Джеффри Дивер: The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

Conventions are just that. They hold no special spell, except that they give readers a better chance to understand. They are boxes into which we conform our expectations in exchange for the opportunity to make out meaning more plainly. I get aggravated only by the assumption that stories of one kind are “better” than another. Although students of the short story have been worshipping at Joyce’s shrine for nearly a century, it is still the three-act story that dominates American narrative. That remains the shape repeated consistently on television and in the movies, as well as in novels, not to mention at the water cooler. When your coworker starts out, “So I met this guy at the health club,” what you want to know is what happened next.

More to the point, whatever convention a story originates from, the ultimate measure of its success will be tied to its originality, whether in language (Raboteux and Smith), conception (like Jeffery Deaver’s dazzlingly clever “Born Bad”), style (Leonard), or character. On the last point, consider the young Czech immigrants in C. J. Box’s “Pirates of Yellowstone,” who are of immediate interest because we have not seen them before. That is the great irony — the ultimate function of convention is to provide readers with a series of conditioned expectations that the best work will in some regard then transcend and defy, leading us to new ground. James Lee Burke’s “Why Bugsy Siegel Was a Friend of Mine” is an ostensible three-act, but it artfully turns in another direction. Each of these stories exhibits some commendably unique attribute that helps to convincingly project us into a coherent imagined world from which we emerge enlightened in some way about our condition as humans.

Scott Turow

From Harvard Review

Ginger Klein held all the cash she owned, which came to nine hundred and thirty-four dollars and twenty-seven cents, in an envelope in her red velvet purse. As she waited in line for the first dinner seating on this cruise to Alaska, she fingered the muscular weight of the bills. The ship’s ballroom was a large, drab room, tricked into elegance with real silver set out on the linen, sprightly gold foil bows on the walls, white roses blooming briefly in stale water. The room was filled with couples, friends, tour groups, glittering in their sequins, intent on having a good time. The room roared as the guests greeted each other, their faces gilded by the chandeliers’ silver haze. Gripping her purse, Ginger watched them and tried to decide where to sit.

Until a few months before, Ginger had been living in a worn pink studio apartment on Van Nuys Boulevard, storing her cash in margarine containers in her refrigerator. She was eighty-two years old and for the last sixty years she had sometimes lived in better accommodations, sometimes worse; this was what she had ultimately earned. On good days she sat with a cup of coffee and the Los Angeles phone book, calling up strangers for contributions to the Fireman’s Ball, the Christian Children’s Fund, the United Veteran’s Relief. Her British accent was her best one; with it, she could keep confused strangers in Canoga Park, Woodland Hills, and Calabasas on the phone. “Congratulations for being the sort of person who will help our cause,” she told them, and heard their pleasure in their own generosity. She cashed the checks at different fast cash stores around the San Fernando Valley, presenting them with one of her bountiful collection of false IDs.

One day, she took the wrong bus home. She looked out the window and was staring at a beach that she had never seen before. The water was bright and wrinkled as a piece of blue foil. Surfers scrambled over the dark, glassy waves. The other passengers seemed to believe this was merely a beach, but Ginger felt her heart grow cold. She had succeeded for sixty-five years as a swindler because she always knew which bus to take.

She had actually intended to pay the doctor if the news had been good. The doctor asked her a few questions. He held up a pair of pliers and she had no idea what they were. She returned to the office twice and saw more doctors who wore pert, grim expressions. The diagnosis was a surprise. When he told her, it was one of the few times in her life she reacted as other people did: she covered her face and wept.

“You need to plan,” her doctor said. “You have relatives who can take care of you?”

“No,” she said.

“Children?”

“No.”

“Friends?”

His pained expression aggravated her. “I have many friends,” she said because she pitied him.

She listened to him describe the end of her life and what she should expect her friends to do for her. Then Ginger had to stop him. She told the secretary that her checkbook was in the car and left the office without paying the bill.

She tried to come up with a grand scheme that would pay for her future care, but her thoughts were not so ordered and each day she lost something: the word for lemons, the name of her street. Peering out her window at the lamplights that pierced the blue darkness in her apartment complex, she imagined befriending one of her neighbors, but her neighbors were flighty college dropouts, working odd hours, absent, uninterested in her. Ginger did not want to die in a hospital or an institution. Dying in this apartment would mean that she would not be discovered for days; the idea of her body lifeless, but worse, helpless, was intolerable to her.

She was watching television one evening when she saw an ad for a Carnival cruise. Many years ago, she had sat with a man in an airport bar. He had been left by his wife of thirty-six years and was joking about killing himself in a room on a cruise ship. “Someone finds you,” he said, on his third bourbon. “A maid, another passenger. Quickly. It’s more dignified. You don’t just rot.”

He was on his way to the Caribbean, desperately festive in his red vacation shirt, festooned with figures of tropical birds. “What an interesting idea,” she had said, lightly, deciding that it was time for a game of poker; she got out her rigged cards. When he stumbled off two hours later, she was $150 richer and certain she would never be that hopeless. But now his plan sounded useful to her.

Before she went on her cruise, she wanted to buy a beautiful purse with which to hold the last of her money. Three public buses roaring over the oily freeways led her to the accessories counter at Saks. The red purse sat on the counter like a glowing light. It was simple, a deep red with a rhinestone clasp; when she saw it, she felt her breath freeze in her throat. The salesgirl told her that it was on hold for someone.

“It’s mine,” said Ginger, her fingers pressing so hard on the glass counter they turned white.

Perhaps it was the hoarse pitch of her voice, or the pity of the salesgirl toward the elderly, but the salesgirl let her buy the purse. In it, Ginger put her cash and also two bottles of sleeping pills. The Caribbean was sold out this time of year, so she spent most of her remaining money on a cruise to Alaska.

She woke up early the first morning of the cruise, restless, trying to remember everything she had ever known. The facts of her life flurried in her head: names of hotel restaurants, the taste of barbecue in Texas versus Georgia, the aqua chiffon dress she had worn at a cocktail party in 1975. She sat at the table, scribbling notes on a pad: Fake furs on Hollywood Blvd., 1956, cloudy, blue fur hats from the rare Blue Hyena from Alaska, lemon meringue pie at the cafeteria on W. 37th St., New York, 1960s, the seagulls flying on the empty Santa Monica beach at dawn, how much money I made a year, $37,000 from Dr. Chamron in 1987 —

Magnolia in Los Angeles, she wrote. She remembered the scent of magnolia as she and Evelyn had stepped off the train in Los Angeles when she was fifteen years old. She remembered her sister Evelyn’s walk, Evelyn just seventeen then, her walk her first successful con; stepping hard onto her feet, shoulders lifted, she tricked Ginger into believing that she knew what to do. It was 1921 and they walked off the train into Los Angeles, two girls alone, armed with an address for an aunt whom they would never meet.