him.

He looks down at the dead woman. “My mother used to fix her hair. Said she’d come in once’t every two weeks and sit in the chair and jaw everyone’s ear off, nobody else could get a word in.”

You can’t read too much into the facial expression on a corpse — a lot can change in the moments after death, before police and press arrive on the scene — but damned if the old bird doesn’t look like she was in the middle of a nasty remark when the blade struck. Her tongue is nestled between her upper bared teeth and the lower incisors. Her eyes are crossed just a little, and the left one is all bloodshot and rheumy.

In the other room the son sits, placid, and mostly ignores the deputies’ questions regarding his wife and his mother. He’s loosening up now, relief revealing itself in his posture, and though he’s not smiling, he does look to have been recently relieved of some unnamed burden. I slip into what I’m assuming is the old folks’ bedroom and, after getting a picture of the disorder therein, steal a small framed picture of the old lady off the dresser and slip it into the inside pocket of my overcoat.

II.

It’s past dark when I get to my great-aunt Ivy’s house to fix a faucet, a couple of stalwart kids still playing cowboys in the yard across the street. Next door, from a side window lit yellow against the pale blue of the early evening, a crabbed woman of indeterminate age watches me with unconcealed hostility. She whips her curtain shut as I let myself in the front door.

Ivy’s living room is a malodorous wreck, with blankets draped over the furniture to cover ancient stains of uncertain, doubtless horrifying provenance. I’ve tried to get her to replace the blankets with plastic, but that’s too modern and insufficiently homely for her taste. Two or three of Ivy’s cats rub against my ankles and meow as I cross the room toward the kitchen. There are six or more litter boxes scattered through the house, at least one of which badly needs emptying.

I find my Uncle Pell seated as usual at the kitchen table with a water glass full of bourbon and the Evening Eagle, and he notes my arrival with alarm.

“Who the fuck are you anyway and what the hell’re you doing in my house?” He rises, his lumpy old claw clenched into a pink rope-veined fist. With the sleeve rolled to the elbow, his forearm resembles nothing so much as the neck of a very, very large turkey. I’m unaware of any look of amusement on my face — what I feel is pity and horror — but a smirk is what he sees when he looks in my eyes. “You think this is funny? Think you got nothing to be scared of? Everybody does. You think Jesus Christ didn’t piss himself up on that Cross, you’re crazy.” He squints at me and calms down a little. “You’re Flavey’s boy, aintcha. Here to fix the faucet.” He sits back down and picks up the paper.

When I’m done with the faucet I fix the hinge on the medicine chest and scrape the caked-on Pepsodent out of the basin. Back in the kitchen I find Pell deep in conversation with an unseen nemesis.

My intent is to leave without disturbing him, but Ivy spoils it by parking in the driveway and making her slow way up to the door. Smelling of lavender and powder she passes me without a glance, her constricted breath rasping in and out. “You won’t get your hands on them candlesticks,” she says.

“What candlesticks?” I ask, though I know perfectly goddamn well what candlesticks, since they come up every time I visit.

“Between you and the damn neighbors seems like half the people I know’s after Mother’s candlesticks.”

“Which neighbors?”

“Mrs. Severy, next door, and that no-account cripple she’s married to. They come poking through here at night. I can hear ’em. Some night I’ll put a lead slug into ’em and the law won’t touch me.”

“You let me know if they need a talking to, Aunt Ivy.”

“You won’t get your hands on those candlesticks, boy, you or that skinny wife of yours.”

I try to explain that the skinny wife is long since gone, but Ivy’s done with me and already shuffling back through the debris to her bedroom, muttering to her sister, my grandmother, dead since before the First World War.

“Faucet all you needed me to come out for?” I ask.

She stops and pivots toward me faster than I would have thought possible, her eyes shining and vivacious. “Oh. That’s right, I forgot. I’m leaving on the bus in the morning for Cottonwood. Your great-aunt Edna’s poorly again and I think this might be the last one.” She’s always this way when a relation is ill, with death an unpleasant but very exciting prospect. If she returns from Cottonwood with Edna aboveground she’ll consider the trip a failure.

Pell grunts. “Something wrong with Edna’s woman parts. Always has been.”

“May be gone a couple weeks or a month. Need you to take care of Pell while I’m gone.”

III.

It ends up being a pretty good work week, starting with a botched robbery at a diner on Meridian. The stickup man came in at a quarter to four and ordered a bowl of chili, and after eating it, pulled a gun, upon which provocation the counterman extracted a shotgun from under the dish rack and emptied out the badman’s midsection. Blood and viscera are sprayed all over the back wall and picture window of the diner, the smells of urine and excrement and blood mingling with those of lemon meringue pie and overheated coffee. I shoot the corpse from various angles while the owner argues with the police about how soon they’ll be hauling the body off so he can clean up before dinnertime.

The gunman is — was — about thirty, neatly dressed in a lumber jacket and pressed chinos, and looks like he might have had a haircut that very morning. His lips are ever so slightly parted, the edges of his upper and lower teeth just visible, and his half-open eyes are fixed on the ceiling or beyond it, with no hint of surprise or disappointment in them. He looks far too soft to pull off an armed robbery; did some hint of tentativeness on his part give the counterman the nerve to go for the shotgun?

Outside the waning afternoon sun casts orange highlights on the squad cars and the morgue wagon. The sallow-faced, dyspeptic Sedgwick County coroner, Dr. Groff, half an inch of unfiltered cigarette dangling from his lip, takes one last look at the cadaver before ordering the driver and his assistant to load it up. A morgue attendant told me once that Groff scrounged old butts around the office, saved the tobacco, and rerolled them, and I can never look at him without wanting to laugh. As the dead man gets hoisted into the back gate of the wagon Elting and I shoot the bull with Groff and Captain Meeker of Serious Crimes.

“They must have been expecting a goddamn bear to wander in there someday.” Meeker lights up a cigarette and shakes his head.

Elting whips out his notebook. “Can I quote you to that effect?”

“Quote me on this: cocksucker was asking for it. Shit, and now the owner wants to fire the counterman ’cause he made such a mess with the shotgun. Do me a favor and make him out to be a hero so they won’t shitcan him, okay?”

“Heroes move papers anyway.”

I go back inside to ask the counterman if he’ll consent to have his portrait taken for the Beacon. His big soft face is a distinctly unhealthy-looking milk white with a sprinkling of black stubble, and I’m thinking about ways to accentuate that pallor.

“How about right there in front of the window so’s you can see the blood?”

“That’s a good idea but the Beacon won’t run it. If it was up to me...” I shrug. If it were up to me I’d have him pose on one knee with the shotgun next to the corpse like a ten-point trophy buck; in any case, the body’s gone and an old woman is already hard at work with a mop and a bucketful of ammonia on the human effluvia staining the floor. I have him stand behind his counter, shotgun leaning across his chest, its barrel pointing above his right shoulder toward the light fixture. He’s trying to look like a hard man, but earlier the cops told me he’d been into the bathroom three times to puke since their arrival. The odor in the restaurant isn’t getting any nicer, either, a mixture now of the aforementioned smells plus the ammonia in the old woman’s bucket plus a soupcon of the counterman’s vomit wafting over from the men’s room, its door open for aeration. The dinner crowd tonight will be, I predict, thin and of necessity hardy.

“Do me a favor,” I say to the counterman. “Quit smiling for a second.”

He relaxes his facial muscles and widens his eyes. The corners of his mouth extend downward, the very picture of a psychopath. Perfect.

The late gunman’s name was Alvin Holroyd, and he lived in an apartment on South Market. Elting has been topping a married college girl in the afternoons, so as a favor to him I go there on my own to get the widow’s picture. If she says anything noteworthy I’ll add it to his copy, otherwise just jot down her name and address.

The black-eyed girl who answers the door looks eighteen or nineteen, with scarlet blotches on her cheeks and forehead violent against her pale skin and a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her bright red wet nose. Her hair is dark brown and wavy, pulled into a thick chignon that seems on the verge of bursting, a Gibson-girlish style that I find pleasing. I’m guessing she’s six months pregnant.

“Seven. Eight, almost,” she tells me. My presence seems to have a calming effect on her, giving her as it does something to do with her hands. Her name is Bea, she tells me as she busies herself making us coffee. Though she seems to have been crying for a couple of hours straight she seems also to have an imperfect understanding of what happened to her husband this afternoon, like a child who, though sad about the death of a puppy, still half-expects it to show up at the door yapping to be let in. “Alvin’s all panicky about the baby. I can’t believe he went and stuck up a place.”

“Panicky? How, exactly?”

“Lately he can’t sleep, just lies awake thinking about the baby. He’s been working at Feldon’s trucking, and he’s fallen asleep at the wheel twice already. First time he woke up just in time to get the truck back off the shoulder. Second time was last week, and they fired him.”

“Did he hurt anybody?”

“No, but he totaled that truck.”

“Wait a minute, was that over on George Washington Boulevard? Hit an aboveground gas pipe?”

“Yeah. One of those big green things, sticks up out of the ground? They had to evacuate all the houses around there.”

Jackpot. Alvin’s mishap was a reasonably big story last week. “How old are you, Mrs. Holroyd, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I’m seventeen. Alvin’s twenty-eight. We practically had to put a gun to my dad’s head to make him sign the papers so we could get married.” She touches her hand to her belly. “One of those deals, you know, where it was kind of important to do it right away.” She moves the hand to the back of her chignon, then slides it down to the base of her neck and squeezes a few times before allowing me a rueful half smile.

“You have a job?”

“Nuh-uh. Alvin doesn’t believe in that.” She picks a handkerchief off of the table in front of her, wipes her eyes, and blows her nose. Because her nose is so stuffed she holds her jaw slack, and it makes her lips look fuller than they are. “I’m sorry I’m so stupid-looking with the crying and everything.”

She poses for me by the window. The poignancy of her situation is the only thing that’s going to get the picture in the paper, so I tell her to stand sideways for a good belly view. Now that the picture’s taken I’m anxious to get away, but the coffee is just now ready to pour so I take my cup and smile as if I just took her picture for an article on the garden society.

“Guess I ought to call my folks and let them know, hadn’t I?” She smiles again, as though out of force of habit, and for the first lime I feel a pang of regret for poor dumb Alvin. I don’t have the heart to steal his picture, so I ask if I can borrow one.

IV.

When I walk into Pell’s kitchen a few minutes after sunrise I find him face-down on the linoleum, and to my expert eye in the light of that fifteen-watt bulb, he looks dead. When I grab him by the shoulders, though, and roll him over he lets out a long, pained sigh. His eyes are half-open, pupils rolled upward, and there’s blood caked on and under his nose where he hit the floor. I don’t like the way his right arm looks, limp and crooked, and he’s slow to rouse. When he first comes around he doesn’t seem to know me, and when I tell him I’m taking him to the hospital he blows his stack.

“I ain’t going to any fuckin’ hospital. Nothing wrong with me, I was sleeping until you woke me up, you dirty son of a bitch.” He tries to sit up and falls back onto the floor, howling in pain and clutching at his right arm. “Jesus Christ, boy, what the hell’d you do to me?”

“You passed out, fell down, and busted your arm is what it looks like to me. Come on, let’s go to the hospital and get that thing set.”

“The hell I will. I’m just winged is all. Nothing wrong with me a little drink won’t fix.” He tries to sit up again and yelps, a seal-like sound I wouldn’t have thought him capable of producing, then falls backward again, his head connecting with a dull thud. “Goddamn.”

“Pell, are you going to get in the car with me or am I going to have to call an ambulance?”

“Hold your goddamn horses. Help me up and I’ll get a snort and then we’ll go.”

One more drink can’t do him too much more harm on top of the fifteen or twenty he probably had last night, and it might make him easier to handle, so after tucking my hands under his armpits — an unsavory task — I pull him up to a sitting position and help him get his feet planted solidly on the floor. With some degree of difficulty we get to the table, whereupon he pours himself a water glass full and downs it. “Let’s get going.”

In the car the blood is flowing again slowly from his nose, along with tears at the pain in his arm. I turn on the radio and he sniffles quietly, and it isn’t until I pull out of the driveway that he speaks, voice cracking with pain and rage.

“Hospital’s the other way, you dumb shit.”

“Wesley’s closest, Pell.”

“Fuck Wesley’s, I’m a vet, take me to the goddamn VA. They got to take me for free.”

I pull into a driveway and turn it around. “You been there before, or are we going to need some kind of proof you’re a vet?”

“I go once a month by taxi and see a croaker about my lungs. Get free prescriptions, too.”

“I never knew you were in the service.”

“Goddamn right. War with Spain, served down in Porta Rica. Damn near got killed, too. Got my fuckin’ horse shot right out from under me.”

“You were in the cavalry?”

“Sure. I grew up riding horses. My pa fell off a horse when he was drunk, crushed his head on a rock. Six months later my old lady married a mean old skunk and that’s when things started turning to shit for old Pell.”

“So did you ride up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt?”

“Shit, no. And neither did he, that was all bullshit. It was a regiment of niggers took San Juan Hill and that cocksucker Roosevelt took all the credit. He didn’t ride up ’til after.” A drop of blood that’s been quivering on Pell’s chin drops onto his shirt at that moment, flattening into a circular red stain.

“I never heard that before.”

“The colored don’t write the damn history books. But you can ask any man who was there and they’ll tell you, if they’re honest.”

It’s the most intelligible conversation I’ve ever had with Uncle Pell. Maybe the pain is cutting through the boozy miasma in his brain. When we get to the emergency room at the VA we have a long wait, during which he says not one word, and when he finally gets in to see a doctor I tell him that Pell’s blood is probably about eighty proof at the moment.

“I could have told you that before I even smelled him,” he says. “We get our share of boozers here.” Tall and skinny with a long face peppered with zits as red as bee stings, he isn’t much older than twenty-five, and when he goes into the room I can hear Pell through the door, angrily challenging his competence and credentials.

Ten minutes later he comes out to inform me that Pell is going to be an inpatient for a while.

“For a broken arm?”

“Broken arm, broken nose, alcoholic dementia, liver and kidney troubles, cardiac arrhythmia, you name it. When’s the last time he saw a doctor?”

“He told me he comes here once a month for his lungs.”

“According to his chart he hasn’t been here since February ’48, for some kind of bowel complaint. His lungs sound fine to me.”

V.

Elting and I spend a good part of the next afternoon at Adams Billiard Parlor on West Douglas, where a regular patron stabbed a young stranger who’d tried to skip out on a debt. The other regulars are in a state of outrage at the unfairness of their friend’s arrest, insisting that it was the stabbing victim who, once out of surgery, ought to be delivered to the county lockup.

“That boy come in here looking for a game, wanted to know who was the best player in the house,” says the old man behind the cigar counter up front. He identifies himself as the owner and offers us each a free Roi-Tan, which Frank declines and I accept gratefully.

“And that was Mr. Tremaine?” Frank asks.

“Buddy Tremaine.” His belt is cinched well above his navel and he nervously adjusts his trousers. “Well, mister, I’ve seen a few hustlers in the thirty years I’ve been in this business, and I knew Buddy could take this little shit on without breaking a sweat. You know, one of those fellows who gets to where he can beat anyone in his shitty little one-horse town and thinks he’s the next Moscone. Well, he lets Buddy beat him the first time around, and Buddy knows he let him.”

“So Buddy’s not playing his best game, either.”

The old guy laughs, spraying me through his missing eyeteeth. “No, hell no. He figured on taking the little son of a bitch for his whole bankroll. So when the kid’s game sharpens up so does his, but just enough so’s it’s still tight. Finally the kid’s desperate, starts shooting his best, and that’s when Buddy cleans his clock. Took thirty-five dollars right off him. Now the kid says he wants to play Buddy one more time, double or nothing, and before that he hightails it to the bathroom. Now Buddy tells me to watch the table while he goes out back to the alley, ’cause this ain’t the first time someone’s thought of going through the men’s room window to get out of paying a debt in here. What Buddy wasn’t expecting was the kid coming out of there holding a knife. So Buddy drew his and stabbed the little fucker, and all of us here’ll swear to that on a stack of goddamn Bibles.”

“So how come the money was still in his pocket when he went to the bathroom?” I ask.

“How’s that?”

“Don’t people usually hand the stakes over to a third party?”

He puffs his chest out and draws up a little taller. “Not here they don’t. Isn’t that kind of a place.”

Frank takes off at that point and I stay to get a picture of the owner standing next to the table on which the men had played the games in question, and another out back, pointing to the high window from which the young stranger had dropped. There’s blood on the pavement and on the grass.

“You shoot billiards?” he asks me as we walk back inside.

“A little pool sometimes.”

We sit down on a long wooden bench at the front of the hall intended for players waiting for tables, the length of its seat worn to an evenly blond tone, a tarnished brass spittoon at either end of it. “I was State Three-Cushion Billiards champion two years in a row, ’15 and ’16, and then again in ’20 and regional champ in ’23, back when you could play tournaments for good money. Won enough in the regional to buy my own parlor.” He looks around at the place, at the players and the loafers and the hustlers, and shakes his head. “I must have been out of my fuckin’ mind.”

VI.

Several weeks into his VA stay Pell is sitting up in bed, lapping at his slumgullion with brio and addressing me with the full force of his contempt, enraged that Aunt Ivy still refuses to leave her sister’s bedside in favor of his own. “That roundheel whoretoilet better get her ass back to Wichita before I head out there myself and drag her back with my good arm.”

“Anything I can do for you in the meantime?”

“Bring me my fucking bottle. That’d make this shithole a damn sight more interesting.” If these weeks of involuntary sobriety at the VA hadn’t lightened his disposition, it has considerably improved his enunciation. He still looks pretty close to croaking — hollow of eye and sallow of cheek, the visible portion of his broken arm lavender and red — but out in the ammonia-scented corridor his pimply young doctor tells me he’ll have to go home within the week.

“He has a pretty bad sinus infection, got him on penicillin for that, and an ulceration on his ankle, and his ears are full of fluid. I also don’t like the sound of his heart. And anything you could do to keep him from drinking once he gets home would be helpful as well. He had some pretty ugly withdrawal symptoms the first couple of days, but his constitution’s strong. Keep him off the sauce and he could live another twenty years.”

The thought of Pell passing the century mark is horrifying in its own right, but that of being his custodian for weeks on end conjures an urgent, vaguely electrical sensation in my stomach. “Can’t he stay here until his wife comes home?”

“Afraid not.”

“What about his heart? And the sinus thing. And his ankle?”

“Beds are scarce, Mr. Farmer. This isn’t a hotel and it’s not a soldier’s home anymore.”

I find the chief of staff, Dr. Schnitzler, smoking and pawing a homely nurse six inches taller than he is, and when I knock on the open door she scurries out of his reach looking damned pleased with herself. I explain the situation to him and he nods quietly until she interrupts.

“That’s the old man on three who called Marjorie a fishcunt.”

“Marjorie?” Schnitzler says. “Is she the big blond with a permanent wave and a limp?”

“That’s her,” the nurse says. “Your uncle’s way too sick to leave, by the way. They just can’t take him anymore.”

Schnitzler grunts. “I’ll talk to the administrator and get it straightened out. What’s this doctor’s name, the one wants to send him home?”

“Hammond’s his name, I think.”

He nods. “The one with the acne.”

The nurse laughs again. “We call him ‘the boy.’ ”

Schnitzler glowers over the tops of his spectacles at her. “That’s going to stop right away, you understand? The man’s an M.D., even if he does look like he ought to be throwing the morning paper off of a bicycle in his short pants.”

VII.

The highlight of the week is a knife fight over a bottle of cough syrup. A couple of hopheads sitting around the living room of a tiny house on South Meridian cracked open a brand-new bottle of codeine-fortified expectorant and the first of the two, a twenty-seven-year-old pipe fitter named Hazel Kilbane, swigged down two-thirds of it. His best friend and roommate, twenty-nine-year-old Billy Ray Steig, an unemployed linotype operator (who had apprenticed, the Beacon will be pleased to note in the evening edition, at the Eagle), took offense at Hazel’s flouting of narcotic etiquette. Slugging down the remainder of the bottle he stumbled to the kitchen, where he took a butcher knife from the cluttered sink and came out looking to stick his pal. Hazel staggered out of the way and hid behind a tattered easy chair, over whose arm Billy Ray stumbled (a quantity of Old Grand-Dad having been consumed earlier over luncheon), cutting himself badly on the soft underside of his forearm. As he howled in pain Hazel laughed, and Billy Ray lunged for the knife and cracked his head open on the wall, still howling. Enraged at his friend’s laughter Billy Ray stuck the butcher knife into Hazel’s rib cage, noting with some surprise how difficult it was, even with a nice sharp blade. When he saw the amount of blood pooling around Hazel he panicked and called for an ambulance.

During Frank’s brief interview Billy Ray sits on a wooden chair with his hands cuffed before him, his forearm wrapped in bloody gauze. He’s reasonably lucid, considering the amounts of codeine and alcohol in his depleted bloodstream. Most crime scenes have one particularly bloody spot, but this one is a gory mess from Billy Ray’s arm gushing as he ran about the house trying to find something to help Hazel with before the ambulance came. Before we got there one of the uniformed cops slipped on a puddle of it in the kitchen.

“It was just pure dumb luck it slid in through the ribs like that. If I’d’a hit bone I’d’a quit right then and there.”

Elting’s face lights up at that, and he writes it down trying to conceal a smile, then asks him how long he and Hazel had been roommates.

“Five years, since’t I got back from the Pacific.”

“You in the Navy?” Frank asks.

“Hell, no,” he said. “I’m a fuckin’ Marine.”

I get a nice picture of the skinny corpse, the skin of its right cheek stretched eyeward by the floor into an involuntary postmortem sneer, and from the top of a dresser that’s missing its upper two drawers I pilfer a photo of Kilbane for my album, since it’s unlikely I’ll find a studio shot anywhere. The stolen photo shows him on a beach, flexing his childlike biceps, “MUCSLE BEACH VENIS CAL. JUNE 47 scrawled along the white border.

There’s only one bed in the room, and a giant economy-sized jar of Vaseline stands on an orange crate that serves as a nightstand. Frank comes in and gives a snort. “You figure ’em for a couple of homos?” he says. “Maybe there’s our angle.”

The Eagle’s Bucky Kraft comes in from the living room. “Did you say something about homos?”

“That’s what it looks like to me,” Frank says.

“Bullshit,” Bucky says, spitting a little, patches of red moving up from his neck to his cheeks. “That boy Billy Ray’s a goddamn Marine!”

“I don’t guess that proves it one way or the other, Bucky.”

“My name’s Buck, goddamn it. The Eagle won’t print anything about queers anyway, even if it’s just innuendo. Far as we’re concerned, that particular vice isn’t practiced in the Air Capital City.” Bucky’s gaze is drawn nonetheless to that jar of Vaseline, and after a moment’s contemplation he sniffs and leaves the room.

VIII.

The cats must be fed. In Ivy’s kitchen they surround me, making horrible mewling noises as though trying to convey to me some message beyond the habitual “feed us.” Sure enough, a worse than usual smell hangs in the thick still atmosphere of the house, and I get the unpleasant notion that a weaker version of it has been present the last couple of times I’ve visited the house, maybe even before Pell broke his arm.

I follow the smell to the bedroom, where a big old tabby lies dead on the bedspread in a state of advanced putrefaction, body cavity crawling with so many vermin that he or she seems to be wiggling pleasurably, individual clumps of fur swaying this way and that. I run outside the house to take a deep breath of cold clean air and consider my options. The solution that appeals is arson: release the live cats into the neighborhood and watch the whole damned house burn to the rafters. Reason prevails and I go back in carrying the Speed Graphic to take a couple of pictures, then grab the ruined bedclothes by the corners like a sling and lift the cat up in the sling, holding my breath.

Kitty has soaked clean through to the mattress. The right thing to do would be to take the whole damned mess to the dump, but since I don’t want that smell in my car, not even in the trunk, I haul it all out into the backyard, making a second trip for the mattress.

After some effort I find a spade in the basement, its handle so gray and rotten I have to grip it very near the blade to keep it from snapping in the hard ground. I dig a big shallow hole to toss the mattress in, followed by sheets, bedspread and maggoty corpse.

Even outdoors in the cold the smell is overpowering. Before I finish digging I hear barking, and on the other side of Ivy’s rusty chain-link fence a couple of dogs prance and yap, trying to figure out how to get to this gamey bounty. Clearly, better disposal methods are called for.

In the garage I find a can of turpentine, which, poured on the corpse and the mattress, does a good momentary job of masking their smell before it gives up the ghost and becomes just another ghastly odor in concert with the others. There are now four dogs on the other side of the chain link, and with some small measure of trepidation — just how flammable is turpentine, anyway? — I drop a match into the hole and jump back, away from the resultant ball of flame. The smell that wafts from the burning mess is bad but it’s an improvement over a moment ago, and its offensiveness diminishes as the fire consumes. The dogs lose interest and wander away, and I spot Mrs. Severy standing in her yard, following me with tiny wide-set eyes. Her brown housecoat and yellow scarf bring out her jaundiced complexion, offset nicely by the greenish-blue circles under her eyes. She must be freezing her tits off, but she shows no sign of discomfort beyond the pinched expression on her face, which I am guessing is more or less a permanent fixture.

“Dead cat,” I tell her. “Been dead a little while.” I hold my nose in case she doesn’t get the drift.

“No one home over there?”

Mindful of Aunt Ivy’s suspicions I tell her that they’re just feeling under the weather, and she nods and goes back inside.

The mattress is burned down pretty well by now, and I pour some more turpentine on it where the flames are getting weaker. The smoke is thick and gray, and it strikes me I could have left it on the curb for the trashmen.

IX.

The next morning we all experience an unaccustomed sense of revulsion at what should be an ordinary scene of mayhem. Something in the ether seems to have put us all in a state of moody introspection as we peer one by one into a poorly lit elevator shaft in the Greene Building on Broadway, its bottom strewn with gum wrappers, cigarette butts, and other forms of urban detritus. In the midst of it crouch Captain Meeker and another plainclothesman from the WPD, alongside the venerable Dr. Groff. The object of their scrutiny is the shattered body of one Arnold Stennis, age twenty-four, of 2487 South Mildred in Wichita. There’s no immediate indication of how Arnold got down the shaft, but the fact that his hands are tied behind his back suggests foul play. According to Captain Meeker, Mr. Stennis was a known associate of Jack Haughtry, a trafficker in narcotics who at this very moment is being roused from bed and taken in for questioning. Meeker tells us all this with none of his accustomed joviality in the face of death, at least the deaths of those he reckons were in for it; you’d think the event was nothing more than an addition to his week’s workload.

The giddy elevator operator is the only one in the building showing any signs of animation at all. He’s old and tiny, in the tradition of elevator men, and his nose has gone lavender and gray from drink. An errant strand of very long white hair has come loose and falls over his forehead, giving him the look of an elderly adolescent. “Got here this morning and I seen the cage on number two wuddn’t down here where it oughtta been, found the goddamn thing up’t the tenth floor. Well it’s a goddamn good thing I didn’t just ride ’er down, ’cause something seemed off to me, I know my machines, see? Went down to the ninth floor and found the doors jimmied open. Boy I knew something was up then, so I shined me a flashlight down there and by Christ there was that son of a bitch lying there. I said to myself I’d damn well better get the police in before the offices start opening up.” Frank takes all this down while I get a couple of shots of the old man and of the cops milling around the lobby.

We move off to the side to watch the office workers arriving, gawking at the police and bitching about everyone having to share a single elevator. Frank cheers up at the sight of a leggy blond with a big crooked nose, crossing the lobby to elevator number one. “Look at that one swaying back and forth. Goddamn. Hey, miss,” he shouts. When she looks over at him he points at her legs. “Run in your stocking.”

She pulls at her skirt and twirls, arching her back provocatively, looking for the nonexistent run, then shoots Frank a look of pure poison. “Creep,” she says, nostrils flared, and struts toward the elevator.

He laughs hard and wipes a little tear from his eye. “That’s an old one but it still works. Boy, some pins on her, huh?”

X.

On the way home from the Greyhound Station as Aunt Ivy laments her sister Edna and criticizes the funeral — cheap and low-class, in her opinion — I keep my mouth shut about the dead tabby. As soon as she’s in her kitchen, though, she starts counting heads and turns to me, half-panicked, half-accusatory.

“Where’s Saucy? What have you done with Saucy?”

“Was Saucy the big tabby?”

“She sleeps on my bed! Where is she?”

“Aunt Ivy, I’m afraid Saucy passed while you were in Cottonwood with Aunt Edna.”

“Where is she?”

“In the yard.”

“I want to see her. I don’t believe it. Show me.”

“Aunt Ivy, she’s been dead for weeks.” Here I feel compelled to add, for no logically supportable reason, something Aunt Ivy doesn’t have to know: “I cremated her.”

Aunt Ivy slaps me across the face. “No one in our family’s ever been cremated,” she says.

“Aunt Ivy,” I amend myself, in a moment of divine inspiration, “I believe your neighbors might have done her in.”

This sets off another bell in her old gray head. “My candlesticks.” She tears off into the bedroom and screams. “Where’s my bedspread?”

“It had to be burned with the cat. I replaced the mattress, too.”

Now she’s looking under the bed and in the closet, now under a floorboard.

“That’s it, call the police. They’ve stolen the candlesticks.”

“How many places did you hide the candlesticks?”

“I ain’t telling you where I hid the candlesticks. It’s enough they’re gone. What are you going to do about it?”

XI.

Late that same afternoon dispatch sends me out to meet Frank in Kechi, north of town, and I park between his car and one belonging to the Kechi police, a black prewar Plymouth with rust damage on the runners. A Sedgwick County sheriff s prowler is parked on the street in front, with Dr. Groff’s meat wagon right behind it. What’s odd about the scene at first glance is that the operators of all these vehicles, with the exception of the doctor, are all milling around in front of the house, smoking and kicking at the clods of dirt that litter the cruddy yard. A sheriff s deputy writes up a report on a stainless steel tablet while his colleague from the town of Kechi tries in vain to strike up a collegial dialogue.

On spotting me Elting bounds down from the porch and hustles me joyously inside with a warning to hold my breath. This is unnecessary, as it happens, because by the time I’m even with him the stench emanating from the front door is assaultive and unparalleled in my years of covering violent and unusual deaths.

“Guy’s been dead damn near three weeks,” he whispers, as if it’s a secret. This is intriguing, since normally a few weeks will take the punch out of a death smell.

What I find before me is Ezra Groff, breathing intently into a handkerchief and seated on the lid of the toilet. Next to him is a clawfooted porcelain tub filled with what are only inferentially identifiable as human remains, mostly composed of a thick, soupy liquid, but containing what appears to be a human skull partially exposed near the end of the basin opposite the faucet. I turn and, nearly overpowered, race to the front door with Frank cackling behind me. I stand with my hands braced against the building for a minute, filling my lungs with the relatively clean air of Kechi, Kansas, while Frank fills me in on what he knows.

“Son of a bitch weighed three-fifty, four hundred pounds, is what the neighbors are guessing. Groff says maybe more. Looks like he died trying to claw his way out of the tub. Son of a bitch, can you imagine if this’d happened in July or August?”

I’m trying not to, and I go to the trunk of the DeSoto to get my tripod, since the illumination in the bathroom is just right for a shot in natural light. I take it back into the house and, fortified by pride in my craft, force myself to spend a good five minutes within sniffing distance of the corpse, taking three shots, including one of Groff leaning in to examine the skull’s dentition with the hankie over his own cadaverous old face. Lovely shots they’ll be, once the memory of that smell fades from my olfactory lobe.

From the bedroom I pilfer a photograph of a fat young man, taken at the Kansas State Fair in 1936, according to the caption running along the border. Accompanied by three other boys and a couple of reasonably attractive girls, he sports a souvenir straw hat and looks quite happy. The man in the picture is fat, really fat, if considerably shy of four hundred pounds, and since there are no other photographs evident on the premises I have to take it on faith that the cheery figure in the fair pictures is a younger version of the liquefied man in the tub.

His name was Vernon Ralston, aged thirty-eight, and until three and a half weeks ago he was employed as a baker at the Renfro Bakery on North Broadway. When Vernon stopped coming in to work. Groff tells me outside, his bosses never bothered to find out why, just hired another baker to replace him. Inside the front door the Kechi patrolman who responded to the neighbor’s odor complaint found among the three weeks’ worth of accumulated mail a curtly worded notice of termination from the bakery. Vernon’s date of death, Groff theorizes, may have been the third week in March when the mercury dropped precipitously for a couple of days, since the thermostat is set to eighty. This extra roaring of the furnace sped the rate of decomposition until the gas was, mercifully, shut off for nonpayment, the dead man having already been several months in arrears at the time of his decease.

XII.

“Kill the cocksuckers,” Pell rages that evening from his reclaimed spot at the kitchen table. “I’ll de-ball that son of a bitch and bury his wife alive.”

“If they stole the sticks they’re probably in a pawnshop somewhere,” I tell them.

“Go find ’em then,” Ivy says.

“There’s probably twenty pawnshops in this town, so this may take a while. You’d better get ready to go out.”

“I’ll not set foot in a pawnshop. That’s the province of criminals and Christkillers.”

“Aunt Ivy, how am I supposed to identify candlesticks I never saw in my life?”

She waddles into the bedroom and returns with a shoebox full of photos, some of them quite old by the look of them. Finally she finds what she’s looking for, hands me a Polaroid of her grimacing behind a set of four matched candlesticks that do indeed look valuable.

“How come I never saw the sticks before?” I ask her.

“Wouldn’t take ’em out for the likes of you.”

On my way out I pass Pell, looking up at the corner where the east and north walls meet the ceiling, his lower lip jutting out in deep contemplation. I look up there too and don’t see anything besides a few decades’ worth of discolored cooking grease.

XIII.

On Valentine’s Day Frank and I cover a shooting in the parking lot of the Bowler Restaurant way out east on Central. The dead man is a dishwasher, the killer the restaurant’s manager. The latter suspected that the former was wooing a waitress away from him, and after an altercation in the restaurant witnessed by more than a dozen diners the dishwasher quit. His corpse strikes me as that of an aging lothario, a few years past his stalking prime but still man enough to draw a woman from the arms of the short, portly manager. I photograph the latter handcuffed in the back seat of a brand-new radio cruiser, the very model of the unhinged impulse killer, but for me the shot of the day is the object of the deadly rivalry, one Phyllis Macklin. Mrs. Macklin, thirty-eight years of age, is plump and full of piss and vinegar, with a wry, depraved, mischievous look that might have ensnared me, too, if I worked with her day in and day out. She’s distraught, if not overly so for a woman who’s just lost a pair of suitors, and her slightly smeared makeup is a nice if not particularly original touch. While Frank interviews the kitchen staff I get a shot of her seated at a booth, making damned sure to show her legs, long and lovely even with her sensible working shoes on.

Back in the car I ask Frank if he could imagine killing for a gal with an ass like hers.

“Wasn’t over her,” he says. “That’s how it started, but the dishwasher got pissed off and quit right in the middle of lunch. That’s when the manager went for the gun.”

XIV.

In his exuberant youth Wingy Lazar was riding in the passenger side of a Stutz Bearcat with his arm extended through the window, and when the car passed a little too close to a stop sign he found himself a walking, talking cautionary tale for children, with a new and colorful nickname to boot. As I walk into his father’s pawnshop — my grandfather’s accounting office was upstairs for years — he’s explaining to a willowy blond woman the operation of an ancient box camera. As usual the prosthetic arm hangs by a hook on the wall, and the lady is paying as much attention to his foreshortened arm as she is to the camera. Wingy swears by the stump’s mysterious aphrodisiac qualities. “It’s just a question of waving the stump around like it’s a cock,” he said to me once. “Once you do that they’re as good as hypnotized.”

He nods to me and conveys via a slight arching of his eyebrows that he may have a shot at the lady’s virtue. I kill the time examining the old coins stapled into little cardboard squares with round cellophane centers, arranged in rows under the glass counter.

“Is this the kind where you just send Eastman Kodak the whole camera and they send it back with the pictures?”

“It’s been quite a while since they’ve done that, ma’am,” he says, and for the first time I take a good look at the willowy blond, who turns out to be quite a bit longer in the tooth than I imagined looking at her from behind, with a long, narrow face shiny with makeup and mascara like Theda Bara’s. Damned if Wingy isn’t pointing things out with his stump instead of his other hand, though, and damned if her voice isn’t taking on a distinctly flirtatious tone as the lesson progresses.

After a few minutes the lady leaves, having promised to give the matter some thought. “Oh, yeah, she’s gonna be giving the matter some thought all right,” Wingy says.

“You should ask if she’s got a granddaughter. We could double date.”

“Ah, she’s not that old.” He looks after her through the plate glass as she disappears down the sidewalk. “How old, you think?”

I slap the Polaroid down on the glass countertop. “Someone come in and pawn these candlesticks in the last couple, three weeks, maybe?”

With a cagey show of nonchalance he holds his fist up to his face and studies his lone set of fingernails. “What if someone did?”

“Stolen from my aunt’s house.”

“Nah, haven’t seen ’em. You sure they got pawned?”

“I’ve been to two-thirds of the hockshops in town and haven’t found anything.”

“If the owner thinks they’re hot then you won’t. If they take in hot merchandise they wouldn’t show it to you, coming in with a goddamn Polaroid like that. Better take the picture to the cops.”

“Problem is I’m not sure they were really stolen. My aunt’s kind of batty.”

Wingy cocks his head and looks at me with one eye squinted shut, and I understand that I’m wasting his time and mine.

XV.

Late in the afternoon I accompany Frank down to the Allis Hotel, where a sixth-floor suite is the scene of an apparent suicide. The victim hanged himself in the closet, no mean feat since it involved crouching slightly and suffocating himself. Doctor Groff estimates that the process must have taken ten minutes at the very least.

“I guess this one’ll go down as a suicide, Doc?” Frank asks him with a snicker.

“That’s what I’ll write down, but I’m not convinced.”

“You think it’s murder?”

“Accident. Take a good look at the body.”

The dead man is naked except for his socks, which seems like a funny way to check out — my photographs of him are from the chest up, emphasizing his purple mottled face — and his cock rests flaccid and sticky in his hand.

“You know what the sergeants used to say in the Army, drop your cocks and grab your socks,” Frank says.

“Now take a look at that on the floor, next to his left toes.” A tiny puddle sits congealing beneath the organ, so small you’d never notice it if it weren’t pointed out. “I’m not going to check it, but I’d bet money that’s human semen.”

“So you think he beat his meat one last time before he punched his own clock?”

“I think he was masturbating with a noose around his neck and when the moment of climax arrived the noose tightened as planned and he passed out. Strangled under his own weight.”

Frank bursts out laughing, and two of the cops glare at him. The third laughs it up in his turn, and Groff seems not to notice any of it.

“Don’t know how it gets around but these boys get the idea that lack of oxygen intensifies the sensation of euphoria at the moment of physical release. First time I saw one of these was in 1919, a farm boy in Sumner County, just fifteen years old. All around him at his feet were dirty French pictures his brother’d brought back from the war. I knew an old sawbones who’d been a medic with the GAR, he’d seen one way back in the early 1870s in Wisconsin. There was a lady’s whalebone corset on the floor the boy was jacking off onto.”

I half-expect Frank to try and run the story past the city editor with the offending information highlighted, just to hear the apoplectic reaction.

XVI.

Ivy limp-stomps across the kitchen until she’s less than a foot from me. “Where’s the candlesticks?”

“Nobody’s seen them.”

She grabs the lug wrench off the kitchen counter, left over from my last attempt to fix the sink, wields it briefly like a shillelagh, and hands it to me. “Then they must still be next door. I’ve known them no-accounts thirty years or more, and they’ve never been any good. Their kids were thieves, too.”

“Aunt Ivy, you can’t just go over there.”

“Are you going to let me go alone?” she asks, and I know there’s zero chance of convincing this ninety-pound birdlike old thing not to go, so I follow her.

My first rappings on the Severys’ door go unanswered, but I can hear their radio playing inside. I keep on knocking and the sound stops, and the living room lights go out. “Come on, open up, we need to talk to you.”

Ivy pounds on the living room widow. “They must take us for idiots. Look, trying to pretend they’re not home. Knock again.”

I pound louder and yell some more. It’s cold and quiet, except for a chain reaction of dogs barking, egged on by my knocking and hollering.

Ivy tries the doorknob without success. “Let’s go around back and see if it’s unlocked,” Ivy whispers.

“Why don’t we just call the police?” I whisper back.

“Don’t be stupid, boy. They’ll just lie and we’ll look foolish.”

There’s a light on next to the back door. Ivy points triumphantly at a large wooden crate in its glare, broken down into a stack of boards next to the trash can. “Look at what they just spent a bunch of money on.”

It’s a packing crate for an Emerson television set. While I’m looking at it I hear Ivy rattle the knob, and then I hear the breaking of a pane of glass. The lug wrench has sailed right through into the kitchen.

“Jesus,” I whisper, but I don’t manage to keep it very low.

“Stick your hand in there and unlock it,” she orders, and I obey, understanding finally why everyone in my family has always been so scared of the old gal.

Stepping inside a kitchen only marginally more hygienic than Ivy’s I pick the wrench up from among the shards and we march like soldiers to the living room where I turn on the overhead light. The crippled husband sits next to a walker in front of the extinguished television set, his eyes on the carpet like a bad puppy. His wife rises from the easy chair with her knobby index finger outstretched.

“You get out of my house this instant! I’ll have the police over here so quick your head’ll spin.” Her lower teeth are all jangly and thin, with one incisor broken clean in two.

“Go ahead and call ’em. Ask for Sergeant Burton in Burglary Division.” Though this is a name I just made up on the spot, it gives Mrs. Severy a jolt.

“You go on and get out of here.”

There’s real hate on her face, for me and my aunt and for her husband, too, I think. It’s easy to imagine this living room as a crime scene, one of them having slaughtered the other, and not sorry for it, either.

I step over to the TV and turn it back on. It fizzes and crackles, and a tiny blue light appears at the center of the gray-green screen and expands until it consumes it altogether. “Nice picture.”

The husband speaks up. “They make one bigger than this.”

“You should’ve stolen more silver,” I tell him.

“You watch what you say in this house, mister,” Mrs. Severy says.

I haven’t loathed her up until this moment, but something in her tone makes me want to coldcock the old bat. I take the wrench from Aunt Ivy’s bony, papery old fist. “I’m going to bust this television into little tiny bits if I don’t get a goddamn pawn ticket and some cash out of you.”

“Go ahead. I’ll see you in jail for breaking and entering.” But she leaves the room, and I can hear her in the bedroom rooting around in drawers. She turns on the radio to KFH, and I can hear their police beat reporter droning about a stickup at a gas station.

Mr. Severy cries quietly, little spasms rocking his body, his pants belted at his solar plexus. He burbles something about his wife’s strong will, never quite admitting that they stole the silver but acknowledging his long-standing desire for a television set like the one their son has. When his wife comes back into the room she has her arms folded over her scrawny chest.

“Where’s the pawn ticket?”

“What pawn ticket?” she says, placid and confident. “I just called the police on you.”

Again I picture the room as a crime scene, an image that has great appeal to me. I tap the lug wrench on the top of the television cabinet and lift it above my head as if to bring it down on Mrs. Severy’s matted scalp. She screams, Ivy laughs, and the old man sniffles as I swivel and smash the business end of it against the television screen. Everyone flinches but nothing happens. I swing again, and really put my back into it this time, and I manage to crack the safety glass in front of the picture tube.

Now I go after it like a lumberjack, and on my third try I smash straight through into the guts of the thing. The picture tube implodes with a genuinely frightening noise, not unlike a gunshot, and I feel a genuine sense of accomplishment as it sparks and smokes.

I’m vaguely aware of a keening from one or both of the Severys as I open the door and unplug the set before dragging it with some difficulty onto the porch, where the entire cabinet sits and burns, pale blue flames illuminating its interior and nasty black smoke pouring from the seams.

After a good spraying down with the Severys’ garden hose the smoke dies down, though its smell hangs electric and nasty in the night air. Mrs. Severy pushes through the front door, past me and onto her lawn to greet the arriving cops. As she leans into the window of the cruiser and jabbers at its occupants I gaze at the smoldering set and feel a great calm settling on me as I prepare to make my case to the law. This may look bad at first glance, but these men have seen worse.