The Best American Mystery Stories 2020

Richard Helms See Humble and Die

from The Eyes of Texas

A summons. A dumb subpoena. All I had to do was slap it into the guy’s hand, tell him he’d been served, and pocket the forty-seven-fifty for the job. Should have been simple as a wet dream, especially for a former Texas Ranger looking for something to stave off boredom after punching out with thirty-two years of service.

Sick and tired of sitting around, watching TV, and waiting for something critical to break and put me on the dark side of the grass, I registered a DBA with the Houston clerk of court and hung out a private investigator shingle. It was something to do. I put a listing in the Yellow Pages, my granddaughter made a web page, and business trickled in from time to time. Maybe every two or three weeks some drab, nervous housewife would sidle through the door, her makeup smeared with tears, and demand that I catch her husband banging his secretary. I usually gave them a one-week turnaround. Sometimes, if the philandering husband was a real horndog, I wrapped the case before the end of the evening news.

I met an insurance guy in a bar in Sugar Land, just west of Houston, about a year back. We struck up a conversation. When he found out I had been a Ranger, he started asking me a lot of questions. Then he found out I was a private cop. He almost peed himself.

“No shit?” he said. “You’re like a real private eye? Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean nothing by it, but aren’t you a little... well... old to be a private eye?”

“Want to arm wrestle?” I said. “My usual opponent is still in a cast. I stay in shape. And I know things.”

“Like what?”

“Wear a badge for three decades and you learn tricks. It’s not all about knuckles. There’s a lot of know-how to the game. Besides, it ain’t like you see on the TV. My days of tracking felons and punks are in the past. Most of what I do these days is sit around and wait for someone to do something stupid.”

“I think I can get you some work,” he said.

“Yeah? What kind?”

“Insurance fraud,” he said. “Let’s order another round and talk about it.”

So every month or so I get a call from Dallas to check on a claim. I once accidentally rear-ended a guy in San Angelo. It was nothing. A couple of crinkled bumpers at a stoplight. I couldn’t have been going more than three miles per hour. I hopped out of the car and checked on the other driver, who said he was perfectly fine. No problem. By the time the uniform cop arrived to take a report for the insurance companies, the other driver was holding his neck and declaring that he had shooting pains going all down his arm. I shrugged and handed my information over to the cop.

Two days later I caught the guy on my dashcam, doing backflips on a trampoline in his backyard. Needless to say, his personal injury claim died on the spot.

That was the kind of work I got from Dallas. Lots of folks trying to put one over on the insurance company. Some of them were legit. Most were bullshit. I saved the insurance company in Dallas a lot of money.

Then there was the process serving. An old friend at the courthouse called me one day. Said he’d heard I’d opened an office. Wondered whether I’d like to pick up a hundred or so a week to serve warrants and subpoenas. Probably wouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.

I bit. The pay is pocket change, but like I said, I’m not in this for the money. Not entirely.

I drop by his office each Monday morning, and he has three or four orders to be served waiting for me. It’s usually local stuff. I served a guy just down the street from me a couple of months ago. Walked over after dinner, found him in his front yard mowing his dirt. Slapped him with a subpoena and was back in my house, all in ten minutes. They’re not all that easy. In most cases, though, it’s a piece of cake.

People don’t walk around expecting legal papers to drop out of the sky. It’s a cinch to get close to them. The easiest are the ones you catch at home. Ring the bell, ask for Mr. About-to-Be-Served, tell him you’re a courier, and hand him the envelope. Bingo bango, dinner for two at Golden Corral in your back pocket, with a few bucks left over for ice cream.

I’m partial to ice cream.

Sometimes you catch a guy who’s been given a heads-up. This is especially true in divorce cases, where the wife has already screamed something like “I will steal your fucking dreams, you cheating son of a bitch!” Those guys are on the lookout. Getting to them sometimes takes a little finesse.

I know a woman in town who’s in the process-serving game. Her name’s Amy. She’s middle-aged, but time has been kind to her, and she still gets lots of looks from guys half her age. She snags a lot of divorce paper services. Her game is to catch the subject in a bar, start up a conversation. Somewhere along the line, she gives him a fake name, and he — ​naturally — ​gives his real one. She repeats the name, as if she’s heard it before. The guy says, “Yep, that’s me!” and she lays it on him. He goes home with a subpoena in one hand and his dick in the other. Works every time. Nobody expects a hot southern lady to come bearing a summons. She has perfect camouflage.

Won’t work in my case, unless I’m serving divorce papers to little old ladies in rest homes. I work the codger angle. There’s always a guy out there willing to talk about the good old days. Sometimes they buy me a beer before I serve them. It’s not really ethical, but I hate to be antisocial.

The boss at the courthouse knows what kind of guys are likely to respond to Amy and which will respond to me. He’s kind of psychic that way. He gives Amy the young guys, and I get the old-timers.

I received the call on a Wednesday morning.

“Got a job for you, Huck,” my guy said.

I’m Huck. Huck Spence. It’s short for Huckleberry, my middle name.

“What’s the job?” I asked.

“Guy named Ralph Oakley. Should be a milk run, no big deal. He skipped out on jury duty. Chose exactly the week the district judge’s diverticulitis was flaring up. Judge was in the mood to knock broomsticks up some asses. He issued orders to bring in every scofflaw who failed to show for the jury pool, so they could account for their lack of civic engagement, but mostly so he could rake them over the coals and vent his spleen. There’s a fine for dumping out on the call, also.”

“I’m familiar with it,” I told him. “Word in the halls is the money goes into a fund that’s split evenly among the judges at the end of the year.”

“Beats me,” he said. “I have no idea whether it’s true, but I’ve heard the same rumor.”

Ralph Oakley lived in Humble, about fifteen miles north of the center of Houston. Humble is the ghost of an oil boomtown, which lent its name to an oil brand at some time in the murky past. A hundred years ago it was the richest-producing field in the entire state. The oil dried up, and the petro circus pulled up stakes and moved on, leaving Humble very humble indeed. At its height, Humble burst at the seams with roughnecks and wildcatters and mud loggers and doodlebuggers making small fortunes by pulling dead stuff out of the ground. These days population tops out around twelve thousand, mostly truck farmers and day laborers and field workers and timbermen, the kind of people who sweat out their paychecks and try to raise families on the precipice of poverty. It’s your typical small suburban Texas town, a simple satellite of the metropolis to the south. It’s a hundred square miles of desperation and hope and churches and resignation, with a few bars thrown in to keep the sidewalks flat on Saturday night. The best thing Humble has going for it is a high school football stadium that would make most college fields weep with envy. They take high school football extra serious in Humble.

It also has twice the average crime rate for towns its size. It’s that kind of place.

I had an address for Ralph Oakley. It was close to the city limits with an unincorporated community called Borderville, close enough to the freeway to hear the cars zooming by. To get there I had to drive through the center of Old Humble, a section that might have inspired Anarene in The Last Picture Show.

I pulled up in front of the house where Oakley lived. A woman wearing a flowered house robe answered the door. She looked like someone had wrapped a refrigerator. Her voice sounded like someone grooming a cat with a belt sander.

“Yeah?”

“I’m looking for Ralph Oakley,” I said.

“Ralph? Ralph ain’t lived here for a year and a half. Can’t say I’m sad about it, either. Guy was a fuckin’ cheapskate, pardon my French. Practically had to beat the rent out of him every month. Why you want him? What’s he done?”

“Just wanted to catch up. Do you know where he moved?”

“You’re a friend of his, you should know.”

“I haven’t seen him in years. I’m just passing through. This was the last address I had for him.”

“Well, you might catch him at work, if he ain’t been fired yet. Check out Borum’s Butcher Shop. Five blocks thataway. Cain’t miss it. Got a big plywood bull hanging out over the sidewalk. Last I saw him, he was working in the back.”

She was right. There was no missing Borum’s Butcher Shop. I walked through the front door. Texans pride themselves on their beef, and Borum was no exception. The floor was spotless. The cases were polished to a sheen, the glass crystal-clear. Cuts of rib eye, thick as a man’s wrist, were stacked inside. I walked down the case, building an appetite. Porterhouses, New York strips, fillets. I started thinking about grilling that night.

“Help you?” a man said as he walked in from the back room. He was shorter than me, but massively built, in the way you get cutting up two-hundred-pound steer carcasses for a couple of decades. His face was open and smiling, that fake sort of grin people slap on their faces when they want to sell something.

“Ralph Oakley?” I said.

“Bob Borum. You a cop?”

“Nope. Are you?”

He grinned for real this time. “Was, once. Long time ago. Thought I smelled it on you.”

“Left over from my days in the Rangers, but that was a long time ago too. Ralph wouldn’t be around, would he?”

“Off today. Mind if I ask your business with him?”

“Some legal stuff. Nothing big.”

“None of my business anyway, right? It’s cool. Way Ralph’s been moping around and skipping out on work lately, he probably won’t be working here much longer. What happens to him is on him, right?”

“Couldn’t agree more. I dropped by the address I had for him, but they said he moved away.”

“He’s in a motel, three streets over. Been living there for quite a while now. Not a bad deal, I suppose. Fresh towels every day, fresh sheets every week, and you don’t have to lift a finger. Not a lot of square footage, but how much room does a man need, anyway?”

“I reckon we all wind up with more or less the same space,” I said.

“Ain’t it the truth?”

“Let me take care of this business with Ralph, and I’ll drop back by. That rib eye there looks like it’s got designs on my stomach. Think you can wrap it and have it ready for me? I don’t want to leave it in the car.”

“You got it.”

The place was what we used to call a “drive-up motel.” It wasn’t a chain place. It had likely been around for half a century. The entire motel was on a single level, all the room doors opening directly onto the parking lot. The outside walls were painted cinder block. An ice machine with a wheezing, rattling compressor stood against the outer wall alongside a Pepsi machine. All the “sold out” lights on the machine were lit.

Bob Borum had given me Oakley’s room number, so I didn’t have to shine on the desk clerk. I backed my car into a space across the lot, facing his door.

A couple of years back, a process jockey in Houston was beaten to death with a baseball bat when he tried to serve divorce papers on a guy who’d stoked back too many PBRs. Since then I carry a GoPro camera on my dashboard. It’s motion-activated and connected to a drive that can record up to a week of images at a time. If I ever catch the off-world shuttle on the job, I figure someone might find evidence on the camera to catch the guy who did it. It also protects me from claims that I dump paper in the trash and still claim the pay for serving it. It’s happened.

The whole deal took less than a minute. I slipped an oil change receipt from my glove compartment onto a clipboard, added the subpoena, turned on the dashcam, and crossed the lot to his door. A Latina cleaning woman stepped out of the room two doors up just as I rapped on Oakley’s door and said, “Maintenance!” The cleaning woman looked at me strangely. Guess she never saw a maintenance guy in a corduroy jacket and a Stetson before. I held a finger to my mouth and pointed at the door. She nodded and retreated into the room she had been cleaning. That door closed, and I heard the lock trip. Guess it was that sort of neighborhood.

Oakley opened the door. He was about an inch shorter than me, maybe six feet in his socks. He was blond, his hair shaggy and maybe a little stringy, and otherwise an attractive sort, as best as men can determine that about other men. He looked sweaty and nervous. His eyes were red, and I caught a whiff of weed from the room. None of my business.

“Got a call about your AC,” I said.

“I didn’t call nobody,” he said.

I checked the oil change receipt on my clipboard, which looked official enough if you didn’t examine it too closely.

“Ralph Oakley?” I asked.

“Yeah, that’s me.”

I took the envelope with the subpoena and held it out. “This is for you.”

He took it, reflexively. My job was done.

“The original notice of jury duty was sent to your old address. They didn’t know where to forward it. Tell the judge that story, and you might talk your way out of a fine.”

“What?” he asked, but by then I’d turned and walked away. His rose-colored eyes told me he wouldn’t remember the advice anyway.

He closed the door. I sat in the front seat of my car and filled out the service log detailing when I’d completed the job. As I did, a Honda Accord pulled into the parking slot in front of Ralphie’s room. A woman stepped out. From behind, she had a decent figure. Nice legs. She wore a scarf over her hair, which I thought strange, but then she knocked on Ralph’s door. He opened it and she looked over the parking lot furtively, but she was in shadow and I couldn’t make out her face. I thought she stared at me for a long time, then stepped inside, and it all made sense. I’d spent time sitting outside motels spying on philanderers for longer than was healthy. I recognized a clandestine rendezvous when I saw one.

I drove back to Borum’s, where Bob had my steak wrapped and rung up.

“How’d it go?” he asked as he made change.

“Smooth. No biggie. A misunderstanding. He seems a nervous sort.”

“Ralph? Never noticed.”

“Maybe it’s because his girlfriend was on the way over.”

“Didn’t know he had one. Hey, you enjoy that steak, y’hear?”

Sunday morning I was lounging on the screened porch at the back of my house, reading the newspaper. I’d dispensed with the sports and the funnies and was perusing the local section. I keep an eye on the obituaries these days, mostly because it’s become sort of a game for me to outlive people. I had just taken a sip of coffee, and I nearly sprayed it all over the newsprint when I saw the notice.

Ralph Mark Oakley. Age forty-three. Butcher. Died on Friday, May sixteenth. A smattering of survivors. Services to be held, so forth and so on. Two paragraphs. Forty-three years of breathing, and his entire life had been digested into two paragraphs. Short paragraphs at that. No cause of death listed. The picture looked like the guy I’d served at the motel, except the hair was shorter.

I had Saturday’s newspaper still in the rack in the den. I’d been working Saturday and had only glanced at it. I yanked out the local section and searched it. Found the story on page three. A cleaning woman — ​probably the one I’d scared — ​found Ralph’s body in his hotel room late on Friday afternoon, after seeing the door slightly open. The reporter tried to pretty things up, but it was easy to read between the lines. It had been gory. Ralph had been bludgeoned and stabbed multiple times. He had to be identified by his prints. Police were investigating, but there were no suspects.

I sat on the porch, scratching my aging cat Boudreaux’s lumpy head as she basked in the sunlight, and I thought. Bob Borum had told me he didn’t know Oakley had a girlfriend. I wondered if anyone else knew. I had seen the woman visit him surreptitiously in his motel room. People who sneak around have things to hide. What if the woman thought she had been discovered? She had looked right at me. Maybe she thought I was spying on her, and she decided to eliminate her cheating problem. It didn’t gel completely in my head, but it was something to work on.

And, I had a way to find her.

I retrieved the dash camera from my car. It took a couple of minutes to hook it up to my laptop computer.

I was in luck. Since I’d parked directly across the lot from Oakley’s door, I had a full-on view of his visitor’s car when she parked in front of me. I jotted down the license number and saved the file on my computer.

Here’s the thing about being a retired Texas Ranger. It’s like being in the mob. You might cash out, but you never really leave. Looking back, I probably should have gone directly to the Humble Police Department. I’m a cop, though — ​or at least I used to be — ​and the tendency to do it yourself is kind of strong in cops. I called my old office. It was Sunday, but there was always someone on duty. I was lucky. I got Wade Stanfield. We used to call him Wade the Blade because in his day he was definitely the sharpest knife in the drawer. That was a long time ago. We’ve all dropped a half step toward second since then, which was probably why they had him working the slowest day of the week.

“Blade, need you to run a license for me.”

“What’s up?” he asked.

“Don’t know. Could be something. Might be nothing.”

“Like always. Gimme the number.”

What we were doing was technically illegal. Like I said, though, once a Ranger, always a Ranger. You never completely punch out. It would have been a lot worse if Wade had checked a license for some guy on the street who had never worn a badge or body armor. I read the number off the paper and heard him muttering a little.

“No can do, podjo,” he said. “System’s down for maintenance. Ain’t that the way? They always do these things on Sundays. Should be up tomorrow morning. Maybe later tonight. Tell you what. I’ll run it as soon as I can, and I’ll call you. Gonna cost you two beers and a burger.”

“Cheap at half the price,” I said. “You’re on.”

Sunday turned into Monday, and no word from Wade the Blade. I wasn’t surprised. Like most government agencies, the Rangers were stuck with a computer system that should have been junked years ago. Sometimes shutting it down made it lazy about booting up again.

I had nothing to do, and the Rangers didn’t have the only computer system in the state, so I drove over to Humble and introduced myself to the detective who’d caught Oakley’s murder.

His name was Ken Sheeran. My bona fides as an ex-Ranger got me into his office pronto. He was in his middle forties, a lifer. He was thick around the middle. His shirt gapped between the buttons when he sat down, probably because he saw extra-large shirts as an assault on his vanity. He had thick pewter hair and a gaze that could cut glass. The first time I saw him, I had a feeling he was a good cop. You get a sense for these things.

“How can I help you?” he asked.

“Maybe I can help you. I served papers on Ralph Oakley last week, a couple of days before he died.”

“Did you now?” Sheeran asked. “So you’re the one. Yeah. I see it now. You match the description.”

“Description.”

“Tall, lean guy like you, in his late sixties, with silver hair and a thick salt-and-pepper mustache. Voice like a cement mixer. Wearing a cream Stetson just like the one in your lap there. Sure. Several folks came forward and said you were poking around town last week asking about Ralph Oakley. Serving papers, you say?”

I showed him my PI license and a copy of my process service log. “He ditched out on jury duty. Judge wanted to have a word with him.”

“Guess that ship has sailed. I do recall some legal papers we retrieved from the trashcan in his room. You scared the piss out of that cleaning woman at the motel. I mean, like, literally. She peed her pants when you came knocking on Oakley’s door. She thought you were there to kill him. Don’t suppose you were. That would make my day.”

“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I was sitting in my car at the motel where he was shacked, and a woman came to visit him. It looked like she didn’t want to be seen entering his room. Has anyone said anything about him having a girlfriend?”

“Not as I recall. Can you describe this woman?”

“Five-five, nice figure. Good legs. I only saw her clearly from behind. I got her license number, though. Caught it on my dashcam.”

I handed him the slip of paper with the number and a thumb drive with the video segment from the cam.

“We’ll run this right away. I’d like to thank you for coming in.” He extended his hand. “This could be a big help.”

I started to shake hands, but my telephone beeped. It was Wade Stanfield. I held up a finger to Sheeran and answered.

“Sorry it took so long to run that number, buddy,” he said. “Computers just came back up this morning, and I had a backlog.”

“Did you get a hit?”

“Sure did.”

He told me the car owner’s name. I glanced at Sheeran.

“You need to do a safety check,” I said.

He tried to make me wait at the station, but we both knew that was unlikely. I followed him across town in my car. We parked in front of a wood frame house with a deep covered gallery. I followed him up the steps to the front door.

A woman answered when he knocked. I had never seen her face before, but the figure was familiar.

“Mrs. Borum?” Sheeran asked, flashing his shield. “Mrs. Margery Borum?”

“Oh, my God!” she said, her hand rising to her mouth. “What’s happened?”

“I think you know,” I said. Sheeran shot me a warning look.

“You,” she said to me. “I recognize you. You were the man sitting outside—” She stopped, cutting off the very end of the last word.

“Mrs. Borum,” Sheeran said. “We need to talk.”

She led us inside. She was flustered and sweaty, and she nearly forgot her manners. Finally she asked us to sit and even offered iced tea. We declined.

“Tell us about Ralph Oakley,” Sheeran said.

“He worked for my husband,” she said.

“He wasn’t working last Wednesday,” I said. “I know, because I served him a subpoena at his motel room. I saw you there minutes later. Were you in the habit of visiting him when your husband was at work?”

She started to cry. I sat back and let her. I did hand her a box of tissues from the table next to the couch. Her entire world was crumbling. I’d seen it a thousand times. It never got easy, but sometimes you just had to wait it out.

After a few minutes she calmed a little.

“We... Ralph and I... started seeing each other a few months back. It got out of hand, but I couldn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. We were talking about running off together. It seems silly, now that he’s dead. It never would have worked.”

“Why?” Sheeran asked.

“No money. Cash just burns holes in Ralph’s pockets. He can’t hold on to it. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Where were you on Friday?” I asked.

“In Houston, visiting a friend. We went shopping and had some drinks at a restaurant there. I know what you’re thinking. I was nowhere near Ralph on Friday. By the time I returned, around eight on Friday evening, the news was spreading around town. I’ve been a nervous wreck ever since.”

“Where’s your husband?” I asked.

“He’s at work, of course. He’ll be there until six.”

Sheeran told her not to call her husband. I followed him several streets over to the Borum Butcher Shop. When we walked through the door, the sales floor was empty. I pointed toward the door to the back.

“I’m calling for backup,” Sheeran said as he pulled a walkie from his pocket. I moved toward the door to check the parking lot. Sheeran started to follow me. I heard the blow that dropped him. It sounded like beating a watermelon with a wiffle bat. I turned. Sheeran was sprawled out on the floor, a pool of blood spreading from the back of his head, his eyes oddly unfocused. He twitched and jerked on the linoleum. Bob Borum stood over him, holding a honing steel, which dripped blood. In his other hand was a cleaver.

“You!” he shouted when he saw my face. “This is all your fault!”

“What did you do?” I knelt next to Sheeran and checked his wounds.

“Why in hell did you have to say anything about Ralph’s girlfriend?” Borum pleaded. There were tears in his eyes. “Twenty-three years. We been married twenty-three great years. Then you come in and tell me Ralph’s knocking off a little, so I decide I’ll swing by and see who he’s shagging. Thought it’d give me something to rib him about. I get to the motel, and there’s my own car sitting out front of his room. I followed her the next night, when she told me she was going out to a Grange meeting with her friend Sally. Sure enough, she went straight to that bastard Ralph.”

I backed toward the door. The confines of the butcher shop were too close for comfort. I pined for the open air, where I could dodge any swipes he might want to make with the cleaver. I had palmed Sheeran’s walkie. As I backed up, I quickly raised it and made an “officer down” call, adding the butcher shop address. I suddenly wished I’d also palmed his gun. I don’t carry one.

I hit the door, but it didn’t budge. I recalled that it opened inward from the street.

“You ruined my life, you son of a bitch!” Borum cried as he strode toward me, real tears streaming from his eyes. “Ain’t nothin’ left for me here. I either go on the road or on the gurney. Cain’t kill me twice, can they? I done took out Ralph, and now I done a cop. Ain’t nothin’ to keep me from doing you too.”

“When did you kill him?” I asked, trying to buy time.

“The next morning, on the way to work. I called his phone. Told him I’d drop by, give him a lift. I gave him a lift, all right. Lifted his cheatin’ ass all the way to fucking heaven!”

He dropped the bloody honing steel and raised his hand to wipe at the tears running down his face. I took the opportunity and charged him, the way a tackle sacks a quarterback. My shoulder rammed into his midsection, just below the ribs, crushing against his solar plexus. The air rushed out of him in an explosive gasp. In the back of my mind, I heard the sirens in the distance. I felt a sharp, searing pain along my left shoulder blade. He had swung at me with the cleaver and had connected. The cleaver hit the floor and skittered across it into the corner under a baseboard heater. My stomach lurched, and I tasted metal in the back of my throat. My heart raced as I grappled with the burly butcher, him trying to suck air into his lungs and me trying to hold him down. We rolled and scrabbled about in Sheeran’s blood. I got in two good punches just as the cruisers pulled into the parking lot, and I saw his eyes roll up in their sockets as he went slack beneath me.

It was touch-and-go for Ken Sheeran. They had to remove part of his skull because his brain was swelling. He was unconscious for almost a week, but slowly came around. He took a disability retirement. I had a call from him a few weeks back. He was thinking about the PI game. Wanted to know how to get a foothold. My long silence spoke volumes.

Bob Borum’s lawyer managed to make a deal for aggravated manslaughter mitigated by passion, but he’ll still spend the better part of the rest of his life in prison.

His wife divorced him while he was in jail waiting for trial. She moved away, I think to San Antonio. She showed up to testify, but otherwise nobody in Humble saw her again.

It took seventeen stitches to close the gash in my shoulder. Borum also fractured my scapula, so I was in a sling for a couple of months. You heal slower as you get old. It put a crimp in my PI activities, but that was okay. I needed a while to process things.

Bob Borum wasn’t a bad guy. Neither was Ralph Oakley. They weren’t criminals. They weren’t evil. They were two men in love with the same woman, and I walked into their lives, a stranger come to town, who innocently catalyzed their self-destruction. There were no bad guys in this, just people set on the path of disparate fates.

Borum blamed me for his life turning to shit. In a way, he was right. If I’d kept my mouth shut about seeing the woman go into Ralph Oakley’s motel room, probably none of this would have happened. At least it wouldn’t have happened because of me. Humble’s a small town. Sooner or later, one way or the other, the word would have gotten back to him. Killing Oakley was on him. I triggered it, though. That’s a lot of responsibility to carry around.

I would have to learn to live with that.