The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

Chuck Hogan One Good One

From Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

Milky got home about nine that night, sweating and shivering like he had the flu. Which he did. He had the street flu; he was in a bad way. He opened the door to the house on O Street (Best thing about living on O Street? You only have to walk a block to P.) trudged up the stairs to the third-floor apartment, and watched his shaky hand try to fit the key inside the lock.

Ma was at the table. In her housecoat. Her close-set eyes were red-rimmed from crying, and Milky knew instantly.

“Why, Eddie?” she said. Grief tuned her voice up a notch. “Why?”

Edward Francis Milk felt his gut drop, like a sack of garbage hitting the floor.

He said, “What, Ma?”

“You know.” Her hands, worn like old dish towels, gripped her crossed arms tightly in hopeless self-consolation. “I know it when I see it.”

“Ma.”

“Eddie, you promised me. You always promised. My little boy...”

The guilt. Milky was thirty-one years old, still living with his mother. Then the anger. Milky was thirty-one years old, still living with his mother. “What were you doing in my room, Ma?”

“You been away two days. No phone call, no nothing. I’m scared, I’m all alone. What’m I supposed to do? Sit here and wait?”

“Not go through my things.”

“I was going to call the police. Report you missing. You should thank the man above I didn’t.”

“I was... I was working.”

“You used to want to be a cop.” She wept for him now. “You’d put on Dad’s shirt and hat and pretend you was him...”

This memory had lost all traction with him, the number of times she retold it. “Ma.”

“Jimmy’s passing killed him. Not the grief of it. The shame. Having it in our house? In his house? He told me, your father did, he said, ‘Eddie ever does it, Eddie ever follow in Jimmy’s footsteps, out of my house he goes. Put him right the hell out.’ You know I got to honor that, Eddie.” She looked at Eddie’s father’s picture, framed and standing on top of the stove. Him in his transit-cop uniform. A smaller photo of Jimmy laughing on the front steps was next to it. “This is still his house.”

“Ma.”

“Now I got to put you out.” She pushed herself up from the chair, and in her housecoat nearly flew to the sink. She clung to it as though hands from the floor had her by the ankles, pulling her down. “My baby boy. I should of dragged you to church with me. Should of dragged you. You’re leaving me all alone in the world!”

“Ma.” He just couldn’t do this now. “Ma, sit down.”

“Where you been all this time, Eddie? Where?”

“Working, Ma.” He hit his chest where the letters MBTA, for Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, were stitched over the pocket. Milky had been fired five months before, but still left the house most mornings dressed for work. For her sake.

“Two days straight, and no call?”

“Work is work, Ma.”

“How could you bring this evil down upon me? You’re all I got, Eddie! Daddy’s in heaven and Jimmy’s in the ground and you... you...”

She felt her way back into the chair, a handkerchief clutched in her hand over her heart. She looked gray. She wasn’t breathing right.

“Ma. Ma, listen to me. Where is it? Tell me what you did.”

“How you could bring it in this house after your only brother...”

“Ma, where’d you put it?”

“I didn’t touch it!” Her arm fell dead on the table. “I don’t touch that stuff. I know better.”

“Ma.” Milky grabbed a seat, pulled it near. Her voice was like raccoon claws scraping at the insides of his eyes. He ran his hand through his hair and it came back wet with scalp sweat. He wasn’t moving out. He wasn’t going nowhere except down the hallway to his room to cook a foil and do up. “Listen to me, Ma.”

“Both my boys, these drugs...”

“Ma, shut up!”

He wasn’t yelling at her. He was yelling at himself.

“Look,” he said. “This is something I’m not supposed to tell. Not to anyone. Not even my own mother. No one, you understand?”

He got right up again and paced in the kitchen. His angst was real. This was a leap off a cliff. A Hail Mary pass. The kind of lie that had no end, but he knew he had to follow through anyway, and hope for some miracle. He was too dopesick to argue with her. He was sweating like an egg left out on the counter.

“Ma, it’s this way, okay? I’m a cop. Not really a cop — not a full cop. Not yet. But I’m on that track. I’m working for them now, you see? Undercover. And this — this breaks every rule in the book, me telling you here. If only you hadn’t gone into my room...”

He spun around, gripped a handful of his own hair. He wished he could rip it out. Focus the pain on his flesh, instead of underneath where it wriggled through him like bloodsucking worms.

“But Eddie, how could—”

“I worked it out with them. They know Dad, of course — they remember him, they all still talk about him. And they approached me about maybe doing this... and I tell them, I says, ‘I got some priors, some trouble in my youth, maybe a little even beyond juvie.’ And they says, ‘That little stuff we can work out. If you can show and demonstrate who you are now. Make up for those mistakes, balance the books. If so, then clean slate.’ ”

She said, “They talked about Dad?”

“I told them up-front, I says, ‘I don’t want to coast. Don’t bring me in on the old man’s reputation alone.’ Because who could live up to that anyway? But they says, ‘Milky’ — or, actually, it’s ‘Eddie’ they call me. ‘Eddie, you got to be your own man. We know that. There’s room for you with us if you work hard now. But it’s dangerous, this thing. This is lion training without no whip. You’ll be in that ring all alone.’ ”

He could see emotion tugging at her face. Like waves washing seaweed forward and backward. She wanted to believe him. To commit to this. To crash onto the sandy beach of good news.

He felt the crinkle of the Summons to Appear still in his back pocket, from just having been cut loose of the Suffolk County Jail. “Here,” he said, taking out the pink form, folding it so that she could see only the official seal and the lettering above his typed name. “See that? City of Boston, right there. Boston Police Department.” He put it away again before she could reach for it. “I’m breaking rules left and right here, Ma. I’m jeopardizing my place with them as it is, just telling you this. Risking everything. So you gotta trust me now. Please. And for Christ’s sake, stay outta my stuff from here on in.”

“Eddie... I just don’t know. I remember Jimmy, all his lies.”

“That’s just it, Ma. It’s because of Jimmy that I went to them. That’s what this thing is. Bringing those others to justice.”

“Who?”

“I can’t say. I can’t tell you nothing more, Ma, we won’t discuss these things. In fact, we should never talk about any of this again. Ever. Let it be an understanding.”

“The department, Eddie? For real?”

“I’m trying not to count my chickens too hard. Things haven’t panned out for me before. But they been good to me so far, and I’m trying to be good to them. Only now I got the added stress of worrying about you knowing.”

“No, Eddie.”

“This is a long-term project I’m on, understand. Nothing’s going to break overnight. They tell me these things take months, maybe years. But I’ll do what they say, however long it takes. This is my shot here, and I know it.”

These last words he felt in his chest. Felt them like they were the truth.

Ma was sitting back now, breathing easier. The strange look in her unfocused eyes, faraway yet so close: It was pride. It was love.

“Come here,” she said.

He did. He went and leaned down, and she placed her warm and trembling palms on his clammy cheeks. Her pale lips quivered as she stared at him, drinking him in like medicine. This clinch was as close as they ever got. The Milk family version of a hug and a kiss.

“My boy,” she said.

Milky hated himself then, and loved himself at the same time. A terrible sort of dreadful euphoria, as though he had shot his own mother up with smack. Tied her off and injected her himself and watched her eyes go liquid, and let her thank him for it, for delivering her from suffering. Delivering her from pain. Turned out both of them had needed to get high.

“You’re not going to tell no one,” he said.

“No, no.”

“Not until I let you know the time is right.”

“Then I shout it from the back porch. I dance up Broadway in heeled shoes.”

He had her soaring. Pipe dreams worked for everybody. He stood straight again, his mother sitting back.

“I thought I’d lost you, Eddie. Thought my best boy was gone from me forever.”

Milky squeezed her hand and stole a glance down the narrow hallway toward his room, needing to do up so badly right now.

The walk was an informal thing that, over time, had become consecrated. All the old war widows (staying married in Southie, that was a war) met at the rink down on the Point and walked Day Boulevard to Castle Island, around and around the old fort there at the edge of the harbor. Two shifts, a late-morning walk and a late-afternoon walk. A gang of gray ladies in white Reeboks and duck-brimmed visors, walking laps around the belly-ringed teenagers promenading their baby buggies.

That morning, there were only two of them. There was Rita and, wasn’t it just her luck, Patty Milk. Patty had stopped walking for a long time after her youngest boy Jimmy died up on their roof. Now she tagged along every once in a while, rarely with anything to say. Always a step or two behind the pack, just walking and looking out to sea.

The story was that Patty’s father had nodded off drunk one afternoon at Cushing Beach. Somebody else found Patty, who was only two or three at the time, facedown and floating in the surf. They pulled her out and got her to Mass. General, but she was never right after that. Growing up, she had that look, the chubby face, eyes a little off-kilter, her mouth thin-lipped and cornered down. The father insisted she was fine and was content to let the neighborhood raise her. No special schools. After puberty, she developed an infatuation with men of the cloth. Stalked them over at St. Brigid’s like a girl after a boy band. Many nights, the cops had to come pick her up for tapping on the rectory windows. It was scandalous. She should have been sent away.

Over time, her obsession switched to cops. The uniforms, Rita figured. And Jimmy Milk, he took what was offered him. For that, he was made to marry her, a shotgun wedding with the neighborhood and not the father holding the gun. But Jimmy Milk never regretted it. She waited on that man hand and foot, worshiped him as if he walked on water and cured the sick. Her boys, too, Eddie and Jimmy, Jr. Three men spoiled by a damaged woman, raised in a rent-controlled O Street walk-up on the salary of a transit cop too timid to grift.

Patty would often ask Rita about Rita’s son Billy. Going on about how proud she must be, her eldest son a builder, living up in Swampscott. And Rita always told her, not rubbing it in but trying to give the poor woman some hope: All you need is one good one.

“Ain’t that the truth,” answered Patty this day.

That was strange. Patty had a little extra spring in her step, Rita noticed. She wasn’t trailing behind like the runt of the litter. And didn’t Rita hear that Eddie Milk lost his T job some months back?

“You have news?” said Rita, these being the most words the two women had exchanged in the last five years.

Patty gazed out at the sea, the gulls coasting with their dirty wings spread wide in the salt air, and Rita realized that Patty Milk was positively bursting.

Derrick sliced up the whiskey bread his mother had baked. Irish soda bread with raisins soaked overnight in Hennessy’s. When the mood struck, she would bake up a few loaves for neighbors and friends, whoever was on her good list that month, and always one to take by Marian Manor, where she worked. The bread was soft enough and safe enough for the elderly patients to gum, and the raisins put them right to sleep.

Derrick paused a moment, realizing that the knife in his hand, the one with the splintered handle, was the same knife he had used to slice up Sulky Nealon. But that was a month or so ago, and besides, the blade had been washed and dried.

His mother baked bread today because Billy was home. Derrick’s brother, the golden boy who married a fat girl from the North Shore and moved out of Southie. Today he had returned for a rare Sunday dinner.

“Slice that thicker, Derr,” said Rita, Derrick’s mother. And for some reason, he did. He had a lot of patience today. Because there was something good on his horizon. Something big.

“You get down to the Island today, Ma?” he asked from the kitchen.

“I got my walk in, yeah,” she said, from the parlor. To Kelly, Billy’s pregnant wife, seated next to her on the divan all polite and shit, she said, “Good for my lungs.”

“Still rollin’ with the gray ladies?” said Billy, an inch taller in new, heeled shoes.

“I’m to be the fifth grandma in the bunch,” said Ma. “Today out there, it was just two of us. Me and Patty Milk.”

“Milky’s ma, huh?” said Billy, some of that North Shore condescension crawling into his voice. “Good old Milky. What’s that mope up to these days?”

“That’s the thing,” said Ma. “Derrick, you hear anything about Eddie joining the force?”

Derrick almost laughed out loud. “Eddie what?”

She went on, to Billy, “I was telling Patty about you putting up the new development in Wilmington. She said her Eddie had some good news coming. That he was working for the police on something, a special project. I figured MBTA, but she seemed to say no. Derr, didn’t you tell me he got clipped from the T?”

Derrick had stopped slicing. He was staring down at the sliced bread, the whiskey-soaked raisins swollen, yellowed. He set the knife down on the carving board.

Derrick stood with Milky outside Hub Video. Milky was scratching lottery tickets with his thumbnail and dropping the losers to the sidewalk, one after another.

“Still playing, huh?” said Derrick.

“You kidding me?”

“I quit that.” Derrick shoved his hands deep into his pockets. “I’m quitting a lotta things. Thinking about it.”

“Yeah? What’s up?”

“Don’t know exactly. Change in the air around here, I guess.”

Milky dropped his last scratch ticket. He looked concerned. “Well, maybe that’s a good thing.”

“I think it is. Like, you getting pinched again a couple of days ago. Not good. How’d that thing go?”

“The usual. Except they forgot about me in there and I was in longer than I should’ve. I pay this fine, I avoid the thirty days. Which I have to do. My ma.”

“Yeah,” said Derrick.

“I was going to see, maybe, if you could front me some. Against this thing at the end of the month.”

Derrick said, “You want some up-front?”

“Fine’s twelve-fifty.”

Derrick’s eyebrows climbed. “That’s steep.”

“I need the dough to stay out here. Think you can do?”

Derrick put one sneaker tread flat against the brick wall behind him and crossed his freckled arms. “Pushy. This ain’t like you, Milky.”

“I’m walking a tightrope here, you know?”

“How’s your ma doing, anyways?”

“Her? She’s good. She’s all right. She’s got her TV. Her chair.”

“Been walking with mine out on the Island.”

“Yeah? I didn’t know that. Good. Keep her from turning to stone.”

Derrick watched Milky step foot to foot on the sidewalk in the cooling night air. Milky was straight now, but the dancing-in-place told Derrick he didn’t intend to be for much longer.

“So, can you front me? Or any chance of moving this thing up?”

Derrick said, “Now you want me to move it up.”

“If I go away for thirty, how can I help you with this thing?”

Derrick looked out at Broadway, the parked cars lining both sides of the broad avenue. A white van turned past them onto Emerson, and Derrick stared it down. Then he figured that wasn’t very smart. He had to play this cool.

“I’m pushing that thing back,” he said. “Maybe indefinitely, I don’t know. I’m starting to think there’s a better way out here, you know? Things are changing. Don’t look it, but they are.”

“A better way?” said Milky.

“Twelve-fifty, huh?”

“In five days’ time.”

Derrick nodded. “But your ma there, she’s good?”

“She’s good, Derr, yeah. She’s good.”

“Good,” said Derrick. “That’s good.”

Yarrow stopped with the darts pulled out of the board. He turned. “What?” he said.

Derrick said, “I’m telling you.”

“This is based on what?”

“And I been going dizzy here trying to think back, all the things I told him. Trying to think, has he ever been inside this house without me around? You know — listening devices and such.”

Yarrow returned to him from the wall, Derrick pulling another Killian’s Red from the old Coleman cooler. Yarrow toed the chalk line on the basement floor and readied a dart. “You’re getting paranoid.”

“Think back on him. Think hard.”

Yarrow threw a nineteen. “You been smoking too much.”

“It explains things. Little things going wrong recently. Something’s in the air, abuzz. He’s all into me for this coming-up thing.”

“What does he know?”

“He knows. Not every particular. I don’t spread much around, that’s not my style. But he gets it. He come to you for money?”

“He did, yeah.”

“See? Wanted an advance against the take. First of all, I ain’t loaning money to nobody. I ever float a loan you know of?”

“Negative.”

“Ain’t gonna happen. So why’s he so pushy all of a sudden? Asking to move up the timetable? Getting into us for cash? That’s us showing intent.”

“He said it was Get Outta Jail money.”

“Maybe it’s not money he needs to get out.” Derrick’s finger went back and forth between them. “Maybe it’s us.”

Yarrow scowled. “I think he’s probably fine.”

“ ‘Probably fine.’ You’re not careful.”

“How am I not careful?”

“You’re too trusting.”

“Who do I trust?”

“Too many.”

“ ‘Too many.’ Who do you trust?”

“I don’t trust nobody. Except who I trust.”

“You trust me?”

“I don’t trust Milky.”

“You never liked that kid.”

“I liked his brother. Liked his brother a lot. His brother was the shit. Wish he had been my brother. You didn’t know Jimmy.”

“Not well.”

“Before you came back to town. The shit, he was. Until Oxy turned his head into a friggin’ butterfly cage. Never saw anyone in such a hurry to die.”

Yarrow launched his last two darts in quick succession, having lost his taste for the game. Fourteen and a triple-ring eight. “Milky, though. What’s he gonna do? He dimes us, how’s he gonna show his face around town again?”

“Witness relocation or some such. They’re forcing him into it, don’t you see? They pushed a deal across the table, and he took it because he’s a weak sister. Because he’s strung out like Silly Putty, and because of his ma. That’s why they picked him up on the possession charge. The fix was in on this from the start.”

“What fix?”

“Don’t you see? Busting him, breaking him down, using him to get to you and me.”

“Who told you this?”

“About him? I know.”

“Who told you exactly? I think I need to know.”

“This came from very close, and it was pure happenstance how I got it. I was lucky. I still got a guardian angel left somewhere.”

Yarrow collected the darts. “She’s your last one, that’s for sure.”

Derrick swigged his Killian’s and said, “I want to go over there right now and beat the shit out of him. Beat the truth.”

“That would not be wise.”

“This throws everything into question. How can we make a move, period? If everything we say...” He waited for Yarrow to return, then lowered his voice. “If everything we say and do is being taken down. The friggin’ Invisible Man could be in this room with us.”

“Then we said too much already. We got to know for sure. So how do we do that? Search him for a wire?”

“Forget that. They sew those things into the clothes now, they’re so small. Nothing would be taped to his chest. They hide that shit anywhere.”

“Even if you freeze him out, then what? He already knows what he knows. If you seriously have a question, you need to keep him close.”

“Friggin’ right. Like The Godfather.”

“The thing is what, eleven days off? That’s some time.”

“Don’t upset the cart. That’s what you’re saying.”

“Eyes on the prize, baby.”

“All right.” Derrick took the darts from Yarrow, readied one. “But if Milky turns out dirty, I swear to God, I’m gonna smoke him.”

It would have been cooler if he’d thrown a bull’s-eye then, instead of a lousy six.

Pendleton and Kyter stopped by O Street before lunch, double-parking outside. Two winding flights up the narrow staircase, Mrs. Milk answered the door holding her housecoat robe together with one wrinkled hand.

Pendleton badged her. “We need to see Eddie.”

Mrs. Milk smiled at the sight of them, shuffling backward to welcome them inside. “I don’t know where he is right now. Out working hard, I’m sure. You can leave a message for him with me. He’ll want to get right in touch with you as soon as he can.”

Pendleton smelled buttermilk, looking up and down the narrow hall. “Sure he will.”

Mrs. Milk’s eager smile was not the welcome they got from most mothers whose grown sons were in trouble with the police. “Can I get you two something to drink?”

Kyter said, “I don’t think so, Mrs. Milk.”

“Eddie is working very hard,” she said, stepping closer, speaking confidentially. “He wants to do well. To prove to you that he can.”

“Prove he can what?” said Pendleton, hiking up his pants. “Stay out of jail?”

“See,” she said, ignoring the comment, “I know he wasn’t supposed to tell me, but...”

They waited. “Tell you what, Mrs. Milk?”

“Well, that he’s working for you.”

Kyter looked at Pendleton. “Working for us?”

“Working with you. But please, don’t fault him. You know a mother has ways of finding things out. His secret’s safe with me.” She looked at a framed photograph hanging on the wall, a man with two young boys fishing off a pier. “He’s going to look so handsome in uniform.”

The detectives looked at each other.

“Okay, Mrs. Milk,” said Kyter. “Tell Eddie we came by. Tell him to do himself a favor and get in touch.”

“He will.” She touched the glass front of the frame as she spoke. “He has a lot to live up to now.”

The detectives were pissed off going downstairs, as though they had been the ones lied to.

“That little shit,” said Pendleton, out at their car. “That weasel.”

Kyter said, “I’m sick of this shit. Sick of getting the thumb from him. We come by here like a taxi service?”

“He’s working for us, huh? Working with us?”

“Imagine that day.”

Pendleton looked at him over the roof of the car. “I think now it’s time we teached him a lesson.”

The traffic stop went down in Andrew Square. They brought a marked cruiser with them, full rack lights, big show. Everybody out, hands on the roof.

Pendleton patted down Derrick Shanahan. “You don’t got any warrants there, Shanahan, do you?”

Kyter took Chippie Yarrow, kicking out one leg and bouncing him against the once-white Mazda. “How ’bout you, Yarrow? Any outstandings?”

Derrick said, “What is this?”

“Inspection sticker,” said Pendleton, tapping the corner of the windshield of the beat-up Mazda. “Twenty-nine bucks would have done it. Gotta keep up.”

Kyter said, “Downtown we’ll tell you all about how it works.”

Eddie Milk stood with his hands on the car roof, very quiet, very nervous.

“You,” said Pendleton. “Milky.”

Milky said nothing, eyes staying down.

Pendleton said, “Go ahead, take off. Get outta here.”

Milky blinked like there had been a mistake, relief coming into his eyes. Amazed at his good fortune, he started away before they could change their minds, glancing back over his shoulder as he walked fast into the crowd.

Derrick stared at the roof of the Mazda as if he was trying to remove the paint finish using only the heat from his eyes.

Yarrow looked at the detective facing him as handcuffs clasped around his wrists.

Yarrow went alone to Milky’s place. He wanted to get to him before Derrick did.

Milky’s mother answered the door, said she didn’t know where he was.

“Look, Mrs. Milk. Did two plain-clothes detectives come by here a couple of days ago?”

She clammed up then. She looked worried.

Yarrow said, “How long has Milky been gone?”

Kyter was standing at his desk, waiting for Pendleton when he came in. “He called, all pissy.”

Pendleton spilled down his mobile and his keys. “I expected that.”

“Says he’s gonna call us on it. Gonna write it up.”

“Bullshit. So we got a little creative. Who knew?”

“He wants a favor. Demands it.”

“What the hell now?”

“Not for him. For the mother, he says.”

“For her?” said Pendleton. “What’s that get us?”

“Gets us nothing. But he’s holding our feet to the flames here.”

“To do what?”

“Just show up. Make an appearance.”

“Walk in there?”

“Make like it’s out of respect. The woman’s all alone now. Widow, one son ODed. He says she needs something good to cling to.”

“What are we now, Santa Claus?”

“It’s a gesture. For my own conscience, too.”

“Christ.”

“Don’t hard-ass me. You know we dicked this up. We wanted to put Eddie Milk in his place. Put him on the outs with his little crew there. Well, it big-time backfired. If this is how we pay, if this is the sum total? Then we get off cheap.”

Pendleton said, “He was a weasel. Who got thrown under an Amtrak.”

“Fine,” said Kyter. “Put on your tie.”

In the back room of O’Connor’s, the black-awninged funeral home on Broadway, men sat on padded folding chairs sipping whiskey and paying their respects. In the main parlor, Mrs. Milk sat in a brocaded chair wearing a black crepe dress and white Reeboks. The closed casket was peacocked with a ragged assortment of flowers, the largest wearing a white sash reading “SON.”

The conductor had seen an obstruction on the tracks. He hit the brakes and the body was dragged two hundred feet, sparks igniting its clothes. Between those burns and the wheel cuts, the coroner was at a loss. Milky’s death was ruled a suicide, like his father.

Pendleton and Kyter walked in close to eight. They stood in the receiving line, staring down a couple of punks while waiting their turn. Mrs. Milk recognized the two detectives and rose to her feet. They took her aside and spoke with her quietly. Kyter even held her hand.

In the back room, Derrick grabbed Yarrow’s jacket lapel. “You see that shit? Right there.”

Yarrow watched Kyter patting Mrs. Milk’s shoulder as she convulsed into a black hankie.

Derrick said, “I knew I was right to top him.”

Yarrow froze, the Dixie cup of whiskey in his hand. “What’d you say?”

Derrick stared hard. He wore a grin on his face like a look of sick determination, his breath smelling flammable. “End of the month is officially back on.”

Later, after the mourners had thinned out, Yarrow went up to the bier, kneeling before the walnut veneer of the no-frills casket. Mrs. Milk sat alone in her chair, humming a church hymn to soothe herself. She had her hero now, a martyr to look down over her from the wall in that third-floor walk-up on O Street. She would be consoled. Those two bumblers had done something right for a change.

I knew I was right to top him.

Admission of murder. It didn’t matter now whether or not the end-of-the-month deal went down.

Yarrow made like he was crossing himself, feeling the sweat-dampened front pleat of his shirt, the thin wire that was sewn in there. Under his breath he muttered something — a prayer for Milky, and for all the wayward sons of the town — that only the passive electronic ear could hear. “Never lie to your mother.” Then he stood, touched his fingertips to the coffin’s cool finish, and walked away.