Джеффри Дивер - The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

Jane Haddamis the pseudonym of Orania Papazoglou, whose first language was not Greek and whose parents were both born in Danbury, Connecticut. She is the author of twenty-two Gregor Demarkian novels and, under her own name, of a short series about romance writer Patience Campbell McKenna as well as two psychological thrillers. She was married for thirteen years to the three-time Edgar Award-winner William L. DeAndrea, who died in 1996. She lives with her two sons in Litchfield County, Connecticut.

I don’t think I would have written a story about a cat if the cat had been any other cat but Edelweiss. I’m not a cat-detective sort of person — all the cutesy half-humanness of detecting pets tends to make me climb the walls. So when Ed Gorman first asked me to do a story for a volume of cat-related mysteries, I was torn between my first reaction (“oh, for goodness sake”) and the desire to have a chance to do a short story at all. I don’t get asked to do them often, and I love the form. In the end, I opted for a story that wasn’t anything like cutesy and that couldn’t be mistaken for cozy in a million years. In the process, I gave Edelweiss — who was adopted after having been neglected and abused, and who had the most thoroughgoing case of shyness ever visited on a mammal — the sort of nonchalant self-confidence all cats are supposed to possess by birthright. She’s a good cat, Edelweiss, even if you’ll never get to meet her. If you visit, she’ll hide under the couch or behind the recycling bin until she can be sure you’re safely gone.

William Harrisonis the author of eight novels — five set in Africa — as well as three volumes of short stories, essays, and travel pieces. He taught at the University of Arkansas for a number of years and still lives in Fayetteville.

I usually begin with a character when a story comes to me, but sometimes a place — or even a single image — starts the process. I was driving down toward Dripping Springs, Texas, out of Austin when I saw this forlorn little real estate company in a squat building out there among the scrub oak and mesquite trees. My wife had once worked as a real estate agent and told me how women agents always traveled in pairs when dealing with male clients — especially in isolated rural situations — and my imagination just turned over. “Texas Heat” was the result.

Alan Heathcockhas published stories in a number of journals. His story “Peacekeeper,” first published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, won the 2006 National Magazine Award in fiction. He is a native of Chicago and teaches at Boise State University in Boise, Idaho.

Some friends of mine live in a lovely small town in Minnesota. I visited the town not long after a horrible crime — not unlike the crime in “Peacekeeper” — had been discovered. The town had palpably changed; everything felt different, somehow tarnished. I remember wondering if anything could be done to restore the town’s peace and decided nothing short of having the crime erased from the town’s collective memory would suffice. That, in turn, got me thinking on the nature of peace itself and how disrupted peace will always show itself, will be felt, will be ingested like fouled air, even if not seen by the community; peace, or the lack of peace, is a force of nature, is the very air we breathe. Around the same time I was working on a story about the Great Midwestern Flood of 1993, and it made sense that the two stories reside in the same Active space. I owe a structural debt to the Christopher Nolan film Following for the disjointed manner in which Nolan unfurled his story, juxtaposing related but out-of-sequence scenes to enable a consistent tension — building multiple lines to a proper crescendo, was, for me, a key to unlocking this particular story’s potency.

Emory Holmes IIis a Los Angeles-based novelist, playwright, poet, children’s storywriter, and journalist. His news stories on American crime, schools, and the arts have appeared on the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Sentinel, the New York Amsterdam News, Los Angeles Magazine, Essence, CODE, the R&B Report, Written By magazine, and other publications.

When my crime-writer buddy Gary Phillips called in the summer of 2004 and asked if I would contribute a story to The Cocaine Chronicles — an anthology of new writing he and novelist Jervey Tervalon were putting together addressing the effects of cocaine on American society — I jumped at the chance. I was eager to pen a twenty-first-century blues. I unearthed a motley gallery of killers I’d banked in an archive of traffickers and thugs, collected during my thirty years as a reporter and writer. Some of the characters and settings in “A.k.a., Moises Rockafella” got plucked from the novel I am writing about a meth epidemic (and murder) in 1980s Honolulu. I had done a page one story on this epidemic for the San Francisco Chronicle back in August 1989 and, a few weeks after that, Vanity Fair sent me back to Hawaii to do the story for them. Working on assignment for Vanity Fair is a writer’s dream come true, and the experience was all that and more for me, but my Hawaii narrative never got published in Vanity Fair. It was, however, during this time that I first uncovered the remarkable crimes and characters that have become “A.k.a., Moises Rockafella.”

I changed the settings from inner-city Honolulu to the outskirts of Los Angeles. My cycle of events takes place within the span of a few heartbeats, in a police interrogation room, a few miles from the urban hick town of La Caja, California (a fictional hometown I intend to revisit). To celebrate the invention of La Caja, I birthed an ambitious killer, Cut Pemberton, whose presence is a mere specter in this story. Nevertheless, he is my narratives’ inscrutable engine. He is a quicksilver force and, I may as well add, a predator and a scoundrel and a merciless miscreant too who, for the moment, exists primarily as a mordent spook in the opulent, backtracking imagination of his gargantuan road-dog, his thoroughly guilty, yet somehow blissfully blameless — and hungry and thirsty and wronged! wronged! — pale-ass pussy of a sidekick, the roundly chastened and proportioned Fat Tommy O’Rourke.

“A.k.a., Moises Rockafella” is an inquiry into the mind of this man, Tommy O’Rourke. My story, frankly, suspects Moises is complicit in a monstrous crime. While negotiating the streams of Tommy’s thoughts, I tried to make note of the reeling fluidity and momentum of subjective time as it whipped Tommy round and around in its rapids on that interminable day and night, while around him the grave machinery of fate ticked on. I looked for fun as well as art in this sad stuff. At a decisive point in Tommy’s interrogation, DEA Special Agent Roland Braddock nails him with a slur, “Pale-ass pussy.” Here’s how Nietzsche, in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), critiqued the Moises Rockafellas of his day: “An image made this pale man pale. He was equal to his deed when he did it; but he could not bear its image after it was done. Now he always saw himself as the doer of one deed. Madness I call this: the exception now became the essence for him. A chalk streak stops a hen; the stroke that he himself struck stopped his poor reason: madness after the deed I call this.”

My story is about exactly this: the madness after the deed. There’s nothing funny about murder. True that. But, I won’t get mad if readers think of this narrative as a comedy, even a slapstick comedy, and laugh out loud. That said, at the bottom of all this funny business, “A.k.a., Moises Rockafella” is a blues; a pale-ass, lowdown blues.