The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 Read Online Free PDF

know,” Benny said. “Larry’s. Down to the forks and spoons.”
    Penny felt her teeth rattle slightly in her mouth.
    â€œHe gave her books she liked,” Benny added. “Stiff British stuff he teased her about. Charmed himself out of the rent for months.”
    â€œWhen he died she wailed around the courtyard for weeks,” Mr. Flant recalled. “She wanted to scatter the ashes into the canyon.”
    â€œBut his people came instead,” Benny said. “Came on a train all the way from Carolina. A man and woman with cardboard suitcases packed with pimento sandwiches. They took the body home.”
    â€œThey said Hollywood had killed him.”
    Benny shook his head, smiled that tobacco-toothed smile of his. “They always say that.”
    Â 
    â€œYou’re awfully pretty for a face-fixer,” one of the actors told her, fingers wagging beneath his long makeup bib.
    Penny only smiled, and scooted before the pinch came.
    It was a western, so it was mostly men, whiskers, lip bristle, three-day beards filled with dust.
    Painting the girls’ faces was harder. They all had ideas of how they wanted it. They were hard girls, striving to get to Paramount, to MGM. Or they’d started out there and hit the Republic rung on the long slide down. To Allied, AIP. Then studios no one ever heard of, operating out of some slick guy’s house in the Valley.
    They had bad teeth and head lice and some had smells on them when they came to the studio, like they hadn’t washed properly. The costume assistants always pinched their noses behind their backs.
    It was a rough town for pretty girls. The only place it was.
    Penny knew she had lost her shine long ago. Many men had rubbed it off, shimmy by shimmy.
    But it was just as well, and she’d just as soon be in the war-paint business. When it rubbed off the girls, she could just get out her brushes, her powder puffs, and shine them up like new.
    As she tapped the powder pots, though, her mind would wander. She began thinking about Larry bounding through the back lots. Would he have come to Republic with his wares? Maybe. Would he have soft-soaped her, hoping her bosses might have a taste for T. S. Eliot or a French deck?
    By day she imagined him as a charmer, a cheery, silver-tongued roué.
    But at night, back at the Canyon Arms, it was different.
    You see, sometimes she thought she could see him moving, room to room, his face pale, his trousers soiled. Drinking and crying over someone, something, whatever he’d lost that he was sure wasn’t ever coming back.
    Â 
    There were sounds now. Sounds to go with the 2 a.m. lights, or the mice or whatever they were.
    Tap-tap-tap.
    At first she thought she was only hearing the banana trees brushing against the side of the bungalow. Peering out the window, the moon-filled courtyard, she couldn’t tell. The air looked very still.
    Maybe, she thought, it’s the fan palms outside the kitchen window, so much lush foliage everywhere, just the thing she’d loved, but now it seemed to be touching her constantly, closing in.
    And she didn’t like to go into the kitchen at night. The white tile glowed eerily, reminded her of something. The wide expanse of Mr. D.’s belly, his shirt pushed up, his watch chain hanging. The coaster of milk she left for the cat the morning she ran away from home. For Hollywood.
    Â 
    The mousetraps never caught anything. Every morning, after the rumpled sleep and all the flits and flickers along the wall, she moved them to different places. She looked for signs.
    She never saw any.
    One night, 3 a.m., she knelt down on the floor, running her fingers along the baseboards. With her ear to the wall, she thought the tapping might be coming from inside. A
tap-tap-tap.
Or was it a
tick-tick-tick
?
    â€œI’ve never heard anything here,” Mr. Flant told her the following day, “but I take sedatives.”
    Benny wrinkled his brow.