The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

Pete Dexter The Jeweler

From Esquire

The old man ordered the soup of the day again, homemade noodles and chicken served with bread and a glass of house wine, and wiped at his nose with his napkin the whole time he ate. It was February, and everybody on the East Coast had the flu. The old man looked like he should have been home in bed, but his habits were set deep. At ten to six every morning, for instance, he stepped out of his front door in his bathrobe and slippers to retrieve the Inquirer. Two hours later he came out again, dressed in an overcoat, and walked to the end of his block and caught the SEPTA bus to work. Twice this week he’d given his seat to young women. Exactly at one o’clock he left the store, walked the four blocks to the restaurant, and had his soup of the day and wine, always sitting at the same table near the kitchen. The tab always came to six dollars, and he always left a dollar for the waitress. She had a snake tattooed around the fleshy part of her arm, and beneath it the name Jerry was written in script.

The man who had been keeping track of the old man’s habits was named Whittemore, and he noticed the hair in his plate as soon as the waitress set it on the table. The hair lay across his fish and was anchored at one end in a little white paper cup of tartar sauce, moving slightly in the air from the overhead fan, like something dying in bed but not quite dead. He moved closer and saw that most of the hair was black, but out toward the end, away from the tartar sauce, there was a bulb of root where it was brown.

The waitress was a blonde, so the hair had come from the kitchen, which was worse in a way than if it had just belonged to the waitress herself. She had the tattoo, of course, and a stud in her nose — a small pearl — and a stained blouse, but this was the human being, after all, that they’d sent out to greet the public. Christ knew what they looked like back in the kitchen.

“Is everything all right, hon?” She came back to his table empty-handed from the other side on the way to the kitchen. Whittemore looked up and saw the back of the stud glistening inside her nose. A week ago, when he first walked in and saw the pearl, he thought it was some kind of growth.

“It’s fine,” he said.

She put a hand on her hip and he noticed her fingers. Cloudy, yellow nails, the skin itself stained dark. He wondered if she was also a photographer, had her hands in chemicals in her off-hours. Or maybe just a Camel smoker. The point was, who could eat the food after they saw her hands? He shuddered suddenly, remembering that he’d been having ideas about this same girl earlier in the week. He remembered the exact words that came into his head: She looks up for anything.

“You don’t eat much,” she said.

“Too much stress.”

She nodded, as if that made perfect sense, and then gave him a little wink “I’m the same way,” she said. “I just come in to calm my nerves.”

The old man knew he was caught and was no trouble in the parking lot or in the car on the way out of town.

His name was Eisner, and whatever he was stealing, he hadn’t been spending any of it on his clothes. He sat in the passenger seat in a suit that must have been fifty years old, wearing a bow tie and a starched white shirt, chewing Smith Brothers cough drops. They passed city hall and he cleared his throat.

“It used to be there were no skyscrapers in the whole city,” he said. “It was a local ordinance, nothing taller than the Billy Penn. That was the law.” A moment passed, and he shifted in his seat. “The place wasn’t as dark then,” he said.

A little snot teardrop glistened beneath one of the old man’s nostrils, moving up and down as he breathed, and Whittemore felt himself edging away. He tried to remember if he’d touched him in the parking lot. He wasn’t worried about the door. He’d followed him out, but he knew he’d covered his hand with his sleeve. He did that without thinking now, and he hadn’t shaken hands with anybody since his mother’s funeral. Not that it came up much anymore, but when it did, he would cough into his fist and tell whoever it was that he might be coming down with the flu. Nobody got past that, and nothing human had touched him in a long time.

They were on the parkway now, headed toward the river. Whittemore looked up and saw the art museum half a mile ahead, ancient and dead even in the sunlight; it could have been waiting for them both. The old man moved again, the air stirring with germs.

“A tan like that, you must travel a lot,” Eisner said. They passed the museum and headed west, along the Schuylkill and past the boathouses. Then he said, “Myself, I’m a creature of habit. I stay put.” And then he sneezed into his hands.

Whittemore gave him his handkerchief, which Eisner used to dry his fingers and then his eyes. And when he could see again, he looked out his window, away from the river into Fairmount Park. “During the war,” he said, “there were supposed to be Japs that lived back in there in cardboard boxes and ate people’s dogs...” It was quiet for a little while, and then he said, “I guess they decided they’d rather take their chances in the park.”

Against his will, Whittemore began thinking about his visit to the doctor before he left Seattle. The doctor was Japanese — which is what brought it to mind — and said he didn’t think the memory lapses were anything to worry about, that they were related to stress. The doctors in Seattle saw a lot of stress, of course, all those fucking owls to worry about, domestic partners who couldn’t get on the major medical at Boeing. Whittemore had noticed that it was about twelve years ago when the doctors quit saying You’re fine. Now it was always I don’t think it’s anything to worry about. Which smelled of insurance. Every day, he saw the world dividing itself into a billion insurance policies, everybody trying to set things up in some way that made them safe.

“Myself, what I don’t like is hotels,” Eisner said. “Strange mattresses, peepholes in the doors, somebody’s always got their hand out. People drool on the pillowcase, it soaks through, even a hundred-dollar hotel.” He dabbed at his nose with the handkerchief and said, “Rich people drool as much as anybody else, maybe more, when you think about it. And the strangers walking up and down the halls? No reflection on you, but the more human beings I see from out of state, the less hope I have for the future.”

Whittemore had frozen, though, at the mention of hotel pillows. How could he have missed that? It seemed dangerous in some way that the old man had thought of it and he hadn’t. Ahead of them, a Rolling Rock delivery truck dropped into a pothole that must have broken half the bottles inside.

“You care to know how this happened?” the old man said a little later.

Whittemore began to say no, that it wasn’t any of his business. The old man was popping his toast every two minutes as it was. Instead, he shrugged. He’d been having queer feelings again, even before he left Seattle, like it was all out of his hands.

“There wasn’t any reason,” the old man said. “That’s the big joke. I’m seventy-six years old; they don’t have anything I want. Nothing. No reason but the twins themselves. The future-is-ours, dot-com-generation, bastard twins.” He looked at him quickly and said, “Kids, I’m talking about. Nothing personal. You want a cough drop?”

Whittemore shook his head no and wondered for the next mile why the old man would think he needed a cough drop.

“Paul and Bonnie, I would cut off my right hand before I took a cent. But then they crashed their car on the Black Horse Pike — going to the shore for a weekend in the middle of winter, for Christ’s sake, just like that, they’re gone — and the twins take over before they’re even in the ground. Forty-two years these people were my friends, they were like my family, but the truth is they didn’t spend enough time at home. The business was too important. That’s all I’ll say about it, end of story. They didn’t spend enough time at home.”

Whittemore nodded, as if he agreed with that, although he hadn’t met the boys himself. That wasn’t the way it was done. He worked for himself. There were people in the middle, and everything went through them — the money and the jobs. It was cleaner all the way around.

“Cheating people who’ve been coming into the store forty years, that’s how this happened. Cheating young people come in to buy a wedding ring. Ruining their parents’ good reputation. What’s that worth? What’s the price these days on a good reputation?”

They’d been in the car half an hour now, and the houses in the distance were bigger and had rolling lawns and iron fences. Then a golf course. “You play golf?” the old man said, and a moment later Whittemore grabbed at his knee and ran the outside wheels off onto the shoulder of the road.

The sensation wasn’t painful as much as eerie. Like something in there was being unscrewed. It happened on airplanes and in the movies, anywhere Whittemore had to sit still. He took vitamins, rode his bicycle three times a week, did sixty pushups every morning, and never got through the rest of the day without a twinge somewhere, without thinking this might be it.

“You know I taught these little bastards how to play? Did they tell you that?” The old man was warming to the subject now. “They got to have the best clubs, right from the first day. New leather bags, new shoes. God forbid they should play in tennis shoes. Fourteen years old, and they’re riding around in carts like old men...”

Eisner wiped at his eyes again and then stared out the window, watching someone swing, just wanting to see a golf swing, moving a little in his seat as the swell of the fairway began to eclipse the golfer. “Cheat?” he said. “They embarrass you to death.”

The course disappeared, and Eisner sneezed again. Some of it blew out beneath the handkerchief and spotted his pants. “Did you say you played? I get nervous, I can’t remember what people tell me.”

“A little. I used to play a little.”

“Then you know what I’m talking about.”

They passed into Lancaster County, and a few minutes later turned off the highway onto a road so faded that there was hardly a road left. Weeds were growing in the lane markers. They saw an Amish pulled to the side who had broken an axle on his buggy. He was up front, calming the horse; a woman was nursing a baby in the shadows of the back seat.

“I hear Titleist is coming out with a new ball, twenty extra yards off the tee,” Eisner said.

Whittemore saw the dirt road that he’d picked earlier and began slowing for the turn. The old man’s voice was shaking so badly, he could hardly get this out: “Myself,” he said, “I wouldn’t mind trying it. You get up in years like me, you can use the extra distance.”

And that was as close as he came to asking for anything.

Whittemore pulled the car to the side of the road and sat still a minute, thinking it over. “What if you had to go away?”

“Me?” Eisner said. “Where am I going to go?”

“Someplace else,” Whittemore said. “The other side of the world.”

The old man took a minute putting it together. “You mean like the Poconos?” he said.

Whittemore went to Seventh Street that same afternoon to return the five thousand in person. That was the only chance he saw, to talk to them in person. Something like this — but not exactly this — had happened once before and been negotiated. That was the word the people in the middle used, negotiated. It meant they waited three or four months, gave you enough time to think maybe they’d forgotten, and then a couple of guys who laughed at everything came around with their softball bats and their twenty-pound biceps and pimples on their shoulders and brought you back into the world of hospitals and medical science. He couldn’t remember now exactly what it had been like. This time, though, unless he could head it off, things would have to be explained, which was a more serious word to the people in the middle.

The jewelers took him upstairs to their office — they seemed to be in a hurry to get him off the showroom floor — and while one of them closed the door, the other one took off his coat, dropped into the chair behind his desk, hung his health-club arms over the sides — the kid wanted him to notice his arms — and stared at him as if he were trying to make up his mind. He was the one who did the talking.

“So?” the kid said.

Right away, he saw for himself what the old man meant.

“We put the five thousand up front, right? I told your people, you’re late, you forfeit the back end. That simple.”

Whittemore looked from one of them to the other. Identical, but he could already tell who was who.

“No comprendé?” the kid said.

He began to tell them that the back end didn’t matter, that he hadn’t done it anyway, but he stopped himself, waiting to see where this would go. “The deal was ten,” he said. “Five in front, five after it’s done. That was the agreement.”

The kid shook his head, and then he and his brother glanced at each other again. “It’s like I told your people. Time constraints have been violated. The agreement’s changed.”

Whittemore sat dead still, looking from one of the twins to the other.

“I know what you’re thinking,” the kid said. “I know everything you’re thinking, and it’s like I told your people, my brother and I have left instructions with our lawyers, sealed instructions to be opened in the event anything unfortunate happens. That occurs, the lawyers open an envelope, which spells out all the details of the whole situation. Names, dates, times, everything. If we so much as slip in the shower.”

They waited for him a moment, then smiled as the message settled. One of them, then the other.

“You two shower together?”

“Just a hypothesis, something to consider,” the kid said.

Whittemore considered their jewelry: Rolex watches half an inch thick, diamond rings, gold bracelets and neck chains. The one at the bookcase was wearing cuff links. He wondered if it was part of the jewelry business that you had to look like a Gypsy coming out a hotel window, or if these two just liked to twinkle when they moved, separate themselves from the world at large.

The kid in the chair looked at his brother, who had walked over to the window. The little glances reminded him of the way lovers reach out to touch hands without even knowing they’re doing it. “I mean, look at yourself,” the one in the chair said, “coming in here like this...”

Whittemore nodded at him, but the kid misunderstood. But then, he misunderstood everything. “It’s a Mexican standoff, man,” he said. “Now get your ass out of here before I call the police.”

He shot the one at the window first and then turned slowly to the one who did the talking, giving him a moment to reflect on his Mexican standoff.

Afterward, he stayed in the room a little longer than he should have, the cordite stinging his nose, studying the posture of the bodies, down to the exact position of the fingers when everything had stopped moving. He sat down behind the desk in the kid’s chair, taking the weight off his knees.

The one at the window had been a nail biter.

He thought of the old man and wondered how long it would be before he got homesick and showed up at the restaurant. His hands had shaken, but that was all. No crying, no regrets. There in the front seat, Whittemore had suddenly remembered how he’d let the guys who laughed at everything position his legs across the kitchen chairs just so and that one of his knees — he wasn’t sure even then which one — hadn’t dislocated the first time they came down on it, or the second, or the third.

He’d taken Eisner to a bus stop anyway.

Eisner got out and was around the car at Whittemore’s window in what seemed like the same instant, tapping at the window, brimming tears, and Whittemore rolled it down to see what he wanted, and he came in like death itself, glistening tears and snot, right through the window, his hands, his head, his shoulders, and shit the sheets if Whittemore didn’t just sit there and let the old man hug him.