The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 by Elizabeth George
I hated the gallery owner’s tone when he answered that one, as if he didn’t want Del or me there drinking from those plastic cups of wine or eating the cheese. He had a sleek suit, and his thin hair was gelled back dramatically, and he wore these square purple spectacles that he looked over when he was answering Del. I couldn’t help but feel a little resentful toward him. But then I thought, Square Specs will get his, if you know what I mean. And of course he did.
“I like this one,” I said in front of one of the pictures. It was a simple picture—this painting stuck in the back corner. A big stretch of blue sky and beneath it the different-colored blue of the ocean, and a mistiness to it, like the waves were kicking up spray. Two people sat on the beach, a man and a woman. They sort of leaned into one another, watching the water, and I thought about Del and me and began to feel nostalgic for something that we’d never had. The painting didn’t have a red dot on it, but it did have a price: three thousand dollars. “With the money,” I whispered to Delwood, “we could come back here and buy one of them, huh? Wouldn’t that be ballsy? Wouldn’t that be ironic?”
“Louise,” he said, that tone again, telling me everything.
“I’m just saying,” I said. “Can’t you picture the two of us at the ocean like that? Maybe with the money we could take a big trip, huh?”
“Can’t you just enjoy your wine?” he whispered, and moved on to the next picture, not looking at it really, just at the label.
“Fine,” I said after him, deciding I’d just stay there and let him finish casing out the joint, but then a couple came up behind me.
“Let’s try s on this one,” the woman whispered.
“S,” said the man. “Okay. S.” They looked at the picture of the beach, and I looked with them, wondering what they meant by “trying s.” The man wrinkled his brow, squinted his eye, scratched his chin—like Del when’s he’s thinking, but this man seemed to be only playing at thinking. “Sappy,” he said finally.
“Sentimental,” said the woman, quick as she could.
“Um . . . Sugary.”
“Saccharine.”
“No fair,” said the man. “You’re just playing off my words.”
The woman smirked at him. She had a pretty face, I thought. Bright blue eyes and high cheekbones with freckles across them. She had on a gauzy top, some sort of linen, and even though it was just a thin swath of fabric, you could tell from the texture of it and the way she wore it that it was something fine. I knew, just knew suddenly, that it had probably cost more than the money Del had stolen from the 7-Eleven the night I first met him. And I knew too that I wanted a top just like it.
“Fine,” she said, pretending to pout. “Here’s another one. Schmaltzy.”
“Better! Um . . . sad.”
“No, this is sad,” she said, holding up her own plastic wineglass.
“Agreed.” He laughed.
“Swill,” she whispered, dragging out the s sound, just touching his hand with her fingers, and they both giggled as they moved on to the next picture. And the next letter, it turned out.
T was for tarnished, for trashy, for tragic.
Del had made the full circuit. Even from across the room I could see the elbows shining on his blazer. Then he turned and saw me and made a short side-nod with his head, motioning toward the door. Time to head back home.
I looked once more at the painting of the couple on the beach. I’d thought it was pretty. Still did.
I’d thought the wine had tasted pretty good too.
But suddenly it all left a bad taste in my mouth.
A bad taste still as we continued south now.
The steep turns and drop-offs that had taken us out of Taos had given way to villages, small homes on shaded roads, people up and about, going about their lives. I saw the signs for the Santuario de Chimayó, which I’d visited when I first moved out this way, picking northern New Mexico just because it seemed different, in every way, from where I’d grown up. I’d found out about the church in Chimayó from a guidebook I’d ordered off the Internet, learned about the holy earth there and how it healed the sick. When I’d visited it myself, I gathered up some of the earth and mailed it off to Mama—not that she was sick, but just unhappy. I don’t know what I’d imagined she’d do with it, rub it on her heart or something. “Thanks for the dirt,” she told me when she got it.
“Do you think they’ve found Square Specs yet?” I asked Del.
“Square Specs?”
“The gallery owner,” I said. “Do you think the cleaning lady found him, or a customer?”
We were nearing another curve and Del eased the Nova around it slowly, carefully.
“Probably somebody will have found him by now. Like I told you last night, I tied him up pretty good. I don’t think he’d have gotten loose on his own. But by now . . .”
He sped up a little bit. I don’t think he did it consciously, but I noticed.
A while later I asked, “Are we gonna do anything fun with the money?”
“What kind of fun?”
“I don’t know. Clothes, jewelry . . . a big-screen TV, a vacation. Something fun.”
He scratched his beard. “That’s just extravagance.”
“Are you gonna make all the decisions?”
“All the good ones,” he said. He gave a tense chuckle. “Don’t you ever consider the future?”
But again he missed what I was saying. The future is exactly what I was thinking about.
After we bypassed Santa Fe proper, Del had us two-laning it again on a long road toward Albuquerque: miles and miles of dirt hills and scrubby little bushes, some homes that looked like people still lived there and others that were just crumbling down to nothing. The Ortiz Mountains stood way out in the distance. We got stuck for a while behind a dusty old pickup going even slower than we were, but Del was still afraid to pass, especially with that trailer stretched out behind us. We just poked along behind the truck until it decided to turn down some even dustier old road, and every mile we spent behind it, my blood began to boil up more.
I know Del was picturing roadblocks out on the interstate, and helicopters swooping low, waiting for some rattling old Nova like ours to do something out of the ordinary, tip our hand—picturing it even more after I asked about that gallery owner getting loose. But after a while I just wanted to scream, “Go! Go! Go!” or else reach over and grab the wheel myself, stretch my leg over and press down on the gas, hurl us ahead somehow and out of all this. And then there was all the money in the trunk and all the things I thought we could have done with it but clearly weren’t going to do.
Once or twice I even thought about pulling out that pistol myself and pointing it at him. “I don’t want anybody to get hurt,” I might say, just like he would. “Just do like I ask, okay?” That was the first time I thought about it—not even serious about it then.
Still, it was all I could do to hide all that impatience, all that restlessness and nervous energy. None of it helped by that tap tap tap tap tap of the mirror against the windshield. I felt like my skin was turning inside out.
“I need to pee,” I said finally.
“Next place I see,” said Del, a glance at me, one more glance in the rearview. I looked in the side mirror. Nothing behind us but road. I looked ahead of us. Nothing but road. I looked around the car. Just me and him and that damn mirror tapping seconds into minutes and hours and more.
We stopped in Madrid, which isn’t pronounced like the city in Spain but with the emphasis on the first syllable: MAD-rid. It used to be a mining town back in the Gold Rush days, but then dried up and became a ghost town. Now it’s a big artists’ community. I didn’t know all that when we pulled in, but there was a brochure.
We parked lengthwise along the road by one of the rest stops at one end of the town—outhouse, more like it. Del waited in the car, but after I was done, I tapped on his window. “I’m gonna stretch my legs,” I said, and strolled off down the street before he could answer. I
I walked in one store. Del followed. I just browsed the shelves. The sign outside had advertised “local artisans and craftspeople,” and the store had quirky stuff the way those kinds of places do: big sculptures of comical-looking cowboys made out of recycled bike parts, close-up photographs of rusted gas pumps and bramblebush, hand-dipped soy candles, gauzy-looking scarves that reminded me of the woman at the gallery the night before. I browsed through it all, taking my time, knowing that Del was right up on me, almost feeling his breath on my back.
One shelf had a bowl full of sock-monkey key chains. A cardboard sign in front of the bowl said, HANDCRAFTED. $30.
“Excuse me,” I called over to the man behind the counter. He’d been polishing something and held a red rag in his hand. “Is this the price of the bowl or of the monkeys?”
“Oh,” he said, surprised, as if he’d never imagined someone might misunderstand that. “The monkeys,” he said, then corrected himself. “Each monkey,” he said. “The bowl’s not for sale at all.”
I turned to Del. “Why don’t you get me one of these?” I asked him, holding up a little monkey.
I tried to say it casual-like, but it was a challenge. I felt like both of us could hear it in my voice. Even the man behind the register heard it, I imagine, even though he’d made a show of going back to his polishing.
“What would you want with a thing like that?” Del said.
“Sometimes a girl likes a present. It makes her feel special.” I dangled the sock monkey on my finger in front of him, and Del watched it sway, like he was mesmerized or suspicious. “Or is the romance gone here?”
“It’s kind of pricy for a key chain.”
I leaned in close for just a second, whispered, “Why don’t you just slip it in your pocket then?”
Del cut his eyes toward the man behind the counter, then turned back to me. His look said hush. “I told you last night was the last time,” he said, a low growl.
I just swayed that monkey back and forth.
A woman in a green dress jingled through the door then and went up to the counter. “You were holding something for me,” she said, and the man put down his polish rag, and they started talking.
You could tell that Del was relieved not to have a witness anymore. “C’mon, Louise,” he said. “Be serious.”
But me? For better or worse, I just upped the ante.
“Suppose I said to you that this monkey”—I jerked my finger to make his little monkey body bounce—“this monkey represents love to me.”
“Love?” he said.
“The potential for love,” I clarified. “The possibility of it.”
“How’s that?”
“Suppose I told you that my daddy, the last time I saw him, me only six years old, he comes into my bedroom to tuck me in and he gives me a sock-puppet monkey, bigger than this one, but looking pretty much the same”—because the truth is they all do, handcrafted or not—“and he says to me, ‘Hon, Daddy’s going away for a while, but while I’m gone, this little monkey is gonna take care of you, and any time you find yourself thinking of me or wondering about me, I want you to hug this monkey close to you, and I’ll be there with you. Wherever I am, I’ll be here with you.’ And he touched his heart.”
I wasn’t talking loud, but the man behind the counter and the customer had grown quiet, listening to me now even as they pretended not to. It was a small store, they couldn’t help it. Del wasn’t sweating, not really, but with all the attention—two witnesses to our argument now—he looked like he might break out in one any second.
“And Mama was behind him, leaned against the door watching us,” I went on. “Anyone probably could have seen from her face that he wasn’t coming back and that it was her fault and she felt guilty, but I was too young to know that then. And I dragged that monkey around with me every day and slept with it every night and hugged it close. And finally Mama threw it away, which told me the truth. ‘Men let you down,’ she told me when I cried about it, because she’d just broken up with her latest boyfriend and had her own heart broken. ‘Men always let you down,’ she told me. ‘Don’t you ever fool yourself into forgetting that.’ And I stopped crying. But still, whatever Mama told me and whether my daddy came back or not, I believed—I knew—that there had been love there, there in that moment, in that memory, you know?”
Del looked over at the wall, away from the shopkeeper and his customer, and stared at this sculpture of a cowboy on a bucking bronco—an iron silhouette. The tilt of his head and the nervous look in his eyes reminded me of the first night we’d met, at the 7-Eleven, when he’d called me “ma’am” and I’d told him my age. Seemed like here was another conversation where he was playing catch-up, but this time he seemed fearful for different reasons.
“And maybe,” I said, helping him along, “just maybe if you bought this for me, I’d know you really loved me, for always and truly. Now,” I said, “would that get it through your thick skull?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an embarrassed look on the storekeeper’s face—embarrassed for Del and maybe embarrassed for me too. His customer, the woman in green, cleared her throat, and the shopkeeper said to her, “Yes, just let me find that for you.”
Del shifted his lower jaw to the side—another indication, I’d learned, that his mind was working on something, weighing things. He really was sweating now, and still staring at that bucking bronco sculpture like he felt some kinship with the cowboy on top, like staring at it might give him an answer somehow.
“What was your monkey’s name?” he asked me.
I gave out a long sigh, with an extra dose of irritation in it. He was missing the whole point, just like always. “I don’t know,” I told him. I sighed again. “Murphy,” I said.
His look changed then, just a thin crease of the forehead, a tiny raise of the eyebrow. “Murphy the monkey?” he said. He wasn’t looking at the sculpture now, wasn’t looking afraid anymore. “Louise,” he began, “I don’t really think that this monkey represents the love we share, and the truth is that thirty dollars seems like quite a bit for—”
But I didn’t hear the rest of it. I just put that monkey down, then turned and walked out the door, slamming it behind me the way I’d slammed the Nova’s door that morning.
I can’t say whether I wanted him to call for me to come back or rush out after me, something dramatic like that, but if I did, I was indeed fooling myself, just like Mama had warned. That wasn’t Delwood. When I got in the car, I saw him through the window, slowly coming back—those sad footsteps, scuff scuff scuff. No hurry at all, like he knew I’d be waiting.
We rode on in silence after that—a heavy silence, you know what I mean. More ghost towns where people used to have hopes and dreams and now there was nothing but rubble and a long stretch of empty land. I wasn’t even angry now, but just deflated, disappointed.
“Men will do that to you,” my mama told me another time. “After a while you feel like it’s not even worth trying.” I’d known what she meant, theoretically. Now I knew in a different way.
Soon the two-lane widened, and the strip malls started up, and fast-food restaurants—civilization. I saw a Wendy’s and asked if it was okay to stop.
“I’ll pick from the dollar menu,” I said, sarcastic-like.
Del didn’t say anything, just pulled through the drive-thru and ordered what I wanted. He didn’t get anything for himself. I think it was just out of spite.
Late afternoon, we cruised through Winslow, Arizona, w
Then toward evening we stopped at a motel in Kingman, one of those cheap ones that have been there since Route 66 was an interesting road and not just a tourist novelty—the ones that now looked like they’d be rented for the hour by people who didn’t much care what the accommodations were like.
Del checked us in, pulled the Nova around to the stairwell closest our room, and parked sideways across several spaces, since that was the only way we’d fit.
“Get your kicks,” I said.
“Kicks?” he said, baffled.
“Route 66,” I said, pointing to a sign. “Guess we couldn’t afford the Holiday Inn either, huh?”
He stared straight ahead, drummed his fingers light against the steering wheel. He curled up his bottom lip a little and chewed on his beard.
“You know those court shows you watch on TV?” Del said finally. “And how you tell me some of those people are so stupid? You listen to their stories and you laugh and you tell me, ‘That’s where they went wrong’ or ‘They should’ve known better than that.’ ”
“Do you mean,” I said, “something like a man who robs a convenience store, then calls up the clerk he’s held at gunpoint and asks her out for a date?” I felt bad about it as soon as I said it. Part of why I fell in love with him and now I was complaining about it.