Doug Allyn - The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

“Their man on this end, the fellow who was killed the other night, didn’t seem to have any connection with them. Michael told me on the telephone today that he was from the Midwest and had never been arrested. He seemed to be just a harmless pansy who used the Moon to meet his boyfriend.”

“That’s disgusting,” the major said.

“That’s what happens when the army makes a place the dumping ground for all of its undesirables, Major,” Hammett said. “What did you do to get sent here?”

“I volunteered,” the major grated.

“I’ll bet you did,” Hammett said. “Anyway, last night Michael reminded me that Tobin here had been run off the San Francisco force for beating up a dancer at Finocchio’s. He claimed the guy made a pass at him, but the inside story was that it was a lovers’ quarrel.”

“That’s a goddamn lie!” the MP shouted.

“It’s just one coincidence too many,” Hammett said, his voice as hard as granite. “You know the San Francisco mob. They’re stealing from the government. Prevo was in on the scheme. He was queer. You’re queer. You’re sewn up tight. What happened? He get cold feet and you had to kill him?”

The MP looked from one face to another in the room. Then he looked at Hammett.

“I didn’t kill the guy,” the MP said. “It was him.” He pointed to the major.

Everyone looked at the major, then back at the MP. He was holding his automatic in his hand.

“That’s not going to do you any good, young man,” the marshal said. “This is Alaska. Where you going to run?”

The MP seemed not to hear him.

“I ain’t no queer!” he shouted at Hammett. “I hate queers. I beat that guy up ’cause he made a pass at me, just like I said. I’d have killed him if I thought I’d get away with it. Here, I was just giving the major a little cover in case anything happened. Like the place got raided or something. Then the other day he told me some pal of his had warned him that they’d knocked over the Fort Lewis end of the deal and we were going to have to do something about his boyfriend. ‘Jerry will talk,’ he said. ‘I know he will.’ I told him I wasn’t killing anybody. The stockade was better than the firing squad. So he comes out the back door of this place the other night and says he killed the pansy himself.”

“That’s a goddamn lie,” the major shouted, leaping to his feet. “I don’t even know this man. I’ve got a wife and baby at home. I’m no fairy.”

“You’re for it, Tobin,” Hammett said to the MP. “He doesn’t leave anything to chance. Why, he tried to shoot me last night just on the off chance I might know something. I’ll bet he does have a wife and child. And I’ll bet there’s nothing to connect him to either you or the corpse. And there’s the love letters Michael found in your foot-locker.”

“Love letters?” the MP said. “What love letters?”

He looked at Hammett, then at the major. Understanding flooded his face.

“You set me up!” he screamed at the major. “You set me up as a fairy!”

The automatic barked. The slug seemed to pick the major up and hurl him backwards. The temporary blonde screamed. All over the room, men were taking guns from holsters and pockets. They seemed to be moving in slow motion. The MP swung the gun toward Hammett.

“You should have kept your nose out of this,” the MP said, leveling the automatic. His finger closed on the trigger.

Don Miller stepped out of the hallway behind the MP and laid a sap on the back of his head. The MP collapsed like he was filled with sawdust.

Miller and Hammett looked at one another for a long moment. Hammett took his hand off the pistol in the pocket of his coat.

“I think that calls for a drink,” he said, pouring himself one.

The marshal was putting cuffs on the MP. Carey looked up from where the major lay and shook his head.

“I guess this means you’ll be able to open up again, Zulu,” Hammett said.

The following afternoon Miller found Hammett lying on a table in the cramped offices of the magazine Army Up North, reading Lenin.

“I’ve got some errands to run in town,” he told Hammett.

“Fine by me,” Hammett said, sitting up. “I’ve been thinking I’ll put in my papers. The war can’t last much longer, and this looks like as close as I’ll get to any action.”

“You’d have been just as dead if that MP shot you as you would if it’d been a Jap bullet,” Miller said.

“I suppose,” Hammett said. “This morning the general told me they were going to show Major Allen as killed in the line of duty. They’ll give Tobin a quick trial and life in the stockade. The whole thing’s being hushed up. The brass don’t want to embarrass the major’s father, and they don’t want the scandal getting back to the president and Congress. This is the country I enlisted to protect?”

Miller shrugged. “I got to be going,” he said.

“Right you are,” Hammett said. “And by the way, thanks for stepping in last night. I didn’t want to shoot that kid, and I didn’t want to get shot myself.”

Miller turned to leave.

“I suppose I’ll just give the Moon to Zulu if I go,” Hammett said.

“That’d be real nice,” Miller said over his shoulder.

He went out, got into a Jeep, drove downtown, and parked. He walked into the federal building, climbed a set of stairs, walked down a hallway, and went through an unmarked door without knocking. He sat in a chair and told the whole story to a man on the other side of the desk. “That’s all very interesting,” the man said, “but did the subject say anything to you or anyone else about Marx, Lenin, or communism?”

“Is that all you care about?” Miller asked. “I keep telling you, I’ve never heard him say anything about communism.”

“You’ve got to understand,” the man said. “This other matter just isn’t important. The director says we are already fighting the next war, the war against communism. This war is a triumph of truth, justice, and the American way. And it’s over.”

Miller said nothing.

“You can let yourself out,” the man said. Then he turned to his typewriter, rolled a form into it, and began to type.

From Much Ado About Murder

For mid-October, the weather in London was quite warm and the sun was out, another rare occurrence in this cloudy town. Kevin Tanner, assistant professor of English at Lovecraft University in Massachusetts, sat on a park bench in the middle of a small courtyard at the Tower of London. He still felt a bit jet-lagged, like everything he saw was too bright and loud, and the scents and sounds were too strong and forceful. He was near one of the largest stone buildings in the Tower of London complex, the White Tower, and there he waited. He had been here once before, as a grad student, more than sixteen years ago, and it seemed like not much had changed over the years. There were manicured lawns, sidewalks, and walls and battlements and towers, all representing nearly a thousand years of English history. And beyond the Tower complex, the soaring span of the Tower Bridge — looking ancient, of course, but less than a hundred years old — and the wide and magnificent Thames.

At his feet was a small red knapsack, and just a half-hour ago — after spending nearly twenty minutes in line for the privilege of spending eleven pounds to gain entry — a well-dressed and polite security officer had examined his bag and its contents. Inside the bag was a water bottle, two candy bars, a thick guidebook to London, and secured in a zippered pouch within the knapsack, his passport and round-trip airline ticket. He supposed that if the security guard had been more on the job, he would have looked at the airline ticket and inquired as to how an assistant professor at a small college with a savings account of just over two thousand dollars could have afforded a round-trip, first-class airline ticket. Now that would have been something worth investigating.