He kneels down next to me.
“The gloves, honey.”
He puts on a pair of clear plastic gloves. Everybody wears them lately. Nurses, doctors. The girl who cleans your teeth. The clerk in the food market. In the market it’s a sanitary thing, but the others are afraid of AIDS.
So what’s with the gloves? I’m an eighty-two year old woman, does he think I’ve got AIDS?
Oh.
His hands are on my throat.
* * *
It looks so small, my body.
I was always short, but a person shrinks. You get used to being short, and then you get shorter.
Some system. What genius thought it up?
I guess I’m dead now. I feel the same way, floating up above everything, as I did before he strangled me. But my body was alive then, and he choked me, and the life went out of me like a cork coming out of a bottle. But not champagne, it didn’t pop. It just came out.
So where’s the white light? Where’s the long tunnel with the white light at the end of it? Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen?
You die and there’s this tunnel and this white light, and every dead person who ever loved you is waiting to welcome you. And so on. People come back and tell about it. It was beautiful, they say, and I wanted to stay, they say, but it wasn’t my time.
Very nice, I used to think, but personally I’d rather go to Paris.
But did somebody just make that up? If I’m dead, what happened to the tunnel? Where the hell is the light?
Maybe that only happens if you die and come back. Maybe when you die for keeps, that’s it. Lights out, end of story.
So what am I doing here?
* * *
All wrapped up.
They wrap me in the plastic sheet, stuff me in garbage bags, seal me in with duct tape. What am I, meat for the freezer?
“No body,” she’s saying. “No DNA, nothing. No trace evidence. She’ll disappear and they’ll never even know what happened to her. And if they suspect, so what?”
I’m watching while they put me in a big duffle bag and carry me out to their car. There’s another sheet of clear plastic lining the trunk, and they lay the duffle bag on top of it. The trunk lid’s electric, you don’t have to slam it. You close it gently and it shuts itself the rest of the way automatically.
They get in the car, and it pulls away, and I’m floating in the air watching them drive off with my body. And the next thing I know they’re getting out of the car at the edge of a field. The trunk’s open and he’s carrying the duffle bag.
There’s a hole in the earth. They dug the grave ahead of time. I was walking around, having my breakfast, reading the paper, and all along there was a hole in the earth, waiting for me.
The duffle bag goes in the hole. And the plastic sheet from the trunk of the car. And the gloves he wore.
The grave’s filled in now. “She’s gone forever,” she says. “They’ll never find her.”
They never do.
* * *
Time is different when you’re dead. You’re someplace and then you’re not.
I’m around when they get arrested. And then I’m all over the place. People are talking about me—my friends, people from the neighborhood—and I’m there.
But I don’t really care what they say. I stop listening, and I’m somewhere else.
I’m at the trial. Powerful circumstantial evidence, the prosecutor says. He reads her notebook, and it’s all there. Everything they did, so they could steal my house. Who kills a person so they can steal her house?
Nothing but circumstantial evidence, the defense says. How can you convict without a body? How can you know for certain that a crime has been committed?
But I have a body. Listen to me. If I could talk to you I could tell you where to look. If I could take your hand I could lead you there.
* * *
Guilty, the verdict comes, guilty of everything. Oh, she can’t believe it. How could they convict her? There’s no body, there’s no DNA, so how on earth could they convict her?
Over a hundred years for each of them. I’m here, floating, seeing, hearing, and the sentence comes and the gavel comes down and they take them away in handcuffs.
It feels like I’ve been holding my breath all this time. That’s ridiculous, I don’t have lungs to hold a breath with, but that’s how it feels. And now I let it out, this breath that I haven’t been holding.
And now? They’re done, they’ll be in prison as long as they live, but what about me? Am I stuck with these two forever?
Oh.
Oh, there’s the tunnel. It’s like a whirlpool, an eddy, but not down. Through, it goes through. And there’s the white light they all talked about, and it’s so bright. I never saw anything so bright. It should hurt your eyes, but it doesn’t.
It’s beautiful. And, oh my God, look who’s here...
I have to say it was worth the wait.
Story Notes
Writing the stories is, if not necessarily easy, at least relatively simple and straightforward. The tricky part is putting them in sequence.
Well, not always. My most recent collection prior to this volume was The Night and the Music, comprising all the Matthew Scudder short fiction, eleven pieces in all, and it seemed obvious that they ought to appear chronologically.
But here we’re dealing with a great variety of material, including not only traditional fiction but also a one-act play and a newspaper op-ed piece. For a while I struggled to find a way to make one work lead into the next, and then I remembered the sterling example of a favorite author, John O’Hara, in one of his later collections of short stories. (Waiting for Winter, I think it was, but maybe not.) I bought the book as soon as it came out, opened it to the table of contents, and was struck by the fact that O’Hara had let alphabetical order determine the sequence of the stories.
At the time I couldn’t decide whether I was looking at a brilliant solution or an abdication of responsibility. I’ve since decided that the two are not mutually exclusive, and that what was good enough for the Bard of Gibbsville is good enough for me. And I have to say the sequence serves the stories well.
“A Burglar’s-Eye View of Greed” appeared in the newspaper Newsday in July 2002. I believe there was some news event that prompted an editor to commission the piece, which takes the form of my interviewing Bernie Rhodenbarr, my favorite burglar. Five years later, Mark Lavendier used the text in a limited-edition broadside.
“A Chance to Get Even” was written after Otto Penzler requested a story for a poker anthology. He liked it but asked for some changes which I didn’t want to make, and for some reason we were both uncharacteristically stubborn. I took the story back, and it was published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 2007.
“A Vision in White” is another Otto-inspired story, and another which he didn’t publish. I’d written a story (“Terrible Tommy Terhune”) for his anthology, Murder is My Racquet, but included it in my omnibus collection, Enough Rope. Otto pointed out that stories for his anthology had to be previously unpublished, and so I wrote “A Vision in White”; I sent it to Otto, and he thanked me for it, but then the whole thing slipped his mind and he wound up using “Terrible Tommy Terhune” in the book after all. When I realize this, I dusted off “A Vision in White” and sent it to Janet Hutchings, who published it in EQMM in 2008.
“Catch and Release” was also written for an anthology, in this case the cross-genre Stories, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, published in 2010. A number of reviewers singled out the story, several praising it, and one objecting to it because she found it too troubling. Unless there’s another that I’m forgetting, it’s one of two stories I’ve written about fishing, and it’s interesting (well, to me, anyway) that they’ve both wound up as the title stories of collections. (The other is “Sometimes They Bite.”)
“Clean Slate” first appeared in Warriors, the cross-genre anthology edited by Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin an
d published in 2010. And thereby hangs a tale.
Earlier, I’d written three stories about a then-unnamed young woman for whom the pursuit of happiness consists of picking up men, going home with them, enjoying sex with them, and then killing them. When Gardner and George requested a story about a warrior, I thought of my girl, and by the time I’d written the story I knew far more about her than I’d previously known, and realized that I was, not for the first time, writing a novel on the installment plan. The book, of course, is Getting Off, published in 2011 by Hard Case Crime, “by Lawrence Block writing as Jill Emerson.” “Clean Slate” is a pivotal chapter, and got further recognition as a short story in its own right when Harlan Coben selected it for Best American Mystery Stories of 2011.
“Dolly’s Trash and Treasures,” inspired by the reality shows about hoarders, was an interesting tour de force, in that it was commissioned for a 2010 UK audiobook anthology edited by my friend Maxim Jakubowski; thus it was written specifically to be read aloud. (I’d done something like this once before; “In For a Penny” was commissioned by the BBC to be read over the radio.) EQMM subsequently published it in 2011.
In 1997, EQMM published my short story, “How Far It Could Go.” A while later a theatrical producer in Los Angeles inquired about adapting it for the stage, and I looked at it and realized it was already a stage play in prose form. I offered to adapt it myself, and did so, and nothing happened. (That’s mostly what happens in the theater.) It’s since been performed by an amateur company in Australia, and may be included in an evening of off-off-Broadway one-act plays, but I’m not holding my breath. I rather like “How Far” as a play, and it certainly lends itself to low-budget production—two principal characters, one simple set. I’ve made it eVailable for $2.99, more in the hope that someone will want to stage it than in the hope my share of the $2.99 will make me rich, and I’m pleased to include it here for whatever enjoyment it might bring you.
“Mick Ballou Looks at the Blank Screen” was written as the text for a 2007 Mark Lavendier broadside; in 2011 I included it in The Night and the Music. And you’ll note that, as a happy alphabetical accident, it’s followed immediately by “One Last Night at Grogan’s,” which was written for The Night and the Music and has appeared nowhere else.
And now for something completely different. “Part of the Job” is a lost story, written in 1963-4, published (though I never knew about it) in 1967, and discovered over four decades later by the indispensable Lynn Munroe. The story that goes with it is better than the story itself, and you’ll find both included here.
“Scenarios” was written for The Dark End of the Street, a 2010 anthology edited by S. J. Rozan and Jonathan Santlofer and featuring a mix of writers of crime and literary fiction. I suppose my story has postmodern elements to it; I had in mind all the people (you know who you are) who commit no end of crimes in the privacy of their own minds.
L. A. Noire was a commissioned anthology designed to publicize a videogame of the same name. I was dubious when John Schoenfelder proposed that I write a story for it, and then surprised myself by coming up with an idea that engaged me within two hours of our phone conversation. “See the Woman” is the resultant story.
“Speaking of Greed” and “Speaking of Lust” were both written to be the title novellas of a pair of Cumberland Press anthologies, which I edited in partnership with the late and much lamented Marty Greenberg; the rest of the contents consisted of reprinted stories by other writers. Both books were published in 2001. Plans called for a series of seven books in all, with an original novella for each, but we stopped at two. I had a wonderful time writing the pair, greatly enjoying the old-fashioned frame device, but when it came time to try a third one (“Speaking of Wrath”, it would have been) I discovered the tank was bone-dry.
“Welcome to the Real World” is another story commissioned by Otto Penzler, this one for a golf anthology called Murder in the Rough. Once again, it was the second story I wrote for the book; I’d included the first (“Hit the Ball, Drag Fred”) in Enough Rope, and wrote this as a replacement. And this time around Otto remembered to replace “Fred,” and “Welcome” wound up in the book, published in 2006.
“Who Knows Where It Goes” was inspired by the economic downturn. I wrote it without a destination in mind, rather a rarity in recent years, and sent it straight to Janet Hutchings at EQMM. The title is from the haunting song by my friend Junior Burke.
“Without a Body” is more a vignette than a story. It was commissioned a good ten years ago by Esquire; I was one of five or six writers asked to write something inspired by the Sante and Kenny Kimes murder case. (You could look it up.) A private investigator friend of mine was doing some investigative work for the defense, so I talked to her and spent a day at the trial and wrote an impressionistic piece from the victim’s point of view. Esquire meanwhile had second thoughts, paid everybody, and returned all the stories. I quite forgot about it until it turned up on my hard drive—whereupon I sent it to EQMM, where I’m pleased to say it found a home in 2010.
About the Author
Lawrence Block has been writing award-winning mystery and suspense fiction for half a century. His most recent novels are Hit Me, featuring Keller, and A Drop of the Hard Stuff, featuring Matthew Scudder, who will be played by Liam Neeson in the forthcoming film, A Walk Among the Tombstones. Several of his other books have been filmed, although not terribly well. He’s well known for his books for writers, including the classic Telling Lies for Fun & Profit, and The Liar’s Bible. In addition to prose works, he has written episodic television (Tilt!) and the Wong Kar-wai film, My Blueberry Nights. He is a modest and humble fellow, although you would never guess as much from this biographical note.
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @LawrenceBlock
Blog: LB’s Blog
Facebook: lawrence.block
Website: lawrenceblock.com
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