Lawrence Block - The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

“She said... she said you’ll take me home, but... there’s nobody there. Daddy went away and Megan Ann got hurt bad and Mommy took her to the hospital...”

“Someone will take care of you, I promise. Wait here a minute, I’ll be right back.”

I jogged down the road and picked up the purse. Sticking out of it was a cylinder of stiff brown paper, part of the grocery bag. I unrolled it and smoothed it out as I walked back to the car. Jeri Lynn had written the note while she was driving, the words scrawled unevenly across the paper. I shot my daughter Megan Ann by accident and left her at a hospital in Vacaville in December. Kristin doesn’t know anything about it. She wasn’t there when it happened. She had signed her name and written the date beneath it.

The helicopter suddenly rose from the canyon and shot away. As the sound faded, I heard a siren, coming steadily closer. I went back to the car and slid behind the wheel. Kristin was hugging her teddy bear, staring at the sky where the helicopter had been. An Idaho state police car pulled up behind the Camaro. The trooper came to the driver’s side window and leaned down. I talked to him briefly, keeping my voice low, and gave him Jeri Lynn’s purse and the torn piece of grocery bag. When he headed to his car to use the radio, I turned to Kristin.

“We can find your father. Grownups have to work and pay taxes and things like that. We can find him. Did he... Did you get along with him okay?”

She nodded. “But he was mad at Mommy.”

“Because of what happened to Megan Ann?”

She nodded again, another tear rolling down her cheek. “He said Mommy had to tell, but she wouldn’t, so he went away. Mommy was mad at him. She said it was all his fault ’cause she told him and told him she didn’t want that gun in the house.”

I turned my head, looking away from Kristin Michelle Baker with her freckles and skinny braids and tear-stained cheeks. Gray smoke drifted lazily upward from the canyon where Jeri Lynn Baker’s car was burning. Driven to her death. The phrase repeated itself in my mind several times. The smoke formed a slender spiral, the top blowing off to the west and disappearing.

“I was just... I told Megan Ann she had to stop crying ’cause Mommy had a sick headache, but she wouldn’t stop. I was showing her some stuff, the stuff in Daddy’s drawer, so she’d stop crying.” I turned to look at her. “Is Mommy coming back?” she asked.

“I don’t think so.” After a moment, I added, “Sometimes... sometimes people have to go away even if they don’t want to.”

Kristin’s chin quivered. “It’s okay. Megan Ann got hurt bad and had to go to the hospital. She can’t come home yet. Mommy said she has to go take care of her.” She sighed and added, “She told me and told me not to play with that gun.”

Bech had a new sidekick. Her moniker was Robin. Rachel (Robin) Teagarten. Twenty-six, post-Jewish, frizzy big hair, figure on the short and solid side. She interfaced for him with an IBM PS/1 his publisher had talked him into buying. She set up the defaults, rearranged the icons, programmed the style formats, accessed the ANSI character sets — Bech was a stickler for foreign accents. When he answered a letter, she typed it for him from dictation. When he took a creative leap, she deciphered his handwriting and turned it into digitized code. Neither happened very often. Bech was of the Ernest Hemingway save-your-juices school. To fill the time, he and Robin slept together. He was seventy-four, but they worked with that. Seventy-four plus twenty-six was one hundred; divided by two that was fifty, the prime of life. The energy of youth plus the wisdom of age. A team. A duo.

They were in his snug aerie on Crosby Street. He was reading the Times at breakfast. Caffeineless Folger’s, D’Agostino orange juice, poppy-seed bagel lightly toasted. The crumbs and poppy seeds had scattered over the newspaper and into his lap but you don’t get something for nothing, not on this hard planet. Bech announced to Robin, “Hey, Lucas Mishner is dead.”

A creamy satisfaction — the finest quality, made extra easy to spread by the toasty warmth — thickly covered his heart.

“Who’s Lucas Mishner?” Robin asked. She was deep in the D section — Business Day. She was a practical-minded broad with no experience of culture prior to 1975.

“Once-powerful critic,” Bech told her, biting off his phrases. “Late Partisan Review school. Used to condescend to appear in the Trib Book Review, when the Trib was still alive on this side of the Atlantic. Despised my stuff. Called it ‘superficially energetic but lacking in the true American fiber, the grit, the wrestle.’ That’s him talking, not me. The grit, the wrestle. Sanctimonious bastard. When The Chosen came out in ’63, he wrote, ‘Strive and squirm as he will, Bech will never, never be touched by the American sublime.’ The simple, smug, know-it-all son of a bitch. You know what his idea of the real stuff was? James Jones. James Jones and James Gould Cozzens.”

There Mishner’s face was, in the Times, twenty years younger, with a fuzzy little rosebud smirk and a pathetic slicked-down comb-over, like limp Venetian blinds throwing a shadow across the dome of his head. The thought of him dead filled Bech with creamy ease. He told Robin, “Lived way the hell up in Connecticut. Three wives, no flowers. Hadn’t published in years. The rumor in the industry was he was gaga with alcoholic dementia.”

“You seem happy.”

“Very.”

“Why? You say he had stopped being a critic anyway.”

“Not in my head. He tried to hurt me. He did hurt me. Vengeance is mine.”

“Who said that?”

“The Lord. In the Bible. Wake up, Robin.”

“I thought it didn’t sound like you,” she admitted. “Stop hogging the Arts section.”

He passed it over, with a pattering of poppy seeds on the teak breakfast table Robin had installed. For years he and his female guests had eaten at a low glass coffee table farther forward in the loft. The sun slanting in had been pretty, but eating all doubled up had been bad for their internal organs. He liked the cut of Robin’s smooth broad jaw across the table. Her healthy big hair, her pushy plump lips, her little flattened nose. “One down,” he told her, mysteriously.

A week later, he was in the subway. The Rockefeller Center station on Sixth Avenue, the old IND line. The downtown platform was jammed. All those McGraw-Hill, Exxon, and Time-Life execs were rushing back to their wives in the Heights. Or going down to West Fourth to have some herbal tea and put on drag for the evening. Monogamous transvestite executives were clogging the system. Bech was in a savage mood. He had been to MOMA, checking out the new art. It had all seemed pointless, poisonous, violent, inept. None of it had been Bech’s bag. Art had passed him by. Literature was passing him by. Music he had never gotten exactly with, not since USO record hops. Those cuddly little WACs from Ohio in their starched uniforms. That war had been over too soon, before he got to kill enough Germans.

Down in the subway, three groups of electronic buskers — one country, one progressive jazz, and one doing Christian hip-hop — were competing. Overhead, a huge voice kept unintelligibly announcing cancellations and delays. In the cacophony, Bech spotted an English critic: Raymond Featherwaite, former Cambridge eminence lured to CUNY by American moola. From his perch in the CUNY crenellations, using his antique matchlock arquebus, he had been snottily potting American writers for twenty years, courtesy of the ravingly Anglophile New York Review of Books . “Prolix” and “voulu,” Featherwaite had called Bech’s best-selling comeback book, Think Big, in 1978. When, in 1985, Bech had ventured a harmless collection of sketches and stories, Biding Time, Featherwaite had written, “One’s spirits, however initially well-disposed toward one of America’s more carefully tended reputations, begin severely to sag under the repeated empathetic effort of watching Mr. Bech, page after page, strain to make something of very little.”