The Best American Mystery Stories 2017

Charles John Harper Lovers and Thieves

From Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

It was the kind of rain favored by lovers and thieves. A misty November rain. The kind that hangs low, veil-like, obscuring the dark, desperate world beneath it. The kind that sends lovers into their bedrooms and thieves into the night.

I was more like the thief, waiting outside the Bon Vivant on La Brea, a tired, three-story stucco apartment building with a name more festive than its architecture. Waiting inside my gunmetal-gray 1934 DeSoto Airflow Coupe.

It wasn’t where I wanted to be. It wasn’t where a PI makes any real money in this town. That kind of dough — the kind I never seemed to have — was found up in the Hollywood Hills, where the famous and the desperate-to-be-famous always managed to find trouble where trouble shouldn’t be found.

But at the Bon Vivant, trouble came in the form of two lovers, a midlevel oil executive, Frank “Mac” McKenzie, and his youthful secretary, Teresa Vail. She lived in Apartment 311. The one on the top floor, right side, on the corner. The one with the lights still on at one-fifteen in the morning.

It wasn’t that Mac’s wife cared all that much. Alice McKenzie just needed divorce-court evidence so that she could squeeze the most out of her philandering husband.

She’d squeezed plenty out of me, talking me down to $50 a day and no expenses. I’d been no match for her the minute she’d walked into my office. I’d needed the work. Even though it was only fourteen months since V-J Day and the subsequent end to gasoline rationing, keeping the twelve-year-old DeSoto in fuel — and running — wasn’t cheap.

I’d been tailing Mac around ten p.m. when he’d pulled his cream-colored Buick Roadmaster to the curb a block past the Bon Vivant. He’d walked in fast, his shoulders hunched against the rain, carrying a small black Gladstone bag. A change of clothes, maybe, or a gift for his concubine.

I’d waited over three hours since then, only seeing a handful of people enter or leave the building. The first a happy man whistling a happy tune on his way out at ten forty-five. Whistling, that is, until he saw me, which made him pull his hat lower and hurry on, glancing back a couple of times as if I might be tailing him instead of Mac McKenzie. Which confirmed something I already knew: that everyone in this town was guilty of something.

At eleven I saw two young women in their twenties scurry inside, looking guilty of little more than believing in the future. In who they still could be.

And at one, a middle-aged couple in a drunken argument, both guilty as sin of who they’d become.

That was it. In three hours. Three hours I’d never get back. Three hours that had turned my mood from gray to black.

That’s when I decided it was time to move things along. Time to go in, get a shot of Mac in flagrante delicto, then run like hell. If all went well, I’d be home and in bed by two.

The Bon Vivant was horseshoe-shaped, with its opening toward the street, but in the dark, oppressive drizzle it didn’t feel terribly lucky. I crossed the damp courtyard and walked inside. Passed the bank of mail slots, including the one with Teresa Vail’s name on it. Followed the worn floral carpeting to the stairs and up to the third floor. Found Apartment 311 and gave the knob a quiet turn. It wasn’t locked.

I edged the door open. Held my Agfa Readyset Special camera in front of me like a gun. Kept my finger on its red shutter-button trigger, ready-set to immortalize Mac McKenzie’s infidelity in a flash of exposed silver.

All the lights were on in the living room, an average space decorated with above-average furniture. Despite her age, Teresa Vail had taste. Not a thing that didn’t belong. Not a thing out of place.

Except for the man on the couch pitched sideways against the armrest with the ruby face and the cloth-covered extension cord wrapped around his neck.

And the young woman slumped against his shoulder with the.22 in her hand and the bullet hole under her chin.

Outside, a misty rain still veiled the sins of a desperate city. But inside Apartment 311, those sins were in full view, embodied in two dead lovers and the blood-red echoes they’d left behind.

I was leaning against the jamb in the opening to the bedroom, smoking a cigarette, counting the black shoe marks on the bedroom door, waiting for the cops to cut me loose. Twenty-eight lines and smudges a foot above the wood floor. I pictured Mac carrying Teresa in his arms and kicking the bedroom door open on his way to violating the Sixth Commandment.

Pictured that up until Teresa Vail’s mother walked in. As a cynical private eye, it’s easy to forget about the humanity that props up each life. A humanity that seems at its purest — its most sincere — when someone dies. Having seen hundreds of dead bodies from Anzio to Dachau as a rifleman-turned-medic in the war, I’d developed a certain indifference to the fate of others. A certain hardness to their trauma and pain. Enough, at least, to get me through the endless nightmare of battle.

But seeing the mother of the young woman burst through the open doorway, push past the policemen milling about and the coroner taking still lifes of the bodies, and hearing the chilling, feral howl that rose from her soul when she saw her daughter, made me swallow hard. She would have thrown herself on her daughter’s body if an alert cop hadn’t stepped in front of her and gripped her shoulders, keeping her from disturbing the crime scene. She struggled but soon collapsed, borne down by the invisible weight of death. A weight that would, as I’d learned from the war, press down on her for years to come. If not forever.

My client, on the other hand, showed no signs of heartbreak. Alice McKenzie — fortyish with unnaturally black hair and the swollen face of an aspiring alcoholic — strode through the door in a brown slack suit with a cigarette between her fingers and lipstick on her teeth. She reacted like a foreman who finds the crew lying down on the job. Wide stance, hands on hips, lips pressed into a thin, derisive line.

“That s.o.b.,” she said.

Unlike Teresa’s mother, Alice was childless. And now husbandless, but with an inheritance instead of a divorce. Assuming, of course, that she hadn’t murdered him, which had crossed my mind as I’d begun to wonder how she’d known to show up at the interloper’s apartment at this late hour.

I sidled over to the detective in charge, who stood by the front door like a groomsman, his hands clasped behind his back. His name was Beaumont. I knew him from a prior case. We’d parted from that case like an old vaudeville team, sick to death of each other’s act. “Who called the wife?” I said.

Beaumont wore a brown hat and brown suit that looked like they’d been up all night. He kept a stony face, but his eyes took on a blue twinkle as they stared past me at the commotion that follows in the wake of violent death. The commotion that paid for his tired suit and the mortgage on his house. “Dunno, Nash. I hear she’s your client. Why don’t you ask her?”

“How about the mother?”

“Dunno about her either. Maybe they’re both fortunetellers, like Doreena on the Santa Monica Pier.” He let the hint of a smile nuzzle his lips. Then he raised an eyebrow and turned his sights on me. “What I wanna know, Nash, is how you knew to be here. Square in the middle of a murder-suicide.”

“I was watching the place, trying to get some black-and-white evidence for my client. But when McKenzie didn’t come out, I decided to come in. This is what I found.”

“You’re a helluva PI,” he said, with more twinkles in his eyes. “Always one step behind.”

I twinkled my eyes back at him. “But always one step ahead of you.” Then I took several steps over to Alice. With her feet planted on the wood floor, she looked more in charge than Beaumont.

“Alice,” I said with a nod.

“You found them?” Her skepticism was as subtle as the lipstick on her teeth.

“I’m a full-service PI,” I said. “Who called you?”

She turned her head toward me, took a pull on her cigarette, then exhaled. Her eyes narrowed behind the smoke that drifted from her lips. “A friend.”

“What’s his name?”

Her eyes turned steely. She dropped the cigarette on the varnished floor and stepped it out. “You can go now, Mr. Nash. I don’t need your help anymore. Send me a bill.” Then she spun and walked toward the door. She paused just long enough to give Teresa Vail’s mother a dismissive look and to tell Beaumont that if he needed anything more she was in the telephone book under Mr. Frank “Mac” McKenzie.

After Alice left Teresa Vail’s apartment, I took a moment to gather up my camera and my hat from an accent chair and, with Beaumont’s blessing, made my way out of the apartment. In the hall I passed a Rita Hayworth redhead with her face buried in her hands, crouching with her back against the wall, struggling to compose herself. I almost stopped, but the wall of indifference rose up and without a second thought I took the stairs to the back door of the Bon Vivant.

Once outside I followed the alley to the corner of the building, then crept up the narrow sidewalk between the Bon Vivant and a long hedge. I stopped in the shadows of the walkway not far from the street. From there I could see Alice standing at the curb near the no-parking zone, where two vacant patrol cars sat with their lights off.

The misty rain made the world feel small, intimate, cold. But Alice seemed unaware of the dismal weather, her gaze distant, as if she’d forgotten where she’d parked her car but was in no hurry to remember. She glanced back at the courtyard and the front door to the Bon Vivant. Looked up at the windows to No. 311.

I thought it might be a moment of weakness for Alice, a long, last look toward the man she had once loved. But then a dark Packard, wipers thumping, rolled to a stop in front of her. She slipped between the two empty prowlers and into the passenger side of the sedan. All I could see of the driver was the silhouette of a fedora.

They drove off down the veiled darkness of La Brea, passing under the streetlamps, gliding like a blackened ghost in and out of the falling pools of light.

As I drove back to my apartment on Hollywood Boulevard, I thought about the case Alice McKenzie had just fired me from. Thought about it free of charge, just like most things I thought about these days. Thought about what I’d seen when I’d discovered the bodies.

Teresa had worn a gray pleated skirt and a pink wool pullover sweater — pink except for a scarlet cascade of blood at the collar. A pink ribbon held back her dark-brown hair in a ponytail. Her perfume was the expensive kind, not too sweet, and the makeup on her midtwenties face was flawless. She was the picture of vibrant youth. As vibrant as youth can look when the animation of the soul is gone.

Mac had been dressed for a night on the town in a light-blue herringbone coat and pleated slacks and black-and-white wingtip shoes that needed a polish on the heels. His blue-black hair was slick with tonic and shaped as neatly as a mannequin’s. He was short and carried none of the extra pounds that seemed to come with age. He looked as trim as a varsity rower.

The only thing out of place on him — other than the extension cord around his neck and the deep red coloring of his face — was the crop of medals pinned in random spots on his jacket. A World War II Victory Medal on the lapel. An army Good Conduct Medal on a lower pocket. An American Campaign Medal on the shoulder. A Combat Infantry Badge on the collar. A Purple Heart through a buttonhole. A European — African — Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, pierced by two bronze battle stars and a bronze arrowhead, near a cuff. And, sticking out of the upper left pocket like a red-and-blue pocket square, the Bronze Star.

I’d never seen medals displayed on civilian clothes before, or in such a careless way, but maybe Mac had been a proud veteran. VFW type. There were millions of them around these days. Or maybe his medals had given Teresa a sexual thrill. Maybe his heroism was what had blinded her to the twenty years that separated their births.

Whatever the case, they’d been two people dressed for a night out that had never come. And from the looks of it, hadn’t done anything more physical than sit on the couch and listen to The Adventures of Ellery Queen on the radio.

But something about the whole picture hadn’t added up. Something that had drawn me to their hands. Made me smell them. Both of his carried a hint of soap, both of hers the muskiness of sweaty skin. None of them had smelled of gunpowder, not even the one — hers — holding the.22 that had sent the bullet up under her chin.

Detective Beaumont saw it as a murder-suicide. I was seeing something else.

Then again, what did I care? I was off the clock. Common sense said there’d be no payment for anything else I did on this case and to keep the DeSoto aimed for home. To let Beaumont and his underlings deal with it.

I couldn’t have agreed more.

Until I made an impulsive U-turn in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard, the DeSoto’s tires hissing as they pivoted on the wet, black, shimmering pavement.

When I pulled to a stop at the curb in front of a small bungalow a block off Fairfax, Teresa Vail’s mother was being helped out of a dark-green prewar Dodge parked in the driveway. She stumbled toward the door, propped up by a woman nearly a foot taller than her. The same woman I’d seen crouched in the hallway of the Bon Vivant. The Rita Hayworth redhead.

I checked my watch. Almost three a.m. The rain had stopped, leaving in its wake a cold, surly dampness. The redhead, still holding Teresa’s mother with one arm, was struggling to find a key in her purse. I hurried up the driveway.

“Can I help?”

The redhead looked back at me, wary, protective. “Who are you?”

I stopped a dozen feet from them and raised my hands. “Darrow Nash. I was at Teresa’s apartment. I wanted to see if Mrs. Vail needed anything.”

“I’ve got it covered.” The redhead turned away and continued to dig in the purse as Mrs. Vail moaned at her side. The purse fell and its contents spilled out onto the front step. Curses spilled out of the redhead.

I helped gather up the debris, then used the key that I’d picked up off the step to unlock the front door. The redhead led Mrs. Vail inside and straight down a hall. I wiped my feet on the rug by the front door and waited. To the left lay the living room, a small space stuffed with a sofa and a pair of chairs and a trio of burning lights. It looked like a room that had been left in a hurry, and smelled like a room that was beginning to sour. But what captured my attention stood between two double-hung windows: a liquor table holding a quartet of upside-down tumblers and a bottle of Jameson.

A couple of minutes later the redhead came back up the hallway, her head down, her hands buried in the pockets of her tan raincoat. She looked up, saw me standing in the living room, and gasped, a hand shooting up to cover her heart. Irritation flooded her words. “What are you still doing here?”

“I was the one who found Teresa.”

“That doesn’t give you the right to barge in here.”

“I’m the one who let you in.”

She gazed at the two tumblers of Jameson I held in my hands. Finally said, “Are you with the police?”

“No. I’m Darrow Nash. A private detective.”

“Then why should I let you stay?”

I offered her one of the drinks. “You probably shouldn’t.”

She stared at me. Seemed to assess my face, studying it for clues. Then she shrugged off her coat, tossed it over the back of the sofa, and kicked her shoes toward the door. She took the drink from my hand. “You win, Darrow Nash.”

“Nobody wins tonight,” I said.

She dropped into one of the stuffed chairs and took something between a sip and a gulp. Held the side of the glass against her forehead. Leaned into it. Her silk burgundy blouse, open at the neck in a V, gave me a glimpse of the dark depths between her breasts. Later I noticed her dark gray skirt.

“How’s Mrs. Vail?”

Her eyes brushed me off. “How do you think?”

“I’d say terrible.”

“Brilliant deduction, Holmes,” she said, tilting her drink in a salute. “She fell asleep the minute her head hit the pillow.”

“Is she your mother?”

“Clara? No. Teresa and I aren’t sisters. We’re...” She paused, looked away, rubbed her eyes. “We were friends from work.”

“But you live here, right?”

She nodded. “Just until I find some work. Cattle calls don’t pay the rent. Teresa and I used to be in the secretarial pool together at Standard Oil.” Something about my silence made her add, “I wasn’t fired. I quit.”

“Why?”

She started to speak but caught herself. Her eyes narrowed. “Not that it’s any of your business.” She waited. Finally said, “My boss wanted more from me than I was willing to give.”

“Who was your boss?”

“Paul Devore.” Just saying his name made her clench her jaw. “Teresa helped me stand up to him. She...” Then the tears came, filling her eyes, spilling down her cheeks. Quiet tears, unaccompanied by sobs or anguished moans. The ones that look like they hurt the most.

I filled the void the best I could. “If it helps, I don’t think she killed herself.”

Her swollen eyes widened and locked on mine. She hesitated, as if too many words had come to mind and she couldn’t decide which ones to use. She didn’t have to.

“There’s no way on God’s green earth,” said a voice from down the hall, a voice both fragile and firm, “that Teresa would ever kill herself.” Mrs. Vail stopped at the edge of the hallway, one hand pressed for support against the wall. “She was too strong to do that.”

The redhead stood up. “Clara, I told you to get some sleep.”

It seemed to take herculean effort for Mrs. Vail to turn her gaze on her housemate. “My daughter is dead, Eileen. I can do whatever I like.”

She hauled her eyes back over to me. “Teresa would never take her own life, sir. Never.” It came out stronger than before, overwhelming whatever had been fragile. But the effort used up what strength she had left. Her knees buckled and she slumped to the floor, sobbing. Eileen and I each took an arm and helped her back to her bedroom. The light was off, but I got a picture of it from the smell of lingering perfume and the profound lack of a male presence. A room that had seen its share of tears and loneliness over the years. With many more to come.

Eileen and I returned to the main room and took long sips of our drinks. I felt nauseous from the perfume and the air of death in the house, but I needed to know more. I looked at Eileen. She seemed exhausted, distracted.

“Cattle calls?” I said. “You’re an actress?”

“Aspiring.” She wrapped the word in a thin sheen of bitterness. “Which means ‘unemployed.’ ”

Looking at Eileen, I thought of Rita Hayworth in The Lady in Question, the innocent, melancholy defendant.

“How long had Teresa been seeing Mac?”

She let out a short burst of air, a cheap substitute for a laugh. “Teresa and Mac? You’re not much of a private eye, are you?”

“He brought a Gladstone bag with him like he might be spending the night.”

The thought made her smile. “Not a chance. She was his secretary and they were friendly, but he wasn’t the dating type, if you know what I mean. And he wasn’t particularly good-looking. Teresa felt sorry for him, married to that bitch of a woman. Living behind that kind of a lie.”

Something dawned on me. Something that should have crossed my mind earlier. “Why did you move in here with Mrs. Vail? Why not with Teresa at the Bon Vivant?”

Eileen cocked her head and looked at me like I was a sap. “Teresa didn’t live there. She lived here. That was Mac’s apartment.”

“But the mail slot has Teresa’s name on it.”

“She did that for him. He wanted a place where he could be himself and be free of that nasty woman.”

I nodded, trying to hide the fact that I’d been surprised by the information. “What do you think happened?”

“Murder-suicide. What else?”

“Most murder-suicides come from romances gone bad. But you said they were just friends.”

She stared at me for a moment, mulling over my reasoning, then seemed to give up, her only response a self-conscious sip of her drink.

“How did you and Mrs. Vail know to go to the apartment?”

She took another sip before answering. “Paul Devore called me.”

“How did he know about it?”

“I didn’t think to ask,” she said, glancing away. “I wanted off the phone as fast as possible.”

“Did Devore and Mac know each other?”

“Yes. I guess you could call them rivals. Paul always envied Mac’s success with the company. Before the war, Mac had even beaten Paul out of a couple of promotions.” She paused and her eyes widened. “Maybe Paul was the one who killed them. Maybe that’s how he knew about it.”

We looked at each other, considering the possibility. But then her eyes eased from thoughtful into purposeful. She stood up and stretched. My eyes wandered off on their own to see what that stretch did to her curves. It didn’t hurt them at all. Rita Hayworth in Cover Girl, the sexy showgirl. I set my empty glass on an end table.

Eileen did the same, her eyes now deep and dangerous.

I gave her a long look. A very long look. “I better get going. Thanks for talking.” I moved to the front door, but fought every step. I was surprised by how much I liked this Rita Hayworth redhead. Liked her toughness. Her ease. Her complexity.

When I turned back to her, she had followed me to the door. “What did you say your name was?”

I fingered an information card out of my suit coat and gave it to her. “Darrow Nash.”

“Eileen Burnham.”

“Thanks for not kicking me out earlier, Eileen Burnham.”

“Thanks for the drink, Darrow Nash. Is it too late for a second?”

“I’ll take a rain check on that.”

“It’s raining now.”

I knew what a second would mean. Saw it in her eyes. Felt it in my blood. And it wasn’t what you should be doing on a night like this. A night when a friend is dead and the mother of that friend is sleeping in the next room.

“That card I gave you has a telephone number on it,” I said. “If after a week or so you find yourself wondering about me, try that number. Won’t cost you a thing. It’s a local call.”

She didn’t smile. Just kept staring at me with those deep, dangerous eyes. Eyes that I felt following me all the way back to my car.

Mac and Alice McKenzie lived on a quiet, unlighted street in Burbank in the heart of the San Fernando Valley, bounded by the Santa Monica Mountains to the south and the San Gabriels to the north. A flat basin in the middle of mountain ranges, like the bottom of a petri dish where, particularly in the entertainment business, everyone seemed to be under a microscope.

It was raining again.

The house, one story of faux-Spanish stucco, was dark. I looked at my watch. It was just after four a.m. Either Alice and her boyfriend were home and asleep already or they hadn’t come back to Alice’s house at all. The one-lane driveway was empty.

I knocked on the front door a couple of times, rang the bell a few more. No answer. Tried the knob. Locked. Tried the back door to the patio. Locked. Tried the hairpin I kept in my coat pocket. Unlocked.

I left the lights off as I stepped into the kitchen. Switched on my flashlight. Moved to the living room. Found nothing but the casual disarray of everyday life.

Moved down the hall to the bedrooms. All the doors were open and all the beds were made. It didn’t take long to see that Alice and Mac didn’t sleep together. Alice, of course, had the larger bedroom, Mac the smaller one.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, so I started with Mac’s closet. Found half a dozen pairs of hard shoes, a dozen wool suits, two dozen dress shirts, three dozen ties. Nothing out of the ordinary for a middle-aged oil executive. His dresser wasn’t much different, though I learned his hair tonic was Lucky Tiger and his aftershave was Yardley. The drawers held undershirts, silk socks, boxers, pocket squares, and a handful of neatly folded sweaters. The common denominator was quality. All of his clothes were very expensive and very new.

The same wasn’t true in Mac’s desk. I found it in another bedroom, which had been turned into a study. The top of the desk was covered by a writing blotter and anchored at the two outer corners by a fluorescent lamp and by something that was no longer there. Something that had sat on that corner long enough to have left a faint outline in the dust. Just enough dust to betray a rectangle.

The drawers of the desk were filled with a hodgepodge of pens and pencils and old financial detritus: receipts, bank statements, bills. I flipped quickly through some documents but couldn’t find any life insurance policies that might betray a million-dollar motive.

The right-hand middle drawer held several small rectangular boxes. Inside the boxes were stacks of canceled checks. I was about to close the drawer when I noticed that its interior seemed shorter than it should.

I reached a hand in and touched the back panel. There was a space at the top of the panel for a finger to gain purchase. When I pulled on it, the panel fell forward. Behind it in the secret space was another small rectangular box and a letter-sized envelope folded in half.

I opened the box expecting to find more canceled checks but instead found several matchbooks from a place called The Roaring 20s. Inside the matchbooks were handwritten first names and telephone numbers.

Lying in the box beneath all the matchbooks were a dozen black-and-white photographs, the kind with thick white borders. Different names were written on the backs of the photographs, names that were the same as those in the matchbooks. Men’s names. And in each of the pictures Mac was with a different man. All of the men were naked. Doing the kinds of things people do when they’re naked.

Better divorce photographs than I could have ever taken at the Bon Vivant.

The flash of headlights swung across the rain-streaked window to the study like a lighthouse beam through the mist. I thought about trying to hide or to make a break for the back door, but my old DeSoto was parked down the street. Alice knew it was mine.

Instead, as I heard the car pull to a stop in the driveway, I tucked the small box back into its hiding place in the desk and replaced the fake drawer wall. I slipped the pictures and the envelope into the inside pocket of my suit coat.

In the living room I turned on a lamp, aimed a flower-patterned wing chair toward the front door, and took a seat. Crossed my legs. Used one hand to prop up my chin. Used the other to keep my.38 company inside the pocket of my raincoat.

The front door opened. Alice, still in her brown slack suit, led the way, the keys jangling in her hand. She stopped when she saw me. Took up the foreman pose she’d displayed at the Bon Vivant, feet planted, hands on hips, flint in her eyes. “I thought I made it clear you were fired.”

“You did,” I said. “I’m off the clock.”

A man came through the door behind her wearing a navy-blue suit and hat with water droplets on the shoulders and crown. He bore a slight limp that I recognized from the war — I’d treated several GIs for the same wound. He wasn’t tall but had a certain sense of size about him. Probably from his ego, because he came at me with the misplaced confidence of a rookie cop.

He grabbed my lapels and hoisted me from the chair. “Time to go, pal.”

“Not just yet, pal,” I said, and kneed him in a place a knee is never welcome. He doubled over and dropped face-first onto the floor. I left the gun in my coat pocket and pulled his right arm behind him, resting the offending knee in the middle of his back. I leveraged his arm up until he yelped.

I glanced up at Alice. “Introductions?”

She looked disgusted with both of us. “Darrow Nash. Paul Devore.”

I gave his arm another twist, and he yelped again. “Pleased to meet you, Paul.”

“You’re hurting me.”

“Tell Mr. Devore,” I said to Alice, “that I’ll let him up if he stops playing a tough guy.”

“He won’t do anything.”

I eased off his arm and used my knee on his back to push myself up to my feet. He yelped again but remained on the floor, squirming, finally able to wallow in the pain in his groin now that the pain in his arm and back had subsided.

I dipped my hand into my raincoat pocket and kept it there. I trusted Alice, but not Devore.

“How did you get in?” she said as she pulled a pack from her purse and shook a cigarette between her lips.

“I carry a master key shaped like a hairpin.”

She didn’t seem to care, as she snapped her lighter shut and blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. It swirled over us, between us, like silent blue worry. “What do you want?”

“I want to know why you went to the apartment tonight.”

She glanced down at the man on the floor between us. “Paul took me there.”

I hoisted Devore to his feet and settled him into the flowered chair he’d pulled me out of. His hat had fallen off, exposing the smooth curvature of his head through thinning black hair. An oversized grimace exposed tiny fractures around his eyes.

“Why did you take Alice to the apartment?”

He squeezed the words out through exaggerated pain. “I wanted her to see Mac’s home away from home. I didn’t know he was dead.”

“But you knew it was Mac’s place and not Teresa Vail’s.” It wasn’t a question.

His eyes shifting away from me was as good as a nod.

I turned to Alice. “Did you know it was Mac’s?”

She looked off through the walls toward a spot somewhere beyond the Santa Monicas. Somewhere closer to La Brea. Took a long drag on her cigarette, let the smoke out with the words. “No. I figured on the nights he didn’t come home he’d found some bimbo to put him up.” Her eyes came back to me with a darker tint. “I didn’t know his affairs were month-to-month.”

I studied her. Realized that she had no idea who Mac McKenzie really was.

I turned back to Devore. “How did you know about the apartment?”

“None of your damn business.”

I didn’t have to threaten him. Alice did it for me. She wanted to know too. “Answer him.”

“My secretary called me tonight and told me.”

“What’s her name?”

“Eileen Burnham.”

“Don’t you mean your former secretary?”

His focus sharpened on me. “How do you know that?”

“I’m good at what I do.” I gestured toward Alice. “Why don’t you tell her why Eileen quit.”

He took a quick, panicked glance at Alice. Her gaze narrowed into a hard stare. Then she stuffed out her cigarette in an ashtray and folded her arms.

I didn’t have a warm spot in my heart for Alice. Had never liked that kind of cynicism in a woman. But I hated guys like Paul Devore. Guys with moneyed egos and bankrupt character. Guys who used their positions of authority to get what they wanted, not through persuasion but through force. I answered for him.

“Paul here likes his secretaries to take more from him than just dictation.”

Alice eyed Devore like a hammer eyes a nail. Devore verbally backpedaled in the chair. “It was before I met you, honey.”

Nobody in the room believed that.

I watched Alice, waiting for the anger inside her to show itself in something specific, in either her words or her fists. Devore was watching for the same thing. Instead the anger melted into disillusionment. As if her expectations had been met. Expectations she’d been hoping would be proven wrong. She moved to a window and lit another cigarette.

“Get out of here, Paul,” she said, her voice low, resigned. “And don’t come back.”

He jumped to his feet. “But I love you.”

Nobody in the room believed that either.

I steered him toward the front door, noticing his limp again. “Beat it, Devore. She’s done with you. Alice doesn’t go for cowards.”

The guilty verdict in his eyes was followed by an embarrassed rage that sent him out the door, hobbling toward his Packard. A rage still evident as he backed wildly out of the driveway and sped off into the night.

Alice stood fingering the cigarette close to her lips as she stared into a darkness that illuminated her reflection in the window.

I stepped up beside her. “You’re better off without him.”

She turned her head and gave me a long look. I hesitated, surprised for a moment by what I saw, what I hadn’t noticed before. That her eyes — blue eyes that had once been so cynical — possessed a raw humanity. A tender loneliness.

“You’ll find someone,” I said. And I meant it.

She stared at me. Took a deep pull on her cigarette. Then looked away and exhaled, the smoke obscuring her image in the window.

As I closed the front door behind me, I marveled at how somebody so hard-edged could be so vulnerable. But sometimes, I guess, the deepest truths can conjure up the greatest facades.

At five a.m. outside the Bon Vivant there was no external evidence that two people had suffered tragic deaths inside. No ambulances. No cop cars. All that was left in the wake of the murderous violence was the pregnant, drizzling darkness just before another dawn.

I’d stopped by hoping to catch Beaumont still on the job. I wanted to give him the envelope I’d found in the secret compartment inside Mac’s desk, proof that this wasn’t a simple murder-suicide.

After leaving Alice’s house, I’d sat in my car and looked through the envelope’s contents. It held three short, cryptic notes, each typewritten on small pieces of white paper: I’M WATCHING YOU and DOES YOUR WIFE KNOW? and DOES YOUR BOSS KNOW?

The fourth note got to the point:

My guess was that tonight had been the Sunday night for the meeting. And I’d noticed when I’d followed Mac there that he had rushed into the Bon Vivant just before ten carrying a small Gladstone bag. At the time I hadn’t given it much thought. I had just assumed it held a change of clothes or a present for someone. But it might have contained something else. Something dangerous, like a gun. Or something worse, like money.

And during my time inside the apartment, I hadn’t seen the cops tag it as evidence. I needed to know if it was still in there. And what, if anything, it still contained.

As I walked through the courtyard to the front door, lights had come on in the windows of a handful of apartments, but not the one with Teresa Vail’s name on it. When I reached 311 there was no indication that the cops cared about this case anymore. No postings to keep out. No police tape. To them, it was a murder-suicide. Case closed.

Then I heard a muffled noise through the paneled wood door. I pulled the.38 from my raincoat pocket.

I examined the lock on the door. No evidence of tampering. I tried the knob. No resistance. The cops would have at least locked it when they’d left. Whoever was inside had used a key.

I felt my heart clench. The feeling that comes with news I don’t want to hear. Or don’t want to believe.

I stepped inside and closed the door. The living room was dark, but a flashlight beam danced against the walls in the bedroom. I turned on the lamp next to the couch where Mac and Teresa had died, casting the room in a tepid yellow glow. But not tepid enough to soften the poignancy of the bloodstains left behind on the couch.

I heard the flashlight click off, leaving the bedroom buried in darkness.

“It’s me,” I said into a silence both sharp and airless. “Darrow Nash.”

No sound. Then a form in an overcoat stepped into the open doorway.

“You work long hours for a PI.”

“I work as long as it takes,” I said.

“As long as it takes for what?”

“For the truth.”

No response. Just a long, wary stare. Deep and dangerous.

“How’s Mrs. Vail?” I said.

“Asleep.”

“What brings you back here?”

Eileen rolled her shoulders and lolled her head as if to stretch. “I couldn’t sleep there. I was too upset.” She set the flashlight on a small table by the bedroom door and opened her tan overcoat. She still wore the burgundy blouse, the one with the open-neck V that ended where her cleavage started. Her Rita Hayworth hair rested on her shoulders.

“If you were looking for sleep, why did you bring a flashlight?”

She took several slow steps out of the bedroom, the fingers of her left hand caressing the skin that led down into the deep cleft between her breasts. Her right hand was tucked into her raincoat pocket. I didn’t trust either hand. Or what either one was suggesting.

“I wanted to collect some of Teresa’s things.” She stopped six feet away from me. “I was hoping I’d see you again. Maybe collect on that rain check.”

Rita Hayworth in Blood and Sand. The sultry temptress.

I took a deep breath and let out a long sigh. “Whose idea was it?”

She cocked her head and pasted on a quizzical look. “Whose idea was what?”

I gestured toward the bloodstained couch. “This.”

She shrugged. “How would I know? It was a murder-suicide.”

“If that’s true, why didn’t Teresa just shoot Mac, then shoot herself? Why go to the trouble of strangling him first?”

She watched me, her hands frozen in place, one at her chest, the other in her pocket.

“There was no gunpowder on Teresa’s skin,” I said, holding her gaze. “I smelled her hands. Someone else put that bullet in her head.”

Eileen’s face seemed thinner than earlier in the night. And older. “Maybe we should sit down and discuss this. I know where we might be more comfortable.” Then she walked back into the bedroom and hit the wall switch, filling the room with a milky luminescence from the ceiling light. She sat on the edge of the double bed and crossed her legs.

I stopped in the doorway. It was the same room from the pictures Mac had hidden in his desk at the house. The bed, made with military precision, was covered in a bright red satin spread. The dresser drawers were closed. The closet door was open.

Eileen let an idle hand play back and forth across the silky covering. “Sit by me.”

I made no movement toward the bed.

“Here’s what I think,” I said. “You and Teresa were extorting money from Mac. You found out he preferred the company of men and used it to try to get fifty thousand dollars out of him. He was supposed to meet you here tonight to give you the money.”

She tried on a look of skepticism. It didn’t fit. Even she knew that, so she tried on something else. “Mac shot Teresa.”

I looked down, shaking my head. Caught sight of the black marks on the bedroom door, a foot above the floor. The marks I’d been counting as I’d been waiting earlier in the night for Beaumont to release me. All twenty-eight of them. Some of them thin, curved lines. Some of them dense smudges.

And I remembered Mac’s shoes. Black-and-white wingtips that had needed polishing. Not on the toes but on the heels.

A burst of clarity shot through me. I looked up at Eileen. “Mac didn’t kill Teresa. He couldn’t have, because he was already dead.”

Eileen rose to her feet. Stared down at the bottom of the bedroom door, at the collection of black scars.

“Mac’s shoes were scuffed on the heels,” I said. “He died hanging from this door. My guess is the extension cord was tied to the knob on the other side and draped over the top. But for some reason his neck didn’t break. He struggled, then eventually suffocated. Which leaves only one person who could have shot Teresa. You.”

“I would never do that.” She said it with icy confidence, but I sensed a weakening. Her act wasn’t working on me like she’d thought it would.

“Tell me what happened.”

She stared at me, her face a pallid mask. Stared so long that I began to wonder if she was going to say anything at all. “No one was supposed to die.”

“Was it Teresa’s idea?”

Eileen nodded. “She’d helped Mac get the apartment, but when she found out he only had men over here, she saw an opportunity. She didn’t think he’d be man enough to fight our demands.” Her eyes narrowed and she shook her head. “But neither of us thought he was the kind of guy who would kill himself.”

“Why not?”

“Mac seemed okay with his... with himself. And he was a war hero. All those medals. I never even knew he’d been in the war. He never talked about it.”

“Why would you get involved?”

“I don’t know. Easy money, I guess. I figured if I had enough cash I could quit looking for a day job and start going to more auditions.”

“Then why did you shoot Teresa?”

Eileen’s eyes grew wide and pleading. “I didn’t mean to. I was...” She glanced away for a moment, then looked out of the bedroom toward the living room. Toward the couch. “When we walked in at eleven and saw Mac hanging from the door...”

“Eleven? Weren’t you supposed to meet him at ten?”

“No, the note said eleven. So when we saw him hanging from the door, Teresa pulled out her gun, thinking it was some sort of a setup. But when she realized he was dead, she went crazy. Screaming and crying, shouting that he wasn’t supposed to kill himself. I knew she had to quiet down or someone would come to the door. She was waving the gun around and I was afraid it would go off, so I grabbed it from her. She tried to take it back. We struggled. It went off.”

She hesitated, replaying the scene in her head. “Then Teresa fell onto the couch.” Eileen looked down and her tears fell silently onto the carpet.

“And you moved Mac’s body there to make it look like a murder-suicide. Did he leave a note?”

“I don’t know.” She paused, glanced around. “I don’t think so. I guess I was so shocked that he’d done it I didn’t even think about a note.”

“Did you call Paul Devore?”

“No.” It came out sharp, angry. Honest.

“Why’d you come back with Mrs. Vail?”

She sighed. “I thought it would give me an alibi.”

“And why come back now when you knew there was no money?”

She shrugged, resigned, nearly drained of life. “When you mentioned the bag at the house, I thought maybe I was wrong. That there might still be some money in it.”

“Did you find the bag?”

She gestured with her head toward the closet. “Just now. The only thing in it was an empty leather jewelry box.”

The box that was missing from the corner of Mac’s desk at home. The box in which he must have kept his medals.

It all made sense.

Still, I couldn’t shake the fact that the times didn’t add up. Eileen said that she and Teresa were supposed to meet Mac at eleven. But the extortion letter from Mac’s desk said to meet at ten. And when I’d been waiting outside the Bon Vivant I’d seen Mac go in at ten and two women — Eileen Burnham and Teresa Vail as it turns out — enter at eleven. Mac had died in that hour. But by whose hand? His own or someone else’s?

Eileen took a long, slow breath. Finally looked up at me. The tears had left faint tracks in her makeup. She pulled a gun from her coat pocket. A.38. Aimed it at the general area of my heart.

Rita Hayworth in Gilda. The femme fatale.

She stared at me until tears began to well in her eyes. It looked like remorse, but I wasn’t sure if it was for what she had done or for what she was about to do.

“I don’t want to kill you,” she said. “But I don’t want to go to prison either.”

“You should put that away. Someone could get hurt.”

Her gaze drifted over my shoulder into the living room again. This time her eyes grew wide.

“He’s right, Eileen,” said a voice from behind me. “Drop the gun.” Then a chuckle. “Nice job, Nash. I heard the whole thing. She’s the killer. You might be a decent PI after all.”

I turned to see the self-satisfied mug of Paul Devore, and the accusatory barrel of his revolver aimed past me at Eileen.

He stood near the bloody couch as he punched a gesture toward her with the gun. “Mac killed himself and you killed Teresa. Isn’t that right, doll?”

Eileen bore the stricken look of someone whose secret is out, but she didn’t respond.

“Why are you here, Devore?” I said.

“I followed you,” he said, glancing at me. “I was going to pay you back for what you did to me at Alice’s. But when I heard Eileen’s confession, I decided you needed my help.”

“Sticking up for me like you stuck up for the men in your platoon?”

He looked offended. I immediately felt better about myself. “Look, Nash, it’s five in the morning. You turned Alice against me. Just be happy I’m here to save your ass.”

I almost said something glib. But then it struck me. First as a hunch, then as a flood of certainty. “You never cared about Alice, Paul. You just wanted her to be your alibi.”

“That’s absurd.” He tried to mean it, but the phony outrage died somewhere in the space between us.

“Not really,” I said as I moved out of the doorway and into the living room, away from both Eileen and Devore.

I needed some space in case what I was about to say inspired a gun to go off. Including the one that I pulled from my coat pocket as I turned near the windows. I aimed it at Devore. Eileen, her gun also aimed at Devore, stepped into the doorway. Devore smirked when he saw my.38 but kept his gun aimed at Eileen. There was a ten-foot triangle between the three of us.

“The extortion play on Mac,” I said, “was your idea, Paul. Teresa told you about Mac’s visitors here and you saw an opportunity.”

“You were behind it?” Eileen took a step toward Devore, the shock on her face as real as the gun in her hand.

“You didn’t know that?” I said.

She shook her head. “Teresa knew how much I hated this bastard. She said it was her idea but that she didn’t want to come here alone.”

Devore didn’t respond, but his eyes had narrowed.

“What Teresa didn’t know,” I said, “was that Paul here was going to set you and Teresa up to take the fall at eleven o’clock for his extortion and murder of Mac at ten. Paul would get the money and you and Teresa would do the time.”

Devore tried to laugh. He wasn’t the actor that Eileen was. “You can’t prove any of that.”

“Actually, I can.” I patted my jacket where the inside breast pocket was. “I have the note you sent to Mac. It said to meet here at ten. But Eileen told me that they were supposed to meet Mac at eleven.” I glanced to Eileen. “Who decided on eleven?”

Eileen kept her eyes and her gun on Devore. “He did. And he said he’d take care of sending a note to Mac.”

I nodded at Devore. “So you told them eleven, but you told Mac ten. That gave you an hour to get the money, kill Mac, and make it look like a suicide. A gun would have been too loud, so you choked him with the cord until he passed out, then you strung him up so that Teresa and Eileen wouldn’t suspect you of murdering him and taking all the money. They would think that he had simply killed himself because of the extortion letter. That sound about right?”

“You’ve really lost it, Nash.” He kept his gun aimed at Eileen. “She killed Teresa and Mac killed himself.”

“I saw you leave at ten forty-five.” Devore had been the man whistling a happy tune. The one who had seen me. Who had pulled his hat low. Who I’d assumed was guilty of something. “You were going to call the police so that they would get here just after Teresa and Eileen showed up at eleven. But you saw me outside sitting in my car and you got nervous. You were worried I could place you at the scene, so you didn’t call the cops.”

Devore looked ashen in the yellow light of the room.

“You were the one who pinned those medals all over his coat,” I said. “Was that your way of mocking him, Devore? Did those medals make you jealous? Make you face your own cowardice?”

He turned his gun toward me and took a hobbled step. “I saw action, Nash.”

“Where? Behind the Fort Bragg Officers’ Club?”

“Iwo.” His face wrenched into a phony rage that almost gave cover for the blush that had spread across his cheeks and the beads of sweat that had popped up on his forehead.

“Do you have a Combat Infantry Badge that will back that up? Or just a dishonorable discharge?”

The fake rage turned real. “You think pinning a medal on somebody makes them a hero?”

“No. But it says they’ve got more inside them than guys like you. Those heroes were just as scared as you, only they knew their buddies were depending on them. You’ve never cared about anybody but yourself. Mac was more of a man than you are.”

Devore was breathing heavy, drawing in air in big, noisy wheezes, but his response came out breathless. “That’s what Mac said. You know what I said? ‘Medals or no medals, do you think Standard Oil is going to promote you when they find out you’re a queerie?’ ”

“What did he say to that?”

Devore paused. Seemed to stop functioning. He was looking at me, but his eyes went flat. Like they’d stopped seeing what was in front of him. When he spoke, his voice was as flat as his eyes. “He said, ‘I’ll just tell them about my war record. And if that’s not enough, then I’ll tell them about yours.’ ”

Mac McKenzie had recognized the limp too. Had known what it meant. Had known that with all the veterans who were back running the business world, being a coward on the battlefield could be just as fatal to a career as being a homosexual.

“That’s when you killed him,” I said.

Devore’s stillness didn’t change. “We were in the kitchen. He bent down to put the box of medals back in his bag. I grabbed the extension cord and started to choke him. He passed out.”

Suddenly his eyes focused and he was back with us in the apartment. “I really don’t remember much after that.”

“You don’t remember hanging Mac from the door with the cord while he was still alive? Don’t remember him kicking his heels against the door, struggling to breathe? Or pinning the medals to his jacket?”

“Those goddamned medals,” he said. “They looked ridiculous on his herringbone coat.” I expected him to smile, but he’d turned cold. Bloodless. “Killing him was better than any money.” He aimed his gun at my head. “And killing you will be just as good. You and Mac are the same. You’ve probably got a shoebox full of medals too. I hear they gave them out like candy.”

“Only in the air force,” I said. He didn’t laugh. Not even a smile. That proved he’d never been infantry.

“You think you’re pretty funny, Nash, but the joke’s on you.”

Eileen took a slow step forward. “You’re wrong, Paul,” she said.

Devore swung his gun toward her. “You stay where you are.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Stay where you are.” I needed to keep Devore’s attention on me.

But she took another slow step toward him. “You killed Mac, Paul. And because of that” — her voice hitched and tears began spilling down her cheeks — “I killed Teresa.”

Devore tried to take a step back but bumped into the bloodstained couch. “I said stay where you are.”

Another step forward. “You’re an evil man, Paul.” The tears still fell, but her voice grew stronger as she spoke. “You’ve hurt so many people. When will it stop?”

Devore was panicked now. She was only a few feet from him. He looked cornered. Scared.

Both guns exploded.

Eileen staggered and fell to the carpet. Devore tumbled over the back of the couch, his feet swinging sideways, knocking the lamp off the end table. The bulb flared as it hit the floor, went black as it shattered. The only light now angled in through the bedroom door.

I checked Devore first. He was the real threat.

But not anymore. His eyes and mouth were open, frozen in a look of perplexed fear. His forehead was open as well, the wake of her bullet having left behind a black, viscous hole. A hole that seemed to have sucked the life out of everything within reach. Including me.

I didn’t miss the irony of it all. Devore had tried to run away from a violent death in the war by shooting himself in the foot. But Death had shadowed him back across the ocean, through his convalescence, through his dishonorable discharge, through his repetitive, calculating days at Standard Oil, into Apartment 311 of the Bon Vivant on La Brea. Had shadowed him like a thief determined to take what he valued most.

Eileen was moaning. She was on her back near the doorway to the bedroom. Devore’s bullet had left a crimson bloom on the lapel of her raincoat, on the upper part of her left breast. Her breathing was shallow.

I lifted her left shoulder and felt her back for the exit wound. Pulled my hand away covered in bright red blood and bits of snow-white bone.

I ran to the bathroom, grabbed the towels off the rack. Found a pair of scissors in a kitchen drawer. As I pulled her raincoat away from the wound, her eyes opened. She whispered, “Am I going to die?”

I felt the indifference I’d cultivated in the war falter and tears sneak into my eyes. Whispered back, “I’ve seen worse.” The only thing I could say that I was sure of. I focused on the wound, the only honest thing in the room.

Air wheezed in and out of the hole. The sucking chest wound I’d seen countless times on the battlefield. I tore the towels into dressings and packed them over both wounds, front and back, then cut large pieces from the raincoat and placed those over the dressings. Used my tie and strips cut from her coat to bind the bandages to her body. Then I had her lie on her left side.

Truth is, I didn’t know if she would make it. She’d lost a lot of blood and splinters of bone could have nicked her heart. It would come down to those things that go beyond blood and bone. Like determination. Or purpose. Or the will to live. I had no idea if she possessed any of those things. Had no idea who she really was at heart.

Other than an actress.

I could hear murmuring in the hallway, tenants who had heard the gunshots but were too scared to investigate. I started for the telephone.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. Sweat had seeped onto her forehead and upper lip. Shock beginning to set in.

I came back and knelt beside her. “Sorry for what?”

“For the lies I told you.”

“No confessions right now. You need to get to a hospital.”

“Was I convincing?”

I brushed back her hair, caressed her cheek. “Perfectly.”

She tried to smile. “The role of my life.”

It wasn’t long after that night at the Bon Vivant that I pulled my own army dress uniform from the closet and laid it on the bed. I hadn’t taken any real time to look at it in the fifteen months since I’d come back from Europe, but its familiarity immediately aroused a well-worn dread.

The forest-green four-pocket coat still bore the insignias, bars, and medals I’d been awarded over the course of the war. There were a lot of them, a few more than Mac McKenzie had earned, but that didn’t matter to me. Some men were proud of their accomplishments overseas. I wasn’t. I was no hero. If there had been a way to escape the war that wouldn’t have required a bullet in the foot or a dishonorable discharge, I’d have taken it. I only kept moving forward because I realized that the only honest way back led in front of me. Every step I took was one step closer to home — no matter which direction that step had led.

Like everyone else who’d served in every branch of the service, I’d been trying to hide my fear. And ever since I’d come home, trying to hide the truth I’d seen. About war. About death. About me.

The insignias, bars, and medals merely supplied the gilt of heroism to the endless guilt of the facade I wore.

That I wear.

An actor in my own right. The role of my life. One that never seems to end.

Eileen Burnham survived, but I haven’t seen her since that night.

The police kept a close eye on both of us as they investigated the crime. And I did my best to cooperate, including turning over the extortion letter to Beaumont the morning Eileen had gone to the hospital. He and the prosecutor, William Reinhardt, a hollow-eyed man with no hair and two chins, both believed that Mac had been entertaining women at the apartment and that that was the basis for the extortion attempt. I let them think that.

Neither of them saw the pictures of Mac with other men. I’d kept them in my coat pocket until I was able to go home and burn them. Did I destroy evidence? Sure. Did I care? Not a damn. The extortion letter was enough. Mac McKenzie didn’t die because of his lust for men. He died because of Paul Devore’s greed. And which has done more harm in this world?

No charges were filed against Eileen, and after a brief flurry of lurid articles in the newspapers, the case faded away. Somehow Reinhardt must have bought her claims that her involvement in the extortion plan was limited, her shooting of Teresa was an accident, and her killing of Paul Devore was self-defense. He also must have bought my explanation of how Paul Devore had murdered Mac McKenzie and my corroboration of Eileen’s version of her actions.

But I’m still not sure if I believe her.

There’s a part of me — the PI part — that thinks that it really was the role of her life. That she intended all along to kill Teresa and keep the money — if there had been any — for herself. And that killing Paul Devore had been an unexpected bonus.

But there’s another part of me — the man in me — that wants to believe her. Wants to believe that it was all a tragic accident and that her interest in me had been real. The same part of me that remembers her looks and smarts, her toughness and complexity. The same part of me that, every time it rains, thinks of lovers and thieves and wonders which of the two Eileen Burnham might be.

Or if — like all the rest of us — she’s both.