The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

Jared Lipof Mastermind

from Salamander

It was the fall the NFL players went on strike, asking that their wage scale be calculated as a function of gross revenue — a demand the team owners recoiled from as if someone had upended a pitcher of urine across each vast mahogany desk. So my father had no Patriots game to watch on television, and he flipped on the Wide World of Sports to endure, in his words, “whatever arcane bullshit Jim McKay feels like blathering on about. It’s probably gonna be cross-country skiing, or curling, or goddamn table tennis.”

“Want to play Mastermind?” I said.

My father looked at me and then back to the TV, where coverage had relocated to a synchronized swimming competition, trying to figure out which option was less unbearable.

“Fine.” But he left the TV on.

Invented by an Israeli postmaster, Mastermind was essentially a game of code-breaking where one player arranged four pegs of different colors behind a shield and the other player had twelve turns to guess the correct sequence. To make matters more difficult, there were six different peg colors and repetition was permitted, meaning there were 6⁴ or 1,296 potential combinations. The code-breaker made his guess and then the code-maker would use even smaller black or white pegs to indicate how far off it was. A black peg meant correct color, correct position. A white peg meant correct color, incorrect position. No peg meant neither. The code-breaker used this information to make the next guess. Failed attempts generated cumulative data, applied in series. Games of this variety generally drove my father batshit, but my mother felt they fostered early cognitive development.

“I’ll be code-maker,” I said.

“Balls,” said my father. He spun the board around to face him and chuckled, which seemed to make him cough. He glanced toward the TV again, as if the NFL strike might have been settled in the past few moments to spare him this tedium.

“Don’t just put four of the same color,” I said. “It’s too easy.”

“Don’t tell me how to play. Now, look away while I do this.”

He set four pegs behind the shield and awaited my first guess.

Across the street from our school lived a man with a broken face. He hadn’t always lived there, but for the past three days, freed by the final bell, we’d walk past the yellow buses idling along the driveway and there he’d be, sitting in a window, an X of bandages across his nose, a gauze skullcap held in place by a chinstrap of medical tape. Just two eyes and some nose holes. A mummified king, silent and cryptic, scowling at everything beneath him.

Theories of his injury abounded.

“Race-car driver,” said Benny Silver, my best friend. “Formula One would be my guess. And that is the result of one hell of a crash. Multiple flips, no doubt.”

“What would a race-car driver be doing here,” I said, “in that dump?”

The man smoked a cigarette in the third-floor window, two stories above Val’s Barbershop and King Pizza, side-by-side establishments that shared the storefront at 1608 Chickering Road.

“He’s in that dump,” said Benny, “convalescing.”

Benny gathered and hoarded vocabulary words from his mother’s grad school textbooks, words he planned to deploy in a courtroom one day, when he became a hotshot attorney.

“No, I mean, wouldn’t a race-car driver rather convalesce,” I said, letting Benny know he hadn’t lost me, “in, like, an Italian villa, or a Back Bay brownstone, or a seaside mansion up in Newburyport? Those guys are loaded.”

“The car owners are loaded,” said Benny. “Drivers are like jockeys, hired help on the payroll.”

“Maybe he’s a boxer,” said Mike Walden, with his bowl cut and wristbands.

“Maybe he is pilot of fighter jet,” said Nader Al-Otabi, whose father had brought his family here from Saudi Arabia as part of some top-secret air force contract that Nader couldn’t seem to shut up about. “Maybe seat ejects but cockpit remains closed.”

“Again with the fighter pilots?” said Benny.

“Yeah, we get it, man,” I said. “You know jets.”

“And parachutes,” whispered Nader.

The mummy’s head swiveled toward us and we bolted like impalas spooked by a lion.

After school the next day Benny dragged me to Hanover Public Library. He’d seen something on the news the night before that demanded immediate follow-up. “I’ve had something of an intuition,” he said.

“You sure it was on the news? Sounds like you’ve been watching Dr. Who.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Dr. Who.”

“What’s at the library?” I said.

“Shh.” He put his finger to his lips. “Not until we get there.”

Benny’s sense of showmanship required a visual aid, and he said nothing further until we strode up the library’s front steps and requested several rolls of microfilm from the librarian and commandeered a viewing machine. Even then I had to wait for him to shuttle back and forth across two of them before he finally pointed at the screen and said, “There.”

The headline, dated July 22, 1982, read “Mickey Thutston Escapes from Walpole,” above a pair of mug shots of the notorious bank robber himself.

“That was like three months ago,” I said.

“Precisely,” said Benny.

“Precisely what?”

“Oh, Oliver. Don’t you see?”

I hated when he did this. We were in the same grade. We’d been friends since we were toddlers. But Benny was four months older than me, and whenever he found himself in the know he tended to treat me more like a nephew with a learning disability than a friend.

“See what?” I said, way too loud for the library’s hushed confines. An oil painting of one of Hanover’s founding fathers scowled at me from a gilt-edged frame. Any second the librarian’s head would peek around the corner to reprimand me.

“Plastic surgery,” whispered Benny.

I looked at the mug shot on the screen. Mickey Thurston was a handsome guy, there was no denying it. As in those old black-and-white photos of Paul Newman, Thurston’s eyes looked chiseled from diamonds, the kind of eyes that made a woman’s knees buckle. I’d heard stories about Mickey from both my father and my uncle Stan, who was a Hanover cop. Ladies’ man. Folk hero. Blue-collar guys loved him in a Robin Hood kind of way. He only stole from banks, and everybody, even the cops, knew that the banks were the real criminals. According to the article, Mickey Thurston robbed over forty of them, never used a gun, and was arrested, convicted, and locked up in the early seventies. Then, back in July, he and four other Walpole inmates crawled out of a hole in the ground at the end of a two-hundred-foot tunnel and made a break for it. Three of them had been recaptured by lunchtime the next day. A fourth by sundown. And that left Mickey, out there somewhere. Presumably out of the country. There were more rumors about Mickey Thurston’s whereabouts than theories about the broken man’s face.

“Why would he hide here? We’re only like fifty miles from Walpole,” I said.

“Fifty-two, to be precise.”

“Fine. I see you’ve done your research. Wouldn’t you want to get farther away from the prison you’d escaped from?”

“Unless that’s where everyone was looking for me. All I’m saying is that nobody would be looking for him this close to home.”

Could this be the man in the window across the street from the school, wrapped in gauze? The eyes might have told me, but we hadn’t gotten close enough.

“I don’t know, Benny. Maybe.”

“There’s something else,” he said. “They’re offering a ten-thousand-dollar reward for any information leading to his capture.”

That same fall, my mother began nursing school. The local community college offered a two-year RN program and she’d spent the summer reading anatomy and physiology textbooks in the same way my father read true crime and Stephen King in the living room recliner. Naturally, Benny considered her a medical expert worthy of consultation.

After she rubber-stamped Benny’s extra place setting for dinner, we began our homework at the kitchen table. With half of our math problems completed, Benny locked eyes with me and jerked his head toward my mother, preparing food at the counter. This, evidently, was my cue.

“So, um, how does plastic surgery work?” I asked her.

“What?” she said.

All Benny required was an opening. “What Ollie means is reconstructive surgery.”

I decided that I’d slap him in the mouth if he corrected me again.

She cocked an eyebrow. “Why?”

Though we hadn’t discussed it, Benny was prepared. “You know Mark Hamill?” he said.

My mother spun around and put a hand on her hip. “I’ve heard the name once or twice.”

“Well, between filming Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, Mark Hamill got in a car accident and needed reconstructive surgery. Hence, his altered appearance in Empire.”

“And this is why you’re interested in plastic surgery?”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Benny.

“Sorry, boys, but we’re still on the respiratory system. Trachea to bronchi to lungs, then on to matters of the heart. Tell me what you want to know and I’ll see if I can find it out.”

I pretended to pull the question out of my ass. “How long, say, would someone have to wear bandages after having plastic surgery on their face?”

The sliding glass door flew open. “Smells good in here!”

My father worked at an electroplating shop. The chemical process, he explained to me, was a galvanic cell — in other words, a battery — in reverse, where the cathode of the circuit was the part to be plated and the anode was the metal to be plated upon it. Through the door he carried with him the odor of thousand-gallon vats of acid lining the plating shop floor beneath clouds of vapor that threatened all passersby with a fatal sickness. He crossed the kitchen and kissed my mother and opened the refrigerator to fetch a beer. Over a greedy first sip he surveyed Benny and me sitting there, pencils and graph paper and math textbooks scattered on the table. Which was when he noticed the fourth place setting.

“Whoa, hold on. Master Silver will be dining with us? You do realize,” he said in his best old-money accent, “that we will be serving a mere chicken this evening. A most pedestrian bird, I’m afraid, but the butcher was plum out of pheasant, duck, and partridge.”

One of my father’s chief enjoyments in life was mocking Benny’s improbably sophisticated adolescent palate, loudly and at great length. Over at the Silvers’ apartment, Benny reveled in a paradise of exotic foods: cheeses pungent as gym socks; spicy brown mustards full of cracked seeds that stung your sinuses; venison and goose and even mutton on special occasions. My father threw a dishtowel over his forearm and pranced around in parody of a fancy restaurant’s bow-tied waiter. “Mayhaps the master would like to see a dessert menu?”

“Moving on,” said Benny, “the reason we’re curious about facelift recovery periods is that Shoemaker’s is selling a picture of Mark Hamill with his head wrapped in gauze, taken, they claim, in August of 1977, even though the accident occurred way back in January. If I can call the photo’s date into dispute I might be able to haggle them down on the price.”

Benny really had thought this through. Shoemaker’s Hobby Shop was a killer toy-slash-comic bookstore where he and I spent pretty much all our allowance money. I couldn’t be sure if this picture of Mark Hamill indeed existed, of what portion — if any — of Benny’s story could be corroborated later by my mother or father, though it seemed unlikely that they would cross Shoemaker’s threshold of their own volition.

Either way, Benny’s deflection worked. At the mention of anything Star Wars — related my father’s eyes glazed over. “I’m gonna go change out of these clothes.” He left the kitchen, beer in hand, trailing fumes.

“I’ll see what I can find out from my professor,” said my mother.

Standing by the window of Ms. Hannum’s English classroom and grinding a No. 2 pencil in the sharpener bolted to the sill gave you a clear view across Chickering Road to our fugitive’s hideout. Benny and I spent the entire class breaking lead and alternating visits to the sharpener to see if he’d make an appearance. We’d each made three trips to the window and seen nobody, and I knew we were pushing our luck. The last time I got up Ms. Hannum said, “Mr. Zinn, you’re not carving the words, merely inscribing them onto paper.” I nodded and smiled, feigning embarrassment, knowing that the next time Benny or I got up she would lose her shit.

But then — the snap of graphite behind me.

“Yes, Mr. Al-Otabi?” said Ms. Hannum.

“My pencil has broken,” said Nader. “I request permission to make pointed the tip.”

“What sort of bargain-basement stationer is supplying you children with writing instruments?” she said. “Make it brief.”

Nader tiptoed across the room and Ms. Hannum continued a lecture on Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” that had endured far too many interruptions already.

“The first word of this story is...”

Without raising his hand, Benny said, “True.”

“Very good, Mr. Silver. What do you make of this? Someone else.”

While she scanned the room, Benny whispered to Nader on his way past.

“Psst. While you’re at the—”

At full volume Nader said, “Benjamin, you must not distract me from my errand!”

“That’s it! That’s it! That’s it!” cried Ms. Hannum. “What in blazes is so interesting by the pencil sharpener?” She crossed the room to see for herself.

Benny shrugged and Nader held up his broken pencil.

She turned to me. “What about you, Mr. Zinn? Anything to say?”

“Well, you see, there’s this—”

Benny cut me off again. “Ms. Hannum, as long as you’re over there, you see that building across the street? The one with the pizza place and barbershop? Do you by any chance see somebody over there?”

If he finished another one of my sentences I would lay him out cold.

“Mister Silver, the town of Hanover does not pay me to conduct surveillance at the behest of my students. With your permission, I would like to finish with Mr. Poe’s story.”

Despite her reprimand, Ms. Hannum harbored a soft spot for Benny. Back on the first day of school he’d marched in the room and alerted her to the fact that his interest in law school demanded a comprehensive vocabulary and literary wherewithal, and he’d be damned if he’d settle for anything less than a straight A. I got the sense, ever since, that she considered him a scoundrel of the best possible sort, that if Benny were only thirty-five years older, she’d be all over his jock. On her way back to the chalkboard, she said, “For your information, Mr. Silver, there is no one in that building but a poor man recuperating from some grave injury, his head wrapped in gauze, smoking a cigarette in a lonely third-floor window.”

Benny turned to me, wide-eyed, and held up six fingers. If our calculations were correct, the bandages would come off tomorrow.

One of my mother’s professors had sketched a loose timeline for us: bandages for a full week, face swollen for another two, the bruised eye sockets of a raccoon for another month. On Saturday, with the whole afternoon at our disposal, Benny and I sat on a bench in front of the middle school, directly across the street from the fugitive’s apartment, shooting the shit. Benny owned Atari and my parents had bought me Intellivision, and we argued about their various merits and drawbacks. Benny conceded that Intellivision’s graphics boasted better resolution but maintained that the volume of Atari’s game cartridge library far outweighed the crisper picture.

“It’s about having fun, Ollie, not simulating anything real.”

“I guess.”

“If we were after realism, then we might as well—”

Benny froze and clutched my knee. Across the street a city bus pulled from the curb to reveal our fugitive, minus the bandages. I slapped his hand away.

“Try to act cool,” I said.

“So,” Benny said, way too loud, “like I was saying...”

“Keep it together, man.”

Benny shouted, “Graphics are a thing, but variety, I think, naturally is the thing...”

Unable to conduct surveillance while speaking cogently, Benny tossed a word salad while our fugitive lit a cigarette and paced in front of Val’s and King Pizza. It was our guy, no doubt about it. Bruises rimmed eyes that were like glittering gems, as if he’d snatched the mask clean off the Cheeseburglar’s face. He looked up Chickering Road, awaiting something’s arrival, and then he flicked his cigarette butt into the street and went inside the building.

“You know what this means?” said Benny.

“This’ll be good,” I said. “And you can stop yelling. He can’t hear you anymore.”

“Someone’s coming to get him,” he whispered. “If we’re going to collect that reward, we need to act fast. He’ll be in the wind before you know it.”

“Maybe we should get Nader and Mike involved. We can cover more bases.”

“Oliver, allow me to explain the concept of division,” said Benny. “Ten thousand divided by two equals five thousand, correct?”

“Fine, then,” I said. “If you’re worried about your cut of the reward, then why get me involved? You could keep it all to yourself.”

“Ollie, please. We’re best friends.”

It delighted me to hear him say this aloud. Within the dynamics of our quartet, I had always cast myself as Benny’s right-hand man, the Chewbacca to his Han Solo, but there were times I wasn’t so sure. Sometimes I’d catch wind of sleepovers I hadn’t been invited to, and when we hung out the following week, I would find myself squinting with confusion at new terms that had entered the group’s private lexicon in my absence, phrases like douche chill, inside jokes with me on the outside. Hearing him call me his best friend made my ribcage swell.

That is, until he continued, “Plus, we’ll need to get your uncle involved.”

Uncle Stan. My connection to the Hanover Police Department. That’s all it was.

Uncle Stan lived on Beech Street, a couple of miles from our apartment complex. We decided to approach him at home the next day, while he was off-duty, instead of marching into Hanover PD and whipping the entire force into a lather and, as Benny put it, “gathering investors along the way.” Every person we told, Benny said, would want in on the reward money.

“Not sure investors is accurate,” I said.

“Irregardless,” said Benny. “We only tell your uncle, and if he can slap cuffs on Thurston by himself, we’re still talking thirty-three hundred apiece. Not too shabby.”

We strolled beneath maples and sycamores and hemlocks in various stages of corduroy explosion, the sky gunmetal and threatening rain. I had managed to find out from my father, through a little code-making of my own, that Uncle Stan was off-duty on Sunday.

“How’d you get his schedule,” said Benny, “without tipping off your dad?”

“You’re gonna like this,” I said, and I told Benny about the NFL players’ strike and the Wide World of Sports and our game of Mastermind.

I had just arranged my first guess.

“Nope,” said my father.

“You can’t just say nope,” I said. “You have to, like, illustrate where I went wrong.”

“You were totally wrong,” said my father.

“None of my pegs were right?” I said. “That’s barely even possible.”

My father shrugged, and I got an idea.

“Uncle Stan knows how to play.”

“How nice for Uncle Stan.”

“It is nice. He’s really good, too.”

“Maybe I should call him up and congratulate him on his skill with shitty children’s games.”

“Maybe you should, you know, unless he’s at work?”

My father snorted.

“It’s hardly a children’s game. Look. It says six and up on the box.”

“If a seven-year-old can play it, then the goddamn cat can probably play it.” But then something twinkled behind my father’s eyes. “He does have today off, though. I should call and see if he wants to pop on down to the Chalet.” My father waggled his fingertips in anticipation of a frothy pint at his favorite nearby tavern.

My mother came out of the bedroom, holding a dress on either side of her.

“No one’s going to the Chalet. We’re having dinner with the Marklesons. Which one of these should I wear?”

It was as if someone had opened a valve and let all the air out of my father. He deflated back into the couch as, onscreen, a tetrahedron of swimmers kicked their legs in unison.

“The one on the left.”

“Really?” my mother said. “I like the other one.”

Making eye contact with me, he said, “So then why did you ask?”

“I just wanted my opinion confirmed. Which you’ve done. Thank you.”

My father shook his head as if to say, You see what I have to deal with?

Dodging puddles down Beech Street, it occurred to me that our predicament with the reward money was not unlike that of the NFL players trying to get a proportionate slice of the financial pie they risked injury, week after week, to produce.

Benny said, “I give your performance a B.” He paused and added, “Minus.”

“What? We know he’s home.”

“We know he’s not working. Why, in the name of Yoda, did you not simply call him?”

“You’re like the mayor of duplicity! I’m following your lead.”

Benny shook his head and we climbed the front steps of Uncle Stan’s house and rang the doorbell. “If he’s not home I don’t know what we’re gonna do.”

But Uncle Stan opened the door.

“Well, if it isn’t my favorite nephew and Little Lord Shortpants! Come on in.”

Still a bachelor, Uncle Stan’s place suffered, both decoratively and olfactorily, from a lack of female inhabitance. Wrinkled pants lay jettisoned across furniture. Mismatched shoes rested wherever they’d been kicked off. Across from the couch, a recliner was aimed directly at the television instead of at an angle that promoted conversation. The whole place smelled as if someone had just prepared French onion soup, in bare feet, while farting nonstop. Benny, who was accustomed to a meticulous organization of toys and regularly vacuumed rugs and a rigidly charted rotation of Minuteman Candle Company fragrances at his apartment, now walked into my uncle’s house and sat down and said nothing. It took me a moment to realize he was holding his breath.

Uncle Stan fell into the recliner. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

I said, “We’ve got some information. Kind of a lead.”

“Go on,” said Uncle Stan.

Not sure how to proceed, and getting no help from Benny, I said, “Well, there’s this house across the street from our school.”

My uncle said, “I’m with you so far.”

I turned to Benny, who only nodded.

“The one with the pizza place and barbershop.”

“I’m familiar with it,” said Uncle Stan.

Beside me, Benny began to turn blue.

I said, “We think Mickey Thurston is hiding out there.”

Benny’s withheld breath exploded in a great salivary wheeze.

“No! Not like that!” he cried.

“Take it easy!” I said.

Benny let out an animal wail as if his brain had short-circuited. “Goddamn it! You dangle the information! You don’t come right out with it!”

He gasped for air and said, “Mr. Zinn, are you running a dog kennel in here? Or maybe you’ve got a barrel of vinegar fermenting in the kitchen?”

“Well, well, well,” said Uncle Stan. “If it isn’t Woodward and Blowhard. What makes you think it’s him? I mean, hiding out this close to Walpole seems reckless, even for ol’ Mick.”

“That’s what I said!”

But then we told him about the bandages and the raccoon eyes and the lingering in a third-floor window all day and pacing the sidewalk as if his getaway were imminent. Uncle Stan scratched his chin and got up to fetch a beer from the kitchen and Benny lunged for the window and sucked the outdoor air. When he came back into the room Uncle Stan told us to run on home, that he had some things to look into.

We were in English class the next afternoon when we heard the sirens.

“And so our unnamed narrator attempts to tell us not that he is innocent of murdering the old man, but what?” Ms. Hannum surveyed the room.

Generally speaking, I took a casual approach to reading assignments. I’d skim the material or buy CliffsNotes and wing my essays with an above-average degree of success. But “The Tell-Tale Heart” was like four pages long, and I enjoyed it, so I raised my hand.

Before Ms. Hannum could call my name Benny said, “That he’s not crazy.”

“Very good, Benjamin,” said Ms. Hannum.

I said, “If you cut me off one more time I will knock you the fuck out!”

Everyone froze. Ms. Hannum’s jaw hung slack. Dead leaves rattled outside the window.

“Mister Zinn. I, for one, am shocked by your vulgar tongue.” Beside me, Benny snickered at her choice of words. “Apologize to Mr. Silver this instant.”

“Me? He’s the one who didn’t raise his hand. What about protocol?”

“Broken protocol is no cause for profanity. Apologize.”

“It’s okay, Ms. H. Ollie’s a little on edge today,” said Benny. “Speaking of protocol, I have a question of my own.”

She gripped the bridge of her nose. “Proceed.”

“The guy put the body parts ‘under the floorboards.’ Wouldn’t the cops have smelled something?”

Ms. Hannum sighed. “The police arrived very shortly thereafter.”

“Okay, fine. But let’s say he managed to keep it together for the interview. He still would’ve had to live with the smell for a while. Why didn’t he just bury him? And how, in eighteen-whatever-year-this-was, did he get all those body parts from the tub to the living room without leaving a trail of blood? It’s not like he had trash bags or a plastic tarp.”

“Mr. Silver, literature needn’t always be taken literally.”

Ms. Hannum turned to erase the chalkboard, which was when the police cruisers arrived out on Chickering Road with much fanfare, shattering any plans she might have had for the rest of the period. We craned our necks to see over the windowsill from our seats, until finally she said, “Go,” and we dashed to the windows.

The cops surrounded the building, backs to the wall, guns drawn, beacons blazing atop the cruisers. One of them kicked in the door and they raced up the stairs. Now that he was on the verge of capture, I wanted Mickey Thurston to burst from the third-floor window and leap to a power line and swing safely into a convertible and outrun the cops all the way to the border. I didn’t care about the money. I now realized that we were more like the greedy NFL owners than the underpaid gladiators on the field. Mickey was the real hero here, stealing from the fat-cat bankers, and Benny and I had to go and rat out Robin Hood just so we could buy more Star Wars figures than we’d ever need in three lifetimes. We were wrong, I mouthed to him, and he squinted at me, misunderstanding, but when we turned back to the window, the cops came out of the building empty-handed, scratching their heads.

The following Friday night, Benny and I were in my living room watching TV, my mother squeaking her highlighter over the pages of her anatomy textbook, when the sliding glass door flew open.

“Weekend’s here! Who wants to go out for pizza?”

My father rarely entered rooms quietly. He preferred to burst into them as if streamers and balloons followed closely behind.

My father’s car was a 1973 Saab Sonett, a weirdly esoteric limited-edition car. By the early ’80s it had acquired a cult status among its owners — and its owners alone, one of those clubs that absolutely no one but its members even remotely give a shit about. His Sonett was a very singular shade of red-orange, three parts ketchup to one mustard, and that, coupled with its peculiar nose-heavy contour, didn’t so much turn the heads as furrow the brows of pedestrians, as if the car’s presence suddenly made people question what country they were in. The point is that my father’s two-seater would never accommodate the four of us — though this isn’t really the point, is it? I’ve gotten so far off point with board games and bank robbers and human anatomy and Star Wars and the body under Poe’s floorboards, a shield I’ve erected to block the thing I’ve been trying so hard not to look at directly this entire time — so he climbed behind the wheel of my mother’s car, a brand-new Oldsmobile Delta 88, and she and Benny and I piled in. Gone are the days, I’m afraid, when a plating line manager and his nursing student wife could get a loan for a brand-new sedan, gleaming white, with a plush velour interior. As far as I was concerned, it was the stretch limo of a country music star.

I should have seen what was coming when we pulled up in front of King’s Pizza.

“King’s?” I said. “We always go to Star Pizza.”

My parents exchanged a look I could not decipher.

Inside, we gazed up at a menu that was nearly identical to Star’s and yet all wrong and foreign-seeming, like my father’s Saab. He mused, loudly, to the guy behind the counter, “Thought I saw a FOR RENT sign outside. You got a recent vacancy upstairs?”

The guy shrugged. “I just work here. I don’t own the building.”

At dinner my father managed to drop the words bank, rob, escape, and even fugitive into our conversation. As we awaited the falling ax, my father chomped joyously on pizza crust, loving every minute of it.

Afterward, back in the car, he said, “Anyone feel like swinging by... Shoemaker’s?”

Before I could answer, Benny said “I do!”

Goddamn him. What did he care, anyway? A lecture from somebody else’s parents was meaningless, irrelevant as a Belgian tax schedule. My father dragged us all down there to witness an obvious burlesque of his being very interested in a black-and-white photo of the actor Mark Hamill, encased in bandages. Naturally, they had never stocked nor heard of such an item.

“Oh, really?” He turned around to face Benny and me while my mother leafed through the latest issue of Wonder Woman. “What do you two have to say for yourselves?”

“Sorry,” we said in unison, and he led us back out to the car. Statistically speaking, it was more likely that our mysterious bandaged man was a race-car driver, or a boxer, or a fighter pilot, or any number of other possibilities, rather than one specific bank robber on the lam. But we believed what we believed. We manufactured certainty out of thin air and headlines and wishful thinking. My father thought he could teach us a lesson, something about deception, about how you weren’t supposed to lie to people in order to get something you wanted. Especially your family. But we didn’t learn not to lie; we learned where our lies had met resistance. We got better at it. And that night we drove away from Shoemaker’s, safely contained in the Oldsmobile’s interior of cornflower blue.

Like a shuttled roll of microfilm, thirty years would scroll past with shocking speed and have their way with all of us, leaving rapidly growing masses in my father’s lungs.

On the same coffee table beside the same couch, I set the same board game down between my father and me, the one with the colored pegs and the plastic shield and the guesswork. Twelve moves to get it right. It’s not enough. You could have a thousand moves and still get it wrong.

An oxygen tank helps my father breathe. My mother naps in the bedroom, exhausted, her professional expertise now called upon at great length in the home. Clear plastic tubes loop over each ear. The periodic aerosol burst of the tank keeping the oxygen saturation in his lungs above a specific threshold. The rhythmically identical coughs lighting up his chest from the inside.

“This time I’m code-maker,” I say.

“Fine.” He coughs and says, “Let me ask you something. Remember that house?”

“What house?”

He shakes his head. “You know what house. Who was in it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You told your uncle it was Mickey Thurston.”

“I told him I thought it was.”

“What’s the difference?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Certainty?”

“You were certain enough to call the cops.”

“There was a big reward. That kind of cash, what’s the harm in a shot in the dark?”

“No harm for you, but for the potentially innocent guy upstairs...”

“Everyone’s potentially innocent,” I say.

He chuckles, which induces another coughing fit. “Don’t make me laugh.”

“Sorry. Besides, they never found ol’ Mick.”

“That’s not the point. My point is, the reward made it okay for you to take a leap of faith, as long you didn’t have to absorb the risk if it turned out you were wrong.”

“Why are you asking me this?”

“I think you know.”

We look at each other over the coffee table, the clean slate of Mastermind’s pegboard between us. This time I can see the answer but my father cannot. Or maybe neither of us can. Maybe nobody can. The word regret comes from the Old French, fourteenth century, “to lament someone’s death; to ask the help of.” An impossible contradiction, asking for help from the last person on earth who can provide it. Right now I want invisible strings to yank my father up off the couch just so he can burst through the sliding glass door again, accompanied by his high-decibel cacophony, freed from the workday’s vaporous confines to prance around the apartment, loudly in charge again. I want to do the whole thing differently this time, without all the puzzles and deception. Nothing would slow the passage of time, but the time might be better spent.

Still awaiting his first move, I say, “I don’t know the answer.”

And my father laughs again. And coughs.

And says, “Anyone who says they do is full of shit.”