The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (8 page)

Henry was afraid of this man, but he reminded himself that as fellow inmates of Block 7, he and Espejo were on the same side. Espejo’s cell seemed more like a comfortable student apartment, with a squat refrigerator, a black-and-white television, and a coffeemaker plugged into a naked outlet. Espejo kept a photo of himself from his younger days framed above his bed. In the picture he was shirtless, astride a majestic white horse, riding up the steps of a swimming pool toward the camera. A few delighted women stood behind him, long-legged, bronzed, and gleaming in the bright sun. Everything was colorful, saturated with tropical light. A child—Espejo’s son, perhaps—sat on the edge of the diving board, watching the horse maneuver its way out of the water. On the boy’s face was an expression of admiration and wonder, but it was more than that: he was concentrating, watching the scene, watching his father, trying to learn.

Henry wondered what had happened to the boy. Perhaps he’d been shuttled out of the country, or died, or perhaps he was old enough by now to be living in another of the city’s prisons, in a cell much like this one. There was no way of knowing without asking directly, and that was not an option. The photo, like the lives of the men with whom Henry now lived, was both real and startlingly unreal, like a still from Espejo’s dreams.

Rogelio had warned Henry not to stare, so he didn’t.

“A play?” Espejo said when Henry told him his idea.

Henry nodded.

Espejo lay back on his bed, his shoeless feet stretched toward the playwright. “That’s what we get for taking terrorists in the block,” he said, laughing. “We don’t do theater here.”

“I’m not a terrorist,” Henry said.

A long silence followed this clarification, Espejo’s laughter replaced by a glare so intense and penetrating that Henry began to doubt himself—perhaps he
was
a terrorist, after all. Perhaps he always had been. That was what the authorities were accusing him of, and outside, in the real world, there were people arguing both sides of this very question. His freedom hung in the balance. His future. Henry had to look away, down at the floor of the cell, which Espejo had redone with blue and white linoleum squares, in honor of his favorite soccer club. One of Espejo’s deputies, a thick-chested brute named Aimar, coughed into his fist, and it was only this that seemed to break the tension.

“Did you write it?”

Henry nodded.

“So name a character after me,” Espejo said.

Henry began to protest.

Espejo frowned. “You think I have no culture? You think I’ve never read a book?”

“No, I . . .” Henry stopped. It was useless to continue.
I’ve already ruined myself
, he thought.

They were quiet for a moment.

“Go on,” Espejo said finally, waving an uninterested hand in the direction of the yard. “If you can convince these savages, I have no objection.”

Henry thanked Espejo and left—quickly, before the boss could change his mind.

Everyone wanted to be the president, because the president was the boss. Everyone wanted to be the servant, because, like them, the servant dreamed of murdering the boss. Everyone wanted to be the son, because it was the son who actually got to do the killing in the play. It was this character whose name was changed: he became Espejo.

And indeed, the project sold itself. A week of talking to other inmates, and then the delicate process of auditions. Henry had to write in extra parts to avoid disappointing some of the would-be actors. It was for his own safety—some of these men didn’t take rejection very well. He added a chorus of citizens to comment on the action; ghosts of servants past to stalk across the stage in a fury, wearing costumes fashioned from old bed sheets. He even wrote a few lines for the president’s wife, played with verve by Carmen, the block’s most outspoken transvestite. Things were going well. Even Espejo joined in the enthusiasm. It would be good for their image, he was heard to say.

Rogelio wanted to audition too, but there was a problem.

“I can’t read,” he confessed to Henry. “How can I learn the script?”

Henry smiled. They were lying together on the top bunk, close, naked.

“I can teach you.”

Later he’d remember the look on Rogelio’s face, and the hope implicit in his own offer. Perhaps by saying these words, Henry was already imagining a life outside those walls.

When Rogelio didn’t respond, Henry pressed him. “Who do you want to be?”

Rogelio thought for a moment. “The servant is the one who dies?”

Henry nodded.

“How?”

“He’s stabbed in the back.”

“Well, then,” Rogelio said, “I guess that should be me.”

When the play was performed, three weeks later, Henry paid special attention to that scene. He and Rogelio had worked on the script every night, pacing in their cell, bouncing the servant’s lines back and forth until Rogelio knew them by heart, but he had insisted on practicing the death scene on his own. Out of timidity, Henry thought, but when he saw the performance he realized that he had been wrong. The entire population of Block 7 was watching: hard, fearless men who gasped at the sight of Rogelio staggering. They recognized the look of terror on his face. They’d been that man; they’d killed that man. They watched Rogelio fall in stages, first to his knees, then forward, clutching his chest, as if trying to reach through his body to the imaginary knife wound. Henry and the others, all of them held their breath, waiting, and were rewarded with a final flourish: Rogelio’s right leg twitching. Espejo was the first to stand and applaud. The play wasn’t even over.

Henry was released that November, thinner, older, after a year and a half in prison. He didn’t say to Rogelio, “I’ll wait for you.” Or, “I’ll see you on the outside.” But he thought those things, held them secret but dear, until the day, a few months later, when two of the more volatile sections of Collectors rose up to protest conditions inside. Block 7 had the misfortune of sitting between them, and when the army arrived to put down the revolt, it too was destroyed. Henry heard the news on the radio. The men who had made up the cast of
The Idiot President
all died in the assault, shot in the head, or killed by shrapnel, or crushed beneath falling concrete walls. More than three hundred inmates from Blocks 6, 7, and 8 were killed, and though Henry wasn’t there, part of him died that day too. He lost Rogelio, his best friend, his lover—a word he had never used, not even to himself. In the days after, he sometimes woke with the taste of Rogelio on his lips. Sometimes he woke to the image of Rogelio lying dead of a knife wound.

Henry mourned, even roused himself enough to participate in a few protests in front of the Ministry of Justice (though he declined to speak when someone handed him the bullhorn), but in truth the tragedy both broke him and spared him the need ever to think about his incarceration again. No one who’d lived through it with him had survived. There was no one to visit, no one with whom to reminisce, no one to meet on the day of his release and drive home, feigning optimism.

FROM
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

H
OWARD PICKED UP
his blinking line. “Investigations Division, Jim Howard.”

Silence. “Hello?”

Rough breathing. He could make out a quiet beeping in the background. “Charlie?”

“Jus’ a sec,” a weak voice said. Charlie Post had been in intensive care for ten days now. Howard waited as he gathered enough strength to speak.

“Lyle Collins is coming out,” Post finally rasped. “My guy at Eddystone told me.”

Eddystone was the warehouse of choice for Northern Indiana criminal psych patients. Howard felt a cold knot forming in the pit of his stomach.

“For Christ’s sake, don’t they ever die inside?”

“Coming out late this month. The report will say he’s stable.”

“Stable?! And what do the geniuses think did that? Sloppy Joes every Thursday?”

“Stay on’m, Jim. He’s ancient history. Off the books. He’ll be flying under the radar.” Charlie Post coughed hard.

Howard was jammed up, in the middle of a limbo that involved moving his life and his work from the Northern Indiana Investigations Division of the state police to northern Michigan, where he was trying to land a position with the Major Case Unit of the Michigan State Police. He and Charlie Post went way back. Way back was where Lyle Collins was coming from.

“Stay on’m. I know you’re spread thin. Just remember that bastard won’t be able to keep it together for long. He’ll be hungry.”

“I’ll make time, Charlie.”

Howard could hear fluid bubbling in Post’s throat. “Billy Ferguson used to come over Sunday nights to play hearts with the family. Sweet kid. He and Angie were a match, you know. Rare thing. Then one fine spring day he’s just gone.” Howard could not see the hand he lifted from the bed and waved slightly. “Just gone. Angie never got over it.”

“I remember,” Howard said. “You hang in there, Charlie.”

“Been doin’ that,” he whispered. “I’m ready for somethin’ else.”

“I’ll stop by next week.”

“Better make it sooner than that.”

Howard’s face was grim. He was going to miss old Charlie Post.

Some people have graves in their lives from early childhood, places to visit with their families to express their love for those gone on ahead. Neither of the Lanes had a grave in their life until they moved out into the country. It came with the house and became part of the fabric of their young family.

They had bought the abandoned farm for a song. Although it was only 25 miles from South Bend, it looked like something from the heart of Appalachia. The
Deliverance
banjo-boy would have felt right at home.

Many well-heeled South Bend professionals were into McTrophy homes of the castle variety or Frank Lloyd Wright knockoffs. Derek Lane, a tax attorney on the way up, and his wife, Parveen, a working pharmacist until she became pregnant, lived simply. They liked old things. Liked to clean them up, fix them, and make them part of their world. The fact that these things were often bargains suited the Lanes perfectly. They saved their money and looked for a vintage place with character and a little land.

They had found the peeling white eyesore lost on five acres in the rolling Indiana countryside. It might as well have been on the dark side of the moon. The Realtor hadn’t even bothered to put it on the website. Who would ever want to take on the work of a falling-down farmhouse with acreage that had not been tended for years? The Lanes loved it.

The couple had been inspecting the wildly overgrown grounds near the house when they found the grave. It was tough going. Beneath an early spring canopy of towering white oak and black locust, they were engulfed by head-high scrub brush and prickly raspberry bushes. Parveen, who came from a desert country, marveled at the vibrancy of the emerging green life. First they found the lid of the cistern, took one look down into that dank, water-filled tank, and decided to have it filled in. Their baby would be here soon and the cistern was an accident waiting to happen. They found green hundred-year-old bottles and rusty tools. They found a maze of half-buried chicken-wire fences and a pile of glazed bricks with raised letters that said “Metropolitan Block,” the foundation of something long since rotted away. They admired the glazed bricks and would put them to good use. They found a perfectly preserved brown jug. Then they found the grave.

The house overlooked a small hollow that fell away, rising quickly again at the edge of their property. Later they would install a large picture window so that they could look across that little hollow. They had been inspecting the brow the house sat upon when Parveen noticed a smooth spot on the ground. She thought it was the odd piece of broken brick, but when she rubbed it with her shoe she saw that it was larger than that. She scraped more away with her shoe and saw letters. The two knelt down together and with their gloved hands gently pushed away the dirt and matted leaves. Deeply and carefully carved into a thick piece of aged oak, the epitaph had a few worn letters but was clear nonetheless:

HERE LIES PRINCESS JENNY

Forever friends in this gentle place

My little princess

Gone home now to this good earth

Sleeping now where we lived together

And will again

When the heavens and the oceans and the mountains

Shall pass away

For a couple who treasured relics, nothing they might have found could have been more endearing. Parveen raised a hand to her reddening throat as Derek slowly read the words aloud in his clear barrister voice. He nodded his head approvingly and smiled. He stood up, put his hands on his hips, and looked about. They were home.

Derek took the oak marker down to his basement workshop. He cleaned out the letters with a wire brush and let the wood dry out for three weeks. He soaked the underside in black creosote and soaked the surface in boiled linseed oil. After it dried, he replaced it exactly, now essentially impervious to the elements.

Parveen gathered softball-sized fieldstones of gray and grayish pink and gray-black and made a semicircle around the top of the marker. She planted crocosmia with the orange-flame flowers that the hummingbirds loved and moonbeam coreopsis with their bright bursts of yellow, daisylike blooms.

Derek cleared the grounds of the forgotten homestead on weekends and vacations, removing the chaos of brush and dropping the dead trees with his thunderous 1950s Homelite chainsaw. It all began to look parklike, a five-acre estate. They installed the picture window and added an outside light. Sometimes at night they would light up the little grave and the area around it, the artificial light casting shadows so differently from the moonlight. When they turned off the light, the moonlight flowed down through the boughs, blanketing the marker and the fieldstones and the flowers in a magical glow.