The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

Joe Gores Inscrutable

From The Mysterious Press Anniversary Anthology

Knuckles Colucci wasn’t known as Knuckles because they dragged on the ground when he walked. Far from it. Oh, his jaws were blue enough, his nose was Roman, his eyes were mean, his lips had that Capone twist. But he was physically slight, not bulky. So while maturing into a classic Mafia soldier, and then graduating to Armani suits and Ferragamo shoes — which he invariably wore with parrot-bright aloha shirts — Knuckles needed some sort of physical edge. Thus the habit, in his youth, of carrying a set of brass knuckles as an equalizer.

Those days were long past. Now Knuckles was a frightener. He never demanded of some poor fool the vigorish due a local loan shark. He never broke knees or cut off thumbs. He wasn’t an enforcer. He warned people. Once.

If the warning was ignored, he killed them.

On this particular Wednesday he had flown first class from Detroit to San Francisco. A boring flight because today would be just a warning. He walked through the jammed, noisy, jostling airline terminal and down two escalators. The first took him past the luggage area, where he had no luggage to pick up. He never brought anything more lethal than sinus breath onto any of the numerous commercial flights that his profession demanded. He’d taken three falls in his thirty-nine years. If he took another he wouldn’t get up again, so he wasn’t about to take it.

The next escalator took him to a long slow-moving walkway. In the underground parking garage a bright-eyed kid in his twenties fell into step with him on the angle-striped pedestrian walk.

“Nice flight?” Knuckles merely grunted. The kid handed him a set of Lexus keys. “The red one,” he said, and turned off to lose himself among the endless rows of cars.

The Lexus was nestled between a hulking, sullen SUV and some sort of canary-yellow Oldsmobile convertible. Knuckles pulled on thin rubber surgeon’s gloves, unlocked the door, got in. There was a black violin case on the passenger seat. He unsnapped it, raised the lid, looked inside, grinned thinly, and closed and resnapped it. He set it upright in the bucket seat and snugged the seat belt about it, then followed the EXIT signs out of the labyrinth. His nose was already tingling from the exhaust fumes trapped in the garage. Too many freaking people. Kill ’em all.

“I need a frozen Milky Way,” said Larry Ballard.

He was a tall, athletic blond man in his early thirties, with a surfer’s tan, a hawk nose, and cold blue eyes that just saved his face from true male beauty. He was also a repo man for Daniel Kearny Associates at 340 Eleventh Street in San Francisco.

“Nobody needs a frozen Milky Way,” Bart Heslip pointed out.

He too was very well conditioned, early thirties, shorter, thicker, plum black, and with the shaved head currently in favor among African American males. After winning thirty-nine out of forty pro fights, he had quit the ring to become a repo man for DKA.

“I’ve been working out really hard,” explained Ballard. “My blood-sugar level is way down.”

“We can’t have you going hypoglycemic before you win that black belt,” said Heslip. “Ray Chong’s it is — after you take me back to my car in Pacific Heights.”

Above the door of the narrow Eleventh Street storefront sandwiched between a tire repair shop and an auto supply store run by Persians in turbans was the legend PEKING GROCERY STORE — CHINESE DELICACIES in English letters and Chinese characters.

The owner, Ray Chong Fat, was anything but. Ray was skinny and stooped, with a thin face, not much chin, a long upper lip, and lank black hair. As always, he wore a highly starched white shirt, the cuffs rolled up two turns over his skinny wrists, the collar two sizes too big for his scrawny neck.

Ray was a widower with seven, count ’em, seven daughters. And not even one lousy little son. One daughter in grad school, two in college, two in high school, one in elementary school, one just about to enter kindergarten. Seven daughters meant a lot of expenses, which meant a lot of hard work for Ray.

But he was a satisfied man, whistling tunelessly to himself as he stocked the shelves with assorted cans of exotic fruit: rambutan canned with pineapple; soursops; jackfruit in syrup; and of course Chinese lychees.

The rest of the narrow store was jammed with Chinese yams and cabbage; mandarins and mangoes and pawpaws and star fruit; dried and salted squid; frozen ducks and fish, frozen candy bars and ice cream bars, green tea and chow mein noodles and dried rice noodles and sweet rice candies, all redolent with the smell of strange spices. The shelves in the back room bulged with rental videos, all in Chinese and most shot in Hong Kong. Romance and martial arts were the favorites.

The front door jangled its little bell. The familiar salt-and-pep-per team from down the street came in.

“Hey, got riddle,” exclaimed Ray in his high-pitched singsong voice. “Why Chinese so smart?”

“I don’t know, Ray,” said Ballard. “Why are they?”

“No blondes.” Ray went off into gales of high hee-hee-hee-hee laughter. Heslip shook his shaved head.

“It’s what I always tell you, Larry. Inscrutable.”

Two jokes and a riddle later, they headed for the door. A slight man was getting a violin case out of a red Lexus when they emerged. Ballard waved the frozen Milky Way after him.

“Not my idea of the third violin at the symphony.”

“Maybe it isn’t a violin in the case,” chuckled Bart.

The bell tinkled. A short, swarthy man with a nose as big as a parrot’s was coming up the aisle toward Ray. The man wore a very expensive suit and carried a violin case. Ray wreathed his lean face in a welcoming smile full of prominent teeth.

“Yessir, yessir, help you, sir?”

“Yeah, you freaking slope, you can help me,” said Knuckles.

Ray Chong Fat’s eyes became flat and stupid.

“No savvy,” he said.

Knuckles set his violin case on the counter.

“Know what I hear? I hear some Chinaman is running an unsanctioned Asian card club for the really high rollers in this town once or twice a month, on the weekends.”

“No savvy,” said Ray Chong Fat.

“I hear this freaking Chink’s got a game planned this weekend. I hear a certain gentleman in the South Bay don’t like that shit, get my drift?”

“No savvy.” A drop of sweat ran down Ray Chong Fat’s nose.

Knuckles Colucci unsnapped the violin case. He opened it. “Take a look at that,” he said.

Ray Chong Fat looked into the case. He paled.

“Yeah, you savvy that okay, slope,” said Knuckles. He closed the case, resnapped it, waggled a finger under Ray’s nose. “Don’t do it no more,” he said.

“I need a beer,” said Bart Heslip.

It was nine-thirty that same night, and he and Ballard, working in tandem, had scored two repos each.

“Nobody needs a beer,” Larry Ballard pointed out.

“This is thirsty work.”

“Okay. Ray’ll be open for another half-hour at least.”

But Ray Chong Fat’s store had the CLOSED sign out, even though light still glowed from the back room. They rapped on the glass and rattled the door. In this neighborhood, even DKA had alarms on the doors and heavy mesh screens on the ground-floor windows. Ray had neither.

“How many years have we been coming here and he’s never been closed before ten o’clock?” asked Ballard.

Bart said softly, “Maybe it wasn’t a violin.”

Ray’s door was no proof against their lockpicks. They were halfway down the length of the store when the door of the back room opened and Ray came out. Even in the dim light he looked drawn and wasted.

“Go ’way! We closed.”

“After you tell us what’s wrong.”

Over green tea and delicate almond cakes in the video room, they got the story out of him. The little man with his threats and the violin case with anything but a violin inside.

“It’s easy,” said Bart. “Just cancel the game.”

“Two year ago, number three daughter real sick, ’member?”

“We remember.” They had gotten up a cash donation at DKA.

“Go to Chinese Benevolent Association, borrow money. Lots of money.” He opened his arms wide. “Big interest.”

“Not so benevolent?” suggested Bart.

Ray nodded morosely, sipped tea. They ate almond cakes.

“Man come, say I gotta run weekend Asian card club to pay off loan. If I won’t, he say they do things to my daughters.”

“They needed a front,” said Larry. “At least the loan—”

“Never get loan paid off. Only pay off interest.”

“You know the guy with the violin case?” asked Bart.

Ray shook his head vigorously.

“Know who sent the guy with the violin case?”

“Somebody in South Bay.” Ray started wringing his hands with the theatricality of true emotion. “What I do?”

“You hold the game and save your daughters,” said Ballard.

“Then man with violin come back and kill me.”

The two repo men looked at each other.

“No,” said Heslip.

“Why is sex like insurance?” asked Rosenkrantz.

“The older you are, the more it costs,” said Guildenstern.

“Their jokes are worse than Ray’s,” said Bart Heslip.

It was six A.M. Thursday. He and Larry were with the two bulky SFPD homicide cops in the upstairs conference room at DKA, where they had total privacy because nobody could get up the stairs without making noise. The cops had insisted on this since they were outside department regs just being there.

Rosenkrantz was bald as Kojak and Guildenstern had hair that looked fake but wasn’t. It was rumored in the department that even their wives called them by their nicknames.

When they did good cop/bad cop, Guildenstern was always the bad cop. He had the eyes for it. He said, “You guys been talking for ten minutes and you ain’t given us anything we’d be ashamed to tell our mothers.”

“Only thing could embarrass your mothers is that they are your mothers,” said Heslip.

Guildenstern looked at Rosenkrantz. “He being profound?”

“Just nifty,” said Rosenkrantz.

“Just careful,” said Ballard. “If you try to take down the game, our guy’s family gets hit.”

“And if he holds the game, he gets hit. We got that part of it.” Rosenkrantz was suddenly angry. “The mayor and the D.A. are always telling us there ain’t any Mafia in San Francisco. Asian gangs fighting for power, maybe. Chicano gangs fighting over turf, perhaps. Black gangs fighting over drug money and rap music, could be. But—”

“But no Mafia action,” said Guildenstern. “These days, local guys who are connected have only bookkeepers on their payroll. They need something done, they make a call and somebody gets on a plane out of Chicago or Detroit or even Cleveland.”

Rosenkrantz took it up. “The threatener picks up his hardware at the airport on the way in, does what he does, leaves his hardware at the airport on the way out. We got a lot of names and reputations, but we can’t get nothing on nobody.”

“You’re saying the guy with the violin case isn’t local?”

“Tell us about him,” suggested Rosenkrantz.

They did. The cops exchanged glances.

“Knuckles Colucci out of Detroit,” said Guildenstern.

“Mean as a snake,” said Rosenkrantz.

“Call the undertaker for your pal,” said Guildenstern.

“Who hired him?”

The two big cops heaved themselves to their feet. “South Bay? Let us worry about that,” they said almost in unison.

“Who runs the Chinese Benevolent Association?”

“Let us worry about that, too.”

“You’ll let us know when Colucci leaves home again?”

Rosenkrantz said, “What’s the most important question to ask a woman if you’re interested in safe sex?”

“What time does your husband get home?” said Guildenstern.

Larry and Bart descended the back stairs to the big back office that office manager Giselle Marc shared with the mainframe computer and the teenage girls who sent out legal notices and dun letters after school. Giselle was a tall, lithe blonde in her early thirties whose brains were even better than her long and wicked legs. This early she was alone in the office.

“Well?” asked Ballard.

“Every word,” said Giselle with an almost urchin grin. She held up the tape recorder she’d had plugged into the intercom that Heslip, at her suggestion, had left open in the conference room. “Was that a yes or a no on Colucci from those guys?”

“A yes,” said Ballard. “No, there’d have been no joke.”

“If you think you’re leaving me out of this, you’re crazy.”

“Never crossed our minds,” fibbed Heslip.

They had been listening to the tape for about ten minutes when behind them O’B said, “Ahem.”

Patrick Michael O’Bannon, in his early fifties, with guileless blue eyes in a leathery drinker’s face splattered with freckles, was as devious as a two-headed snake. He was also the best repo man around save Kearny himself. He pulled up a chair and sat down.

“Now, you got a couple of holes in your plan...”

None of them thought about letting Dan Kearny, their boss, in on things. He’d just say no, then he’d take over their operation and run it himself. He did it every time.

The Chinese Benevolent Association was up a flight of creaky wooden stairs from an aged Buddhist temple on Old Chinatown Lane, a little stub of an alley just below Stockton Street. There was nothing to tempt the casual tourist or, indeed, any Caucasian to try the street door. It just bore a set of Chinese characters that spelled out God knew what.

Yet on this particular Thursday midday, two bulky white men came tramping up the stairs and into the reception room. It was hung with bright silk tapestries and there were delicate carved ivory figurines on inlaid tables. There was a hint of incense on the air. On the walls were numerous photos of association leaders shaking hands with local and national politicians.

A pert, pretty Chinese girl was making her fingers fly over the keyboard of a very modern computer. She looked up when the) entered, finding a smile for them.

“May I help you?”

When they just walked past her toward the door in the back wall, she dove for the buzzer under her desk. But by then they were already into the next room, where a white-haired Chinese gentleman sat behind a desk arranged so no window overlooked it. A heavyset thug was coming out of his chair on their side of the desk even as he reached for his armpit.

Guildenstern put a big hand on the man’s face and pushed. He pushed with stunning, unexpected strength. The thug went backward over his chair. Rosenkrantz was holding out his badge for the older gentleman to see.

“Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, SFPD Homicide,” he said.

The old man spoke sharply in Mandarin. The thug righted his chair, sat back down, and ceased to exist for them.

“Mr. Li?” asked Rosenkrantz.

“I am Fong Li,” admitted the white-haired man gravely. His English was accented but elegant. He had a long, narrow, lined face with a thin aristocratic nose. His eyes were dark but benevolent, like his association. In any country of the world, in any race, at any time, he would have been a patriarch.

Rosenkrantz sat on a corner of the desk. “Ray Chong Fat.”

“Ah so,” said Fong Li, much as Ray Chong said, “No savvy.”

“Guy came around and threatened him with death if he held your Asian card game this weekend.”

“I am desolated that I have no information of this event for the honored gentlemen,” said Fong Li.

Guildenstern turned from a table under the window with a delicate Chinese urn in one paw. “This one of them Ming vases?”

Fong Li went very still. He said very softly, “I can make inquiries and discover whether this game of which you illustrious gentlemen speak might be canceled.”

“We don’t want it canceled,” said Rosenkrantz.

Surprise actually flitted across the Chinese man’s august features. “Then I am sure that Mr. Chong Fat need not run—”

“We want Ray to run it this weekend,” said Guildenstern.

Sudden comprehension illuminated Fong Li’s face. “Ah so,” he said again, with a very different inflection.

“But after this weekend, he don’t have to ever run another one,” said Rosenkrantz. “And he don’t owe you any money. The books are balanced, the slate is wiped clean. Anything ever happens to him, or his daughters, anything at all...”

Fong Li bowed gracefully. “This insignificant person would not wish to insult such brilliant men as yourselves, but—”

“I said we were Homicide. We don’t care about gambling.”

A delighted Fong Li beamed. Rosenkrantz stood. Guildenstern carefully set the Ming urn back on the table.

“Nice vase,” he said, making the word rhyme with base.

Two-Ton Tony Marino took his nickname from the heavyweight boxer Two-Ton Tony Galento, who had once gotten himself creamed by Joe Louis. Tony didn’t weigh quite two tons, but even so he was built like a watermelon. When the phone rang in his Detroit office on the following Monday afternoon, he picked up without hesitation: The place was swept twice daily for bugs.

“Yeah, Marino.”

“Tony. Leone in San Francisco. The scemo Chinaman held the game last Saturday night. So Knuckles’ll have to come back out.” Leone gave a sudden gross chuckle. “Blood on the chop suey by Wednesday, right?”

They said laconic goodbyes and hung up. Tony was a little offended. Leone had no real class. You didn’t say things like that. Things got done, bing bang boom, they were over. Nothing personal. You never talked about them before or after.

He dialed the phone. When a machine answered, he told it, “Knuckles, on Wednesday you gotta make that West Coast delivery.”

Shoehorned with the technician into the closed van parked on a side street in the South Bay town of Milpitas near the Summitpointe Golf Course, Guildenstern asked Rosenkrantz, “What’s the leading sexually transmitted disease among yuppies?”

“Headaches,” said Rosenkrantz.

“I think that’s what we’ll be giving our boy Leone.”

“I especially liked the part about blood on the chop suey.”

“Conspiracy to commit?” suggested Guildenstern.

“At least,” agreed Rosenkrantz.

It was Wednesday again, and Knuckles was flying first class from Detroit to San Francisco. He was feeling good. No dry run today. The real thing. At SFO he went through the jammed, noisy, jostling terminal and down the two sets of escalators to the moving walkway. As he started along the angle-striped pedestrian walkway in the vast echoing underground garage, a tall elegant blonde with breathtaking thighs fell into step with him.

“Nice flight?” she asked. Her voice was soft, caressing.

“My name is Knuckles Drop-Your-Pants,” Knuckles said with his most winning smile. She handed him a set of keys.

“The gold Allante,” she said, and was gone among the endless rows of cars before he could think up another zinger.

He sighed, pulled on his thin rubber gloves, unlocked the Allante, got in. He knew damn well he would never be able to buy anything like that in his entire life. The black violin case was on the passenger seat. He unsnapped it and raised the lid. Yeah.

But as he was setting it upright on the bucket seat there was a knock on the window. The blonde. She had a cell phone up to her ear and was gesturing at him to roll down the window.

“Open the trunk.” As she spoke she reached through the open window for the instrument case. “Hurry, there’s no time.”

She tossed the case into the trunk, slammed the lid, came back to slide into the front seat next to him.

“Terrorist bomb threat. They’re searching all the cars with single men in them, so our only chance is to get you and that hardware out of here before they bottle up the garage.” When he did nothing, she yelled angrily at him, “Move it!”

Knuckles had no experience of a woman like this. He put the car in gear, followed the arrows toward the exit as if on automatic. Just before the ramp down to the ticket booths, a hard-eyed red-haired man in his fifties stepped out in front of the car and held up a badge wallet with a freckle-splotched hand. He came around to Knuckles’s side of the Allante.

“FBI. We’re going to have to take a look in your trunk.”

“You got a warrant?” demanded the suddenly strident blonde. “This is harassment! My husband has just picked me up from a seven-hour flight and I’m not going to have you getting filthy pleasure from pawing through my underwear looking for drugs.”

“It isn’t...” The redhead stopped and sighed and stepped back. “And they wonder why,” he muttered under his breath. He gestured wearily. “On through, the pair of you.”

Once they were on the exit road from the airport, she told Knuckles to pull over at the Standard station. She got out.

“Open the trunk. I’ll get your case for you.” She recited a phone number. “Remember it.”

She retrieved the violin case, slammed the trunk lid, put the case back in the car, and finally leaned in his open window.

“If the heat’s still on here at the airport when you’re finished, call me and report,” she told him.

This was the kind of thing Knuckles understood. He’d make damn sure the heat would still be on at the airport.

“If it is, maybe you and me can—”

“Sure. Whatever you want, Knuckles. Leone said to treat you right.” She gave him a suddenly wicked, even debauched smile. “You’ll be staying over at my place.”

A freaking dream come true. Yeah! Do the Chink, call the blonde, then do her. All night. Paradise on a platter. In a feather bed, rather.

Knuckles turned the dead-bolt knob on the front door and flipped the OPEN sign over to CLOSED. Only when he was going down the aisle did he see that there were a couple of customers with the dead man. On the killing ground that was how he always thought of his prey: the dead man.

One customer was a tall blond guy with a hawk nose, the other a shorter, wider jig with a shaved head. Sexual excitement rippled through Knuckles. His first triple-header! Tonight he’d give that freaking blonde a ride she’d never forget.

All three men were eating ice cream cones, for Chrissake! Goddamn pansies, maybe. He set his violin case on the counter.

“I told you I’d be back,” he said roguishly to the Chink. He opened the case, reached in. “The back room. All of you.”

“Or?” said the jig.

“Or this,” said Knuckles, and brought up from the violin case — a violin. He gaped down at it.

The Chink stuck an ice cream cone into his left eye. He yelled and clawed at the icy mess, and the white guy kicked him explosively in the balls. Pain shot through his entire being. As he coiled down on himself, mouth strained open in a rictus of pain, the black guy caught him with a terrific right cross that knocked three teeth right out of his head.

Knuckles Colucci came around sitting behind the wheel of the gold Allante in a no-parking zone at SFO’s domestic terminal. His savaged mouth was bleeding and his groin was pure pain. Beside him on the other bucket seat was the violin case.

It was the blond bitch who had made the switch, of course. She’d had a second violin case in the trunk, and after the redheaded federal agent had been bluffed out... No! Not an agent. Part of the con. He’d been hidden by a pillar from the ticket-takers in the booths. No terrorist bomb. Nothing. But why?

Later for that. Get out of here, fast. He somehow pulled himself together enough to reach for the ignition keys.

There were no ignition keys.

Both front doors opened. Two hulking men, one bald and the other with a thatch of sandy hair, peered in at him.

“Knuckles Colucci, you are under arrest for attempted murder,” said the bald one. He was opening the violin case.

“With a freakin’ violin?” asked Knuckles hoarsely.

“No, with this,” beamed the bald man. His hand came out with a stubby machine pistol wearing a silencer as long as it was. “Looks to me like an Ingram M11 using a .380 ACP. Heard it was your weapon of choice, Knuckles, ’cause it’ll just fit in a violin case. Frilled barrel with a wire screen, a baffle—”

“And two spirals to decelerate the gases so the gun doesn’t make any noise at all,” said the one with hair, slipping the cuffs on the dazed Knuckles’s wrists.

The bald one put his nose down and sniffed. “It’s been fired, too. The report I got said he shot up the Chinaman’s place pretty bad...”

“You know, Knuckles,” said the other one, shaking his head, “you’re a real birdbrain, aren’t you?”

All five of them were feasting at the House of Prime Rib on Van Ness Avenue. It just seemed the kind of occasion to saw at slabs of blood-rare beef two inches thick and to hell with diets and cholesterol and a size six dress.

Ballard raised his glass. “To Ray. For shooting up his own grocery store.”

“All that fun, and it’s covered by insurance,” said Bart.

“You make a hell of a Feeb,” Giselle was saying to O’B.

O’B pulled down the lower lid of his right eye. “And you make a hell of a con woman. You hit him with everything all at once, never gave him a moment to think...”

They all drank. O’B, who was facing the door, gestured. Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern were threading their way through the tables. They came up and looked over the company with benevolence. Rosenkrantz spoke first.

“Hear about the blonde who got an AM radio?”

“It took her a month to figure out she could play it at night,” said his partner.

Giselle, as the only blond woman present, said, “What’s SFPD Homicide’s version of the Miranda warning?”

“You have the right to remain dead,” said Larry Ballard.

“Have a seat, gents,” suggested Bart Heslip.

Guildenstern shook his head and chuckled.

“We got an all-nighter going. Knuckles is in a cage downtown and squawking like a parrot, trying to get a deal. He’s giving us everything he ever knew about anybody in the mob.”

“Witness relocation?” asked Giselle.

“Four-time loser? No chance. We don’t need him anyway. The feds are busting Two-Ton Tony back in Detroit right now — he took the conspiracy across state lines. He can buy the local heat but he can’t buy the feds. He’s going down.”

“Leone?” asked Bart.

“We got him on tape talking about blood and chop suey. He’ll get a five-spot at Q, be out in two — but by then somebody’ll have eaten his lunch down there in the South Bay.”

Ray Chong Fat asked almost timidly, “Mr. Li?”

Guildenstern said, “What do you call someone who’s half-Apache and half-Chinese?”

“Ugh-Li,” said Rosenkrantz. He clapped Ray on the shoulder. “Seems he made a bookkeeping mistake. You’re all paid up with him forever, and you don’t have to run any more games.”

Ray looked at him for a long time. There was a great deal in the look. Then he said, “Chinaboy cook at dude ranch. One ranch hand, every day he come in, say, ‘What’s fo’ dinner?’ Chinaboy say, ‘Flied lice.’ Pretty soon, ranch hand always asking, ‘Flied lice? You got flied lice fo’ dinner?’ Every day. So Chinaboy get book, study English. Next time ranch hand come in, say, ‘Flied lice? Flied lice?’ Chinaboy say, ‘We have a very great sufficiency of fried rice — you plick!’ ”

Rosenkrantz beamed down at the others.

“What d’you think he means by that?” he asked.

“If you stand by the river long enough,” said Ballard, “the body of your enemy will float by.”

“Huh?” said Guildenstern.