The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 (42 page)

“I'm a fairly frugal man,” he said. “Sometimes I need extra for . . . tuition.”

“Tuition?”

“And other academic expenses.”

“Academic expenses,” I repeated, not a question this time. I thought that he had a nice voice, and then I told him so. “You have a nice voice,” I said. “And pretty eyes.” I gave him my phone number, not writing it down because the security camera would have picked that up, but just told him to call, repeating the number twice so he would remember it. “And my name is Louise.”

“Thanks,” he said, “Louise.”

“Good luck with your education,” I called after him, but the door had already swung closed. I watched him run out toward the pumps and beyond, admired the way his body moved, the curve of his jeans, for as long as I could make him out against the darkness. I gave him a head start before I dialed 911.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I was some bored, bubblegum-popping,
Cosmo
-reading girl, disillusioned with the real world and tired already of being a grownup, and along comes this bad boy and, more than that, literally a criminal and . . . Sure, there's some truth there. But here again you'd be missing the point.

It wasn't exciting that he robbed convenience stores.

It was exciting that he was brave enough to call me afterward, especially in this age of caller ID, when I had his phone number and name immediately—Grayson, Delwood—and could have sent the police after him in a minute.

That
Cosmo
article? The one I was reading when he showed up in the ski mask? “Romantic Gestures Gone Good: Strange but True Stories of How He Wooed and Won Me.”

Not a one of those stories held a candle to hearing Del's voice on the other end of the phone: “Hello, Louise? I, um . . . robbed your 7-Eleven the other night, and I've been percolating on our conversation ever since. Are you free to talk?”

That takes a real man, I thought. And—don't forget those academic expenses—a man who might be going somewhere.

But it had been a long time since I believed we were going anywhere fast. Or anywhere at all.

We took the High Road down from Taos. That figured: two lanes, forty-five miles per hour.

“Afraid they'll get you for speeding?” I asked.

“One thing might lead to another,” he said. “And anyway, the rental place stressed that it was dangerous to exceed the speed limit while pulling the trailer here.”

As we drove, he kept looking up into the rearview mirror nervously, staring back across the sweep of that trailer, as if any second a patrol car really was gonna come tearing around the bend, sirens wailing, guns blasting. He had put his own pistol in the glove compartment. I saw it when I went for a Kleenex.

“If we get pulled, are you gonna use it?”

He didn't answer, but just glanced up again at the mirror, which rattled against the windshield with every bump and curve.

I was doing a little rearview looking myself.

Here's the thing. Even if I had become disillusioned with Del, I don't believe I had become disappointed in him—not yet.

I mean, like I said, he was a planner. I'd seen my mama date men who couldn't think beyond which channel they were gonna turn to next, unless there was a big game coming up, and then their idea of planning was to ask her to pick up an extra bag of chips and dip for their friends. I myself had dated men who would pick me up and give me a kiss and ask, “So, what do you want to do tonight?”—none of them having thought about it themselves except to hope that we might end up in the back seat or even back at their apartment. I'm sorry to admit it with some of those men, but most times we did.

On the other hand, take Del. When he picked me up for our first date, I asked him straight out, “Where's the desperate criminal planning to take the sole witness to his crime on their first date?” I was admiring how he looked out from under that ski mask—his beard not straggly like I'd been afraid, but groomed nice and tight, and chiseled features, you'd call them, underneath that. Those green eyes looked even better set in such a handsome face. He'd dressed up: a button-down shirt, a nice pair of khakis. He was older than I'd expected, older than me. Thirties maybe. Maybe even late thirties. A touch of gray in his beard. But I kind of liked all that.

“A surprise,” said Del, and didn't elaborate, but just drove out of Eagle Nest and out along 64, and all of a sudden I thought,
Oh, wait, desperate criminal, sole witness.
My heart started racing and not in a good way. But then he pulled into Angel Fire and we went to Our Place for dinner. (Our Place! That's really the name.) My heart started racing in a better way after that.

Then there's the fact that he did indeed finish his degree at the community college, which shows discipline and dedication. And coming up with that story about his sister and why we were moving, laying out a cover story in advance, always thinking ahead. And planning for the heist itself—the “big one,” he said, “the last one,” though I knew better. Over the last year, whenever tuition came due, he'd hit another 7-Eleven or a gas station or a DVD store—“shaking up the modus operandi,” he said, which seemed smart to me, but maybe he just got that from the movies he watched on our DVD player. He'd stolen that too.

That was how we spent most of our nights together, watching movies. I'd quit the 7-Eleven job at that point. It was dangerous, Del said—
ironically,
he said—and I'd got a job at one of the gift stores in town, keeping me home nights. Home meaning Del's mobile home, because it wasn't long before I'd moved in with him.

We'd make dinner—something out of a box because I'm not much of a cook, I'll admit—and I'd watch Court TV, which I love, while he did some of his homework for the business classes he was taking over at the college or read through the day's newspaper, scouring the world for opportunities, he said, balancing work and school and me. Later we'd watch a movie, usually something with a crime element like
Bank Job
or
Mission: Impossible
or some old movie like
The Sting
or
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
or all those
Godfather
movies like every man I've ever been with. I suggested
Bonnie and Clyde,
for obvious reasons, but he said it would be disadvantageous for us to see it and so we never did.

“Is that all you do, sit around and watch movies?” Mama asked on the phone, more than once.

“We go out some,” I told her.

“
Out
out?” she asked, and I didn't know quite what she meant and I told her that.

“He surprises me sometimes,” I said. “Taking me out for dinner.”

(Which was true. “Let's go out for a surprise dinner,” he'd say sometimes, even though the surprise was always the same, that we were just going to Our Place. But that was still good because it really was our place—both literally
and
figuratively—and there's romance in that.)

“He loves me,” I'd tell Mama. “He holds me close at night and tells me how much he loves me, how much he can't live without me.”

Mama grunted. She was in North Carolina. Two hours' time difference and almost a full country away, but still you could feel her disappointment like she was standing right there in the same room.

“That's how it starts,” Mama would tell me, “ ‘I can't live without you,' ” mimicking the voice. “Then pretty soon ‘I can't live without you' starts to turn stifling and sour and . . .”

Her voice trailed off.
And violent,
I knew she'd wanted to say.

And I knew where she was coming from, knew how her last boyfriend had treated her. I'd seen it myself, one of the reasons I finally just moved away, anywhere but there.

“I thought you were going to start a
new
life,” she said, a different kind of disappointment in her voice then. “You could watch the tube and drink beer anywhere. You could date a loser here if that's all you're doing.”

I twirled the phone cord in my hand, wanting just to be done with the conversation but not daring to hang up. Not yet.

“Frugal,” Mama said, making me regret again some of the things I'd told her about him. “Frugal's just a big word for cheap.”

“Are things gonna be different someday?” I'd asked Del one night, the two of us lying in bed, him with his back to me. I ran my fingers across his shoulder when I asked it.

“Different?” he asked.

“Different from this.”

He didn't answer at first. I kept rubbing his shoulder and let my hand sneak over and rub the top of his chest, caressing it real light, because I knew he liked that. The window was slid open and a breeze rustled the edge of those thin curtains. Just outside stood a short streetlight, one that the mobile home park had put up, and sometimes it kept me awake, shining all night, like it was aiming right for my face, leaving me sleepless.

After a while I realized Del wasn't gonna answer at all, and I stopped rubbing his chest and turned over.

That night when I couldn't sleep, I knew it wasn't the streetlight at all.

For that big one, that
last
last one, Del had roamed those art galleries in downtown Taos after work at the garage. He watched the ads for gallery openings, finding a place that stressed
cash only,
real snooty because you know a lot of people would have to buy that artwork on time and not pay straight out for it all at once, but those weren't the type of people they were after. He'd looked up the address of the gallery owner, the home address, and we'd driven past that too.

I liked watching his mind work: the way he'd suddenly nod just slightly when we were walking across the plaza or down the walkway between the John Dunn Shops, like he'd seen something important. Or the way his eyes narrowed and darted as we rode through the neighborhood where the gallery owner lived, keeping a steady speed, not turning his head, not looking as if he was looking.

We had a nice time at the gallery opening itself. At least at the beginning. Delwood looked smart in his blue blazer, even though it was old enough that it had gotten some shine at the elbows. And you could see how happy he was each time he saw a red dot on one of the labels—just more money added to the take—even if he first had to ask what each of those red dots meant.

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.