The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

Michael Downs Man Kills Wife, Two Dogs

From Willow Springs

Three hard raps on the door made Dudek drop his beer. Only the landlord ever knocked, and no way would he knock again. Not after that morning.

“The downstairs door was open,” she explained.

He invited her into the room. She smelled like lilac. He figured her pearls for fake, though she wore them as if she didn’t care. Strawberry blond hair brushed her shoulders and her purple pullover sweater. The reporter introduced herself, said she wanted to talk about the shooting.

“What do you want me to say?” Dudek said, hoping she’d hear how willing he was to say anything. The reporter didn’t bite.

“Tell me what you saw,” she said, “what you heard.” Her voice reminded him of hot fudge pouring over mounds of vanilla. He said the first thing that came to mind.

“He came out with a cop on each arm. I tried to see his face. I mean, how does a guy look after he shoots his wife? I’ll tell you. He was grinning. Like everything was blue sky and bird songs. He was in such a good mood, I thought of yelling at him, ‘Hey, Mr. Tucker! You mind if I’m late on the rent this month?’ Don’t write that. It’s a joke.”

She grinned and watched him while scribbling on her notepad, her hard mahogany eyes unafraid to meet his. One hundred percent flirt. No question. Dudek could lock on a flirty smile through thirty feet of dark, smoky bar even when his heart pumped tequila instead of blood. In his own apartment, having downed only one can of beer, he felt as certain of the reporter’s intentions as he did his own.

He got a rag from the bathroom to wipe up the spilled beer. He’d seen reporters on TV, always yak yak yakking — but not this one. Mostly she listened, frowning in sympathy, pooching her lower lip. “Ask me something,” he wanted to say, but instead he turned the blinds and looked out on the grimy April afternoon. He thought she’d like that picture: the loner in a T-shirt and ratty trousers, staring out the window at a world gone to hell. On Dudek’s street, that world was low-riders and rust-eaten pickups, and the house across the road where kids had hung a cheap nylon banner for the holiday. On it, a pink bunny gathered painted eggs and grinned, ignorant and idiotic, at the house where Dudek lived, where until about half past six that morning, Mrs. Tucker had lived, too.

“It kicks my ass that he picked Easter Sunday,” Dudek said. “For Christ’s sake, wait until Monday. You know what I’m saying?”

“For Christ’s sake,” she repeated, chuckling, so he laughed, too. He liked her freckles, sprinkled around her cheekbones like fairy dust.

Dudek made a show of sweeping crumbs off the couch, even beating a pillow with an open palm. “Have a seat,” he told her while on his way to the kitchen. “Can I make you some coffee? Pop you a beer? Murder on Easter rates at least a six-pack.”

“Sounds tempting, but I’m on duty,” she said.

In the kitchen, he fished a can from the fridge, glad the reporter had turned down his offer when he noticed that can was the last one.

“You read our paper?” she asked as he sat near her on the couch. The newspaper lay slapdash over the coffee table he had scavenged from a neighbor’s junk pile.

“It’s the Tuckers’.” He sipped his beer, folded the paper. He had read about two wars, a flood in China, and about people who wanted a state beach declared nude for one week a year. He was rooting for the nudies.

“So, when did you hear the shots?”

“I was making breakfast,” he said, “boiling eggs, you know, because it’s Easter. It was dark outside. Quiet. I can’t sleep late. My old man was the same way, but he could blame smoker’s cough. Me, I don’t know. Anyway, the Tuckers. I’m hearing nothing from downstairs, which is strange, because I always hear them when they’re at each other’s throats. I mean, I used to hear them. Before. You’d think this morning they’d have been at it, too.”

“What would they fight about?” she asked.

“Stupid things,” he said. “Sad things. She called him fatso, though she was fatter. He hated that she didn’t work. Some nights, I’d wake to him shouting, ‘You ignorant witch!’ or her yelling about how he was lousy with his hands.” Dudek grimaced. “Stuff I didn’t need to know. Some nights it sounded like they had fun hating each other that much.”

Dudek swigged a mouthful, let it tingle his gums. Mornings after those fights, Dudek would listen carefully before leaving for work, waiting until he could hear either Mr. or Mrs. step out of their apartment. Then he would hurry down the stairwell that landed at their apartment door, wanting to see in their faces how they’d got through the night, how they’d changed from the day before, if something moved in or moved out. He didn’t tell that part to the reporter.

She scribbled something and crossed her legs, her black pantyhose shimmering from the glare of the bulb on his ceiling. She had small feet, the reporter. And she wore black heels that came to a point like a knife. The heels were low, but he could imagine her in higher ones. He drained his beer and set the can between his feet next to the earlier empty, thinking she’d like it if he said something generous about the Tuckers.

“They loved the dogs. Two boxers. Purebreds. Frazier and Foreman. Cocky things. Big chests. God, they barked like maniacs.”

“This morning?”

“All the time, but this morning... I’d never heard them bark like that before. Strangled. Half a howl, almost. You’ll think I’m crazy” — he paused for effect — “but it was like they were begging.”

He noticed her fingers as she wrote: mid-length nails, shiny with clear polish; no ring on the important finger. “When did the dogs start?” she asked.

“After the first shot. Like I said, I was at the stove.” He told her how he’d stood there, the eggs knocking together, rattling the pot. The first bang. Jesus. He ran downstairs like an idiot. In his underwear, halfway down, he’d heard two more, the sound slamming through the walls to his spine. He turned back. One shot might be an accident. Three means something awful.

“Then?” she asked.

Silence. No barking. No nothing. He locked the door. Called the cops. “They were here in a few minutes,” he said, though it had seemed longer as he waited, wondering if Tucker would come upstairs next. Dudek had sat in his living room, gripping the aluminum baseball bat he hid beneath his bed in case of trouble, trying not to throw up. Nothing Ms. Lilac-and-Fake-Pearls needed to know.

“When they brought her out she was on a stretcher,” he said, “covered by a sheet. One of the wheels caught in a crack in the walk and they nearly tipped her. The dogs they brought out in garbage bags.”

The reporter uncrossed her legs, but kept her knees tight together. She leaned toward him, and then placed the tip of her pen between her teeth, lips apart.

Jesus H. Christ, Dudek thought, and he laughed at his good luck.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing, nothing. What else do you want to know?”

She thought a moment. “Why didn’t he kill himself, too?”

“Seems dumb doesn’t it? Maybe that’s because when you hear about these things it’s always murder-suicide. But Tucker walked out with that big grin. Maybe it’s like a car alarm loud as hell in the middle of the night. You know how you want to shoot those things. You just want to shut it up. Nothing else matters.”

“So, Mrs. Tucker was like a car alarm.”

Dudek shrugged. “I’m no head shrinker. Just a neighbor.”

“Did the Tuckers have friends or children?”

“None I ever saw.”

“You didn’t know them too well, then?”

“It’s not like we bar-hopped together, but you live above people, you get to know something about them. They were nice enough, I guess. She read those true-life crime books. In summers she’d read on the porch, fall asleep in one of those scratchy lawn chairs, and snore. He watched the fights. As far as landlords go, he couldn’t tell a wrench from pliers, you know? Cheap, too. You can tell he didn’t like to spend money on the place.”

She had stopped writing. She looked bored. Dudek chewed his lower lip.

“Our apartments have the same layout,” he said. “My bedroom sits over theirs. The cops told me that’s where he killed her, if you want to...” He pointed out of the living room, his face so dumb with faked innocence that she smiled.

Dudek had left his bed unmade, and dirty clothes shaped a hill in the room’s far corner. “Maid’s sick,” he said, kicking underpants and T-shirts under his bed. Then he pointed at the floor. “Down there.”

The reporter stepped around Dudek’s dresser and his bed, her high heels clicking on the worn wood floor, and Dudek realized how eerie the room had become, how he’d avoided it all day. Suddenly, he couldn’t help imagining Tucker, a few feet below, squeezing soft on the trigger, the jolt in his hand, the noise. Tucker must have blinked. When he opened his eyes... and what about Mrs. Tucker? Had he nudged her shoulder to wake her? Did he turn on the light? Tucker would have needed light. Unless he stood close enough to touch metal to scalp.

Dudek stopped rubbing his temples; he couldn’t remember having started. “Blows my mind,” he said. “Killing the wife and dogs on Easter. It’s got a kind of poetry though, you know what I’m saying? Everybody’s looking forward to a nice time. And bam! That’s it. Tucker’s waving his gun around shouting, ‘Hey everybody, look at me! I’m in the shits big time! Forget spring. Forget that rising from the grave stuff. Let me give you a big wad of death.”’

“Why would he do that?” she asked.

“That’s the big question, huh? Why would he put it in God’s face that way, say ‘Screw you, God!’ ” Dudek waved his middle finger at the ceiling. “Something must have made him that crazy...”

She wanted to know. She really did, he could tell — from her insistent voice, from her pale throat now flushed red — she wanted to brush against the ugliness and danger of that morning, feel the electric jolt that he’d stumbled into. She shouldered against the wall of his bedroom, hair tucked behind an ear to lay bare her smooth neck and delicate lobe pierced by a tiny, crystal stud.

“Well, I could’ve predicted it,” Dudek said. He sat on the corner of his mattress, which sagged a few inches. “Early, before I even started breakfast, I heard the outside door of the house banging around, like someone wanted in. I went down, keeping quiet in case it was some thief. Brought my baseball bat just in case.” He pulled it out from under the bed to show her. “I found Mr. Tucker at the landing, fully dressed.”

She waited.

“It wasn’t the first time he’d spent the night out,” Dudek said. “ ‘Happy Easter,’ I said to him. He’d bent down to pick up the key they keep under the mat. I said, ‘Happy Easter.’ ”

“ ‘Happy Easter, Henry,’ he said, and looked at the baseball bat. ‘Watch out for the slider,’ he said. Lots of laughs, that Mr. Tucker. He unlocked their door, then put the key back in its place. I could smell his breath.”

When Dudek looked at the reporter, she stared back, writing without looking at her notepad. She tilted her head and asked the question with her eyes.

“Booze hound,” he whispered. “Her, too.”

She stopped writing. She looked as if she had heard that story before.

“They just weren’t hobby drinkers,” he insisted. “This was a career. You should see the liquor boxes stacked out back. Mr. Tucker used to miss work. And the dogs roamed loose everywhere. Come Tuesday, if he managed to get out their garbage, the bags of empties made Mount Everest on the sidewalk. Sometimes, they’d forget I owed rent. Fine with me, but you know...”

“And this is why he killed her?”

“Yeah. What? Murder on Easter Sunday, fighting, alcohol, that’s not enough?”

“No,” she said and scribbled something. “I mean, yes, of course it’s enough. It is what it is. Well.”

She handed him a business card, smiled, and asked him to call if he had anything else to say, and he nodded like it wasn’t any big deal as she stepped out of his apartment and down the stairs in those pointy-heeled shoes. From the window, he watched her walk through the dusk to her car — a little Honda. She looked once more at the Tuckers’ apartment and then slid into the driver’s seat. Headlights on, zoom, she was gone.

In and out. That was Dudek’s plan. He knew they’d have beer or some liquor, and they owed him. Mr. Tucker did at least, for raining murder down on the holiday. The man owed the whole block drinks.

The police had blocked the Tuckers’ apartment, twisting yellow tape around a couple of rusty nails hammered into either side of the door frame. Dudek unwrapped the yellow tape, then found the key where Tucker had left it under the doormat. He rolled the deadbolt back into the door.

From where he stood he could see almost nothing, and the only light came from a low-watt bulb high above the stairway behind him. He waited for something to move or to make a sound, not surprised at how scared he was, but not having expected it either. A moment later, his eyes adjusted and he stepped inside. The room smelled sweet and coppery like a fresh pack of cigarettes, and he could hear the Tuckers’ fridge humming from the kitchen. A clock ticked the time. From the darkness came a steady pulse of blue light, the display on a VCR. He knew there was a couch near the door; he’d seen it from the stairwell when passing their apartment as Mr. or Mrs. was on the way in or out, and he recalled that he’d never seen them together, never on the porch or walking the dogs; always he met them one without the other.

He felt the wall near the door for the light switch that would be in the same place as the one in his apartment, but then he worried maybe some neighbor would notice and call the cops. Burglars made a living like this, didn’t they, raiding the homes of the recently dead? But that’s not what he was doing, not really. Besides: quick in, quick out. The apartment would be dark again before anyone noticed.

When the lights flashed on, he expected to see a home wrecked by the violence of three murders, but it wasn’t that way at all. He saw the couch, over-stuffed, with balding corduroy upholstery, and a coffee table with a wood laminate surface; on its top, an open TV guide from the newspaper, a coffee mug with coffee in it, a pen, and a few scraps of paper on which someone had written to-do lists: renew the termite policy, brake job, talk to Dudek about parking... He suspected that had pissed them off: parking behind them in that skinny driveway so they couldn’t get their car out. In two of the room’s corners were plaid doggie beds for Frazier and Foreman, their names embroidered on the pillows. On the eggshell-colored walls, framed prints — one of a barn in a wheat field and the other of toddling girls holding fistfuls of dandelions. A television and that VCR he’d noticed. A shelf with a few of Mrs. Tucker’s books, but mostly a place for framed eight-by-tens of some kids in cowboy hats, posing and faking smiles in front of a photographer’s background drape. In another photo, a thirtyish guy — who shared Mr. Tucker’s pointed nose and pear-shaped ass — shook hands with Tommy Lasorda. So the kids lived in L.A. and that explained why Dudek had never seen them. Maybe they’d be flying in now to take care of things. Dudek supposed the police would have called them.

In the kitchen, he grabbed three beers, then changed his mind and took the whole six-pack in its paperboard carton. What difference did it make? Would Tucker junior take inventory? So what if he did? When Dudek shut the refrigerator door, magnets fell and along with them a Chinese menu and some photographs. He picked them up, started to put them back when he noticed — right at eye level — lottery tickets stuck to the fridge by a rubber magnet of Florida.

He leaned closer to read: five sets of numbers for April 7, the Wednesday after Easter. Hell, he thought, why not? He shoved the tickets into his pants pocket.

As he left the kitchen he looked down the hall to their bedroom. The door was shut. It’s like those movies, he thought, where you want to yell “Don’t open the door!” at the dumb babysitter but you want her to open the door, too, because you can’t turn back, you have to know. Dudek wanted to see where it happened. lt’d make a good story later on. So he set the six-pack on the seat of an easy chair and stepped down the dark hall.

Idiot, he thought even as he knocked. Embarrassed, he twisted the glass knob and shoved the door so it banged against the wall. Then he switched on the ceiling light, looking suddenly on an unmade bed, sheets blotchy and stiff, an explosion of blood against the yellow vinyl headboard, and more in two smears across the planks of the floor. The dogs. Mattress stuffing drifted from the stir of air that followed Dudek’s hard push of the door. He shut his eyes, felt afraid, so looked again. Some blood had started to dry and it was brown on the wall, dark purple on the headboard, but still red where it soaked into the sheets and where it pooled thickest on the floor. He backed away, having seen enough, but stopped when he noticed cardboard boxes stacked along the nearest bedroom wall, so many boxes they covered the wall itself. There was a desk, too, and when he stepped closer, careful to avoid the smears on the floor, he saw above the desk a bulletin board with a chart tacked to it, high enough and far enough that it had stayed clean, untouched by the splattered blood. On the chart, in handwriting perfect and small like it came from a machine, Dudek read numbers, listed in series of six, no number over forty-five. Each series was marked with dates, some highlighted in yellow marker, others circled with red. Lottery numbers.

The clear packing tape — yellowed with age — shrieked as he peeled open a box. Shaking his head, he lifted out bundles of lottery tickets that he thumbed at the corners. Each bore that same picky script as on the bulletin board chart. Thousands of tickets, hundreds of thousands of numbers repeated over and over, twelves and twos, sixteens and thirty-sevens, loser after loser after loser, most with Xs through them but some circled, the ink long faded from red to pink. He tore open a second box dated on top “Aug. 76-Nov. 79,” it too stuffed with lottery tickets, numbers circled or crossed out. Then another box — “Feb. 92-May 95” — and another. Dudek laughed. He felt sick, lightheaded, and he backed away from the boxes, wanting space between him and them as if the craziness that rattled the Tuckers had started with those boxes and could spread to him, too.

Shit! He remembered. Quick out. He grabbed the beer. Lights off, he locked the door, slid the key beneath the mat, and wrapped the yellow tape around the nails.

The Tuckers drank out of bottles. They bought fancy beers, dark like molasses, more bitter than Dudek liked, but beggars and choosers and all that crap. He shed his shoes and socks, turned out the lights, raised the blinds, and sat by the window to drink. Across the street, the colors on the rabbit banner washed gray in the dark, so Bunny’s never-ending grin shined too bright, too happy. Dudek knew the rabbit couldn’t mean it.

Between sips, Dudek heard now and then the lonely, panicked siren of a cop car, saw red lights flash and speed over the walls of buildings as far away as downtown. All those lights in all those rooms. He wondered if in one of them, or even two, someone was killing somebody. Odds were good.

He pulled the tickets from his pocket, creased them, then smoothed the fold. He read the numbers by the glow of a nearby street lamp, though he had to squint; the beer fuzzed his focus. Such bizarre patterns: a stray 12 among 31, 33, 36, 38, and 39. Another with 01, 02, 04, 05, 07, 08. Probably worthless, every last one. Dudek reminded himself to check them against the winning numbers in Thursday’s newspaper, then slipped them into his wallet.

He opened another beer, then another, flipping the bottle caps toward his trash can and missing so the caps clattered across the floor. He tried to think, but he couldn’t fit the boxes, the numbers, the charts with everything else he knew — or thought he had known — about the Tuckers. Then he remembered that guy shaking Tommy Lasorda’s hand. Poor sap. Now every painted egg would remind the guy how his dad shot his mom. It was like Easter backwards, what the old man did, passing around his pain and confusion like burned toast at the breakfast table, with Tucker junior swallowing the biggest slice. Dudek imagined him on the plane, pictured him in black with sunglasses on, thought of him landing at Bradley International the next day and picking up a paper, looking for an obituary or something and seeing the reporter’s story. He’d read what Dudek had said. He’d read that his parents were drunks, fighting all the time. Probably wouldn’t be news to the kid, but Tucker junior would know that everyone else in Hartford was reading it, too.

And Tucker junior would be the new landlord.

Dudek chugged a mouthful, betting on eviction. Flush the security deposit. And what could he say? He could already imagine the kid downstairs putting his parents’ stuff in boxes. Dudek could see himself sitting on the couch listening, not daring to walk downstairs, not even willing to flush the toilet, wanting just to disappear. His stomach felt sour. That fancy beer. Too damn bitter.

His head felt mushy, so he leaned way back in his chair. Even in the dark, he could make out the watermark that spread across his ceiling. He remembered the torn screens on the back porch. Dumps like this all over the city. Plenty of places to live. So it wasn’t the eviction that bothered him. And it wasn’t the security deposit. He’d never gotten one back anyway.

He set the beer down. Lousy sludge. He wondered if Tucker junior drank that stuff, too. Jesus, the kid would need something. Dudek wondered if the reporter right now was writing what Tucker junior would read, what Dudek had said, and he pictured her at her desk. Long legs, heels, fake pearls.

Switching on a light, he found her business card. Maybe she’d think he was being a nice guy Concern for fellow man, you know? She answered on the first ring. That hot fudge voice. Over the phone, he liked it more.

He hesitated saying his name, then asked, “Would you mind not using what I told you? It, well — it makes them look bad. Like kicking dirt on them, you know? Haven’t they had enough trouble?”

He bit the tough skin along his thumbnail while waiting for her reply. He thought he could hear her breathe in, about to say something, but then she didn’t. He pictured her smoking. Tapping the cigarette against an ashtray. Didn’t all reporters smoke? He liked that about her.

“I can’t do that,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I told you who I was, and you agreed to talk. Once you agree, what you say I can put in the paper. That’s how it works.”

“But think how this makes them look. What if they’ve got kids?”

“I can’t worry about that, Mr. Dudek. Listen, there won’t be a lot of what you said in the story, but I can’t say I won’t use any of it.”

“That’s shitty.”

“You might have thought about that before you talked.”

Dudek had turned in slow circles until the phone cord had wound around him. Now he circled the other way, unwinding. All wrong. He’d gone about this all wrong. Not the nice guy stuff. He remembered how her throat had flushed red. She liked the creepiness. Sure. What reporter likes sunshine and light?

“Okay,” he said. “Look. There’s stuff I didn’t tell you. Stuff you wouldn’t believe.”

“Mr. Dudek, I’m on deadline.”

“Wait. Let me tell you this. Lottery tickets. Boxes of them downstairs. They even kept track of the numbers. Wrote on every ticket. When I say boxes, I mean boxes. Like a warehouse. You should come by again. Check it out.”

“Jesus. I don’t know what game you’re playing, but I’m done being part of it.”

She hung up. Dudek kicked the table so the telephone spilled, the receiver flying from its cradle across the floor. “Bitch!” he said. What did she mean she didn’t know the game? She knew the damn game! She’d played it, too, with her legs, her voice, her pen between her teeth. And she’d got what she wanted, hadn’t she? And what about him? He could see himself again in his bedroom with that reporter, using the Tuckers as a pick-up line, and he wanted to reach out and squeeze his own throat.

Dudek grabbed another beer, the last one. He needed air, a walk, something.

The neighbors across the way had turned out their porch light, so Dudek couldn’t see the rabbit banner anymore. Maybe they’d even taken it down. Easter was over. He stepped off the porch for a walk, but rain hit the back of his neck, so he turned around, finished the beer while sitting on the porch, and then chucked the bottle into the street just to hear it smash. That settled him a little, or maybe he was just buzzed. He couldn’t tell. He just knew he felt better.

Dudek reached for his wallet. When he found the tickets, he flipped them over to the rules in fine print, then flipped them back to the numbers. All that mattered were the numbers. Maybe they weren’t losers, after all. Hadn’t the Tuckers studied this stuff?

Rainwater poured out of the gutters around the porch. Dudek’s bare feet were cold, and he shivered. He wondered what time the Tuckers’ paper would hit the doorstep. Maybe he could stay up that late, see what that bitch wrote hot off the presses. If he won the lottery, she’d call then, wouldn’t she? Coo at him with that voice. He’d be generous. He could afford to be, a few- million in a bank account. Start small with her, right? Dinner at Carbone’s, some place ritzy like that. Get her interested. Then the day-long drives in his red Porsche, but only if she wore short skirts. “I’ve got standards,” he’d tell her. Next thing you know, a strip of sand on some Caribbean island. He’d buy the reporter a string bikini, smear tanning oil on her back, and she’d get brown, brown, brown. They’d eat oysters and shrimp, and get blitzed on drinks with names bright as sunshine, and he’d fuck her till she hurt. Pretty soon word would get around the island that he was somebody, because he’d tip big. Ten bucks on a five dollar beer. That’d bring the women. He’d have his pick. The blonde with the full lips? The redhead with the silver hoop through her coppery belly button? The native girl? Oh yeah. The native girl. He’d drop that reporter’s ass. Pay your way back, babe. That’s shitty, she’d say. And he’d laugh and laugh.

A car flashed from the dark, splashing water over the sidewalk. Dudek’s fists were clenched, squeezed so tight his fingertips had turned white. When he let them go, he saw that he had crumpled the tickets, each one a ragged ball in the palm of his hand.

Panicked, he unwrapped them, one by one, and with the flats of his fingers smoothed them against his thigh until he could read the numbers again.