Megan Abbott: The Best American Mystery Stories 2016

“Some people let the story get to them,” Benny said, shaking his head.

“What story?”

The two men looked at each other. Mr. Flant rotated his cup in his hand.

“There was a death,” he said softly. “A man who lived there, a dear man. Lawrence was his name. Larry. A talented bookseller. He died.”

“Oh.”

“Boy, did he,” Benny said. “Gassed himself.”

“At the Canyon Arms?” she asked, feeling sweat on her neck despite all the fans blowing everywhere, lifting motes and old skin. That’s what dust really is, you know, one of her roommates once told her, blowing it from her fingertips. “Inside my bungalow?”

They both nodded gravely.

“They carried him out through the courtyard,” Mr. Flant said, staring vaguely out the window. “That great sheaf of blond hair of his. Oh, my.”

“So it’s a challenge for some people,” Benny said. “Once they know.”

Penny remembered the neighbor boy who fell from their tree and died from blood poisoning two days later. No one would eat its pears after that.

“Well,” she said, eyes drifting to the smudgy window, “some people are superstitious.”

Soon Penny began stopping by Number Three a few mornings a week, before work. Then the occasional evening too. They served rye or applejack.

It helped with her sleep. She didn’t remember her dreams, but her eyes still stung with light spots most nights.

Sometimes the spots took odd shapes and she would press her fingers against her lids, trying to make them stop.

“You could come to my bungalow,” she offered once. But they both shook their heads slowly, and in unison.

Mostly they spoke of Lawrence. Larry. Who seemed like such a sensitive soul, delicately formed and too fine for this town.

“When did it happen?” Penny asked, feeling dizzy, wishing Benny had put more water in the applejack. “When did he die?”

“Just before the war. A dozen years ago.”

“He was only thirty-five.”

“That’s so sad,” Penny said, finding her eyes misting, the liquor starting to tell on her.

“His bookstore is still on Cahuenga Boulevard,” Benny told her. “He was so proud when it opened.”

“Before that he sold books for Stanley Rose,” Mr. Flant added, sliding a handkerchief from under the cuff of his fraying sleeve. “Larry was very popular. Very attractive. An accent soft as a Carolina pine.”

“He’d pronounce bed like bay-ed. ” Benny grinned, leaning against the windowsill and smiling that Gable smile. “And he said bay-ed a lot.”

“I met him even before he got the job with Stanley,” Mr. Flant said, voice speeding up. “Long before Benny.”

Benny shrugged, topping off everyone’s drinks.

“He was selling books out of the trunk of his old Ford,” Mr. Flant continued. “That’s where I first bought Ulysses. ”

Benny grinned again. “He sold me my first Tijuana Bible. Dagwood Has a Family Party. ”

Mr. Flant nodded, laughed. “ Popeye in The Art of Love. It staggered me. He had an uncanny sense. He knew just what you wanted.”

They explained that Mr. Rose, whose bookstore had once graced Hollywood Boulevard and had attracted great talents, used to send young Larry to the studios with a suitcase full of books. His job was to trap and mount the big shots. Show them the goods, sell them books by the yard, art books they could show off in their offices, dirty books they could hide in their big gold safes.

Penny nodded. She was thinking about the special books Mr. D. kept in his office, behind the false encyclopedia fronts. The books had pictures of girls doing things with long, fuzzy fans and peacock feathers, a leather crop.

She wondered if Larry had sold them to him.

“To get to those guys, he had to climb the satin rope,” Benny said. “The studio secretaries, the script girls, the publicity office, even makeup girls like you. Hell, the grips. He loved a sexy grip.”

“This town can make a whore out of anyone,” Penny found herself blurting.

She covered her mouth, ashamed, but both men just laughed.

Mr. Flant looked out the window into the courtyard, the flip-flipping of banana leaves against the shutter. “I think he loved the actresses the most, famous or not.”

“He said he liked the feel of a woman’s skin in bay-ed, ” Benny said, rubbing his left arm, his eyes turning dark, soft. “Course, he’d slept with his mammy until he was thirteen.”

As she walked back to her own bungalow, she always had the strange feeling she might see Larry. That he might emerge behind the rosebushes or around the statue of Venus.

Once she looked down into the fountain basin and thought she could see his face instead of her own.

But she didn’t even know what he looked like.

Back in the bungalow, head fuzzy and the canyon so quiet, she thought about him more. The furniture, its fashion at least two decades past, seemed surely the same furniture he’d known. Her hands on the smooth bands of the rattan sofa. Her feet, her toes on the banana silk tassels of the rug. And the old mirror in the bathroom, its tiny black pocks.

In the late hours, lying on the bed, the mattress too soft, with a vague smell of mildew, she found herself waking again and again, each time with a start.

It always began with her eyes stinging, dreaming again of a doctor with the head mirror, or a car careering toward her on the highway, always lights in her face.

One night she caught the lights moving, her eyes landing on the far wall, the baseboards.

For several moments she’d see the light spots, fuzzed and floating, as if strung together by the thinnest of threads.

The spots began to look like the darting mice that sometimes snuck inside her childhood home. She never knew mice could be that fast. So fast that if she blinked, she’d miss them, until more came. Was that what it was?

If she squinted hard, they even looked like little men. Could it be mice on their hind feet?

The next morning she set traps.

“I’m sorry, he’s unavailable,” the receptionist said. Even over the phone, Penny knew which one. The beauty marks and giraffe neck.

“But listen,” Penny said, “it’s not like he thinks. I’m just calling about the check he gave me. The bank stopped payment on it.”

So much for Mr. D.’s parting gift for their time together. She was going to use it to make rent, to buy a new girdle, maybe even a television set.

“I’ve passed along your messages, Miss Smith. That’s really all I can do.”

“Well, that’s not all I can do,” Penny said, her voice trembling. “You tell him that.”

Keeping busy was the only balm. At work it was easy, the crush of people, the noise and personality of the crew.

Nights were when the bad thoughts came, and she knew she shouldn’t let them.

In the past she’d had those greasy-skinned roommates to drown out thinking. They all had rashes from cheap studio makeup and the clap from cheap studio men and beautiful figures like Penny’s own. And they never stopped talking, twirling their hair in curlers and licking their fingers to turn the magazine pages. But their chatter-chatter-chatter muffled all Penny’s thoughts. And the whole atmosphere — the thick muzz of Woolworth’s face powder and nylon nighties when they even shared a bed — made everything seem cheap and lively and dumb and easy and light.

Here, in the bungalow, after leaving Mr. Flant and Benny to drift off into their applejack dreams, Penny had only herself. And the books.

Late into the night, waiting for the light spots to come, she found her eyes wouldn’t shut. They started twitching all the time, and maybe it was the night jasmine, or the beach burr.