A Dark Matter: A Novel

by Peter Straub

  “Only now even she isn’t here.”

  I could not help it, I flared out. “If you’re afraid to come in, go across Rush and check into the local flophouse.” I pointed down the street and across the busy avenue, where a yuppie bar seemed to be supporting a sagging residence hotel for derelicts, identified by a big Jetsons-in-Miami neon sign as the Cedar Hotel.

  “I’m not afraid of your house,” Olson said. This, I understood, was almost but not quite the literal truth. “And believe me, I’ve stayed in that fleabag more times than you can imagine. But what the fuck do you really want from me?”

  I inserted the long key into the enormous lock, then swung the red door open onto a wide vestibule with rosewood walls, a Shiraz rug, and a Chinese vase filled with fleshy-looking calla lilies. “For one thing,” I said, offering the first rational thing that came to mind, “I’d like to hear about Brett Milstrap.” This statement, which I had uttered without benefit of any sort of thought or consideration, startled me. If I had paused to think about it, I would have said that I had long ago forgotten the name of the second fraternity boy who had been in Spencer Mallon’s adoration circle.

  Infuriatingly, Olson stopped moving just before he would have walked through the door. “When am I supposed to have met Brett Milstrap?” Incapable of restraining himself, he looked down to the corner we had turned and retraced our steps: the conflict between his urgency to escape into the house and his reluctance to enter it froze him to the cement stoop. This was maddening to behold.

  Shaking his head, Don finally walked across my threshold. For a moment he glanced into the living room, then up at the angular staircase, attempting to adjust, I supposed, to the nature of his surroundings. The staircase and the gleaming warmth of silver and polished wood in the living room probably invited and repelled him in equal measure.

  “How many rooms you got in this place?”

  “Twelve or fourteen, depending on how you count.”

  “Depending on how you count,” Olson muttered, and began to place his feet on the intertwined long-stemmed tulips woven into the central runner.

  “Tell me,” I asked from the top of the stairs, “were your encounters with Milstrap accidental, or was he looking for you?”

  “Everybody thinks I have all these answers. Which I don’t, by the way.”

  The staircase opened into a roomlike mezzanine space furnished with a desk, a handsome leather chair, cut flowers in a straight-sided vase, and bookshelves flanking the side of the staircase in its ascent to the third floor. A dim, book-lined hallway led into the depths of the house.

  “If you ever get in trouble,” Olson said, “make sure your lawyer arranges house arrest.”

  Olson leaned against the top of the railing, narrowed his eyes, pursed his lips. A wave of goatish body stink floated from him as if misted through a secret valve.

  “While you’re taking a shower, I’ll find you some clothes. Drop what you’re wearing in the hamper. By the way, what’s your shoe size?”

  Olson looked down at his battered, mud-colored sneakers. “Ten and a half. Why?”

  “I believe this might be your lucky day,” I said.

  Half an hour later, a renewed Donald Olson padded into the ground-floor living room with the delicacy of a cat. I gathered that as well as showering he had washed, conditioned, and mildly gelled his hair, removed his stubble, moisturized his cheeks, and in a number of other ways improved his scent and appearance. The result was amazing—Olson seemed to have transformed himself into a younger, happier, and more handsome version of himself. A portion of this effect was due to his clothing, a blue button-down shirt slightly too large for him and green khakis bunched at the waist and rolled an extra turn at the cuffs. Below the cuffs appeared a pair of lightly brogued cap-toe shoes made from what looked like soft, buttery leather, of a brown so pale they were almost yellow. Apparently impressed by these splendid shoes, Olson smiled and pointed down.

  “That’s hand-tooling, right?”

  “If they were saddles, I guess you’d be right. You can have them.”

  “Man, you’re giving away your shoes?”

  “My feet went up a half size a couple of years ago. There’s a box of my old shoes you can go through.”

  Olson fell back on the sofa and extended his arms to his sides, his legs out before him. He looked like a furniture salesman. “What comfort. And my room, man. I couldn’t ask for anything nicer than that room.” Legs outstretched, he lifted both of his feet and contemplated the gorgeous shoes. “Say I walked into a top-of-the-line shoe store, how much would these babies set me back?” He lowered his feet to the carpet and leaned forward, prepared to be astonished.

  “How much did they cost? I don’t really remember, Don.”

  “Give me a ballpark number.

  “Three hundred.” I could not remember how much the shoes had cost, but it was probably twice that.

  Olson waggled a foot in the air. “I didn’t know you could even wear that much money on your feet.” He lowered his foot and spent a moment on a self-inspection: smoothed the fabric covering his thighs, held out his arms to regard his sleeves, ran his fingers down the row of shirt buttons. “I look like a guy with a house in the country and a flashy sports car. A vintage sports car—like what Meredith Bright used to drive! Remember that little red car? With that big chrome swoosh on the sides?”

  “I never saw her car,” I said. “I never even saw Meredith Bright.”

  “You really missed something, man.” He guffawed. “Meredith Bright wasn’t half bad, either. Back then, she looked like the most beautiful girl in the world. The most beautiful girl possible.”

  “Do you know what happened to Meredith Bright? Could you help me get in touch with her?”

  “Meredith wouldn’t add much to your project.”

  I jerked myself upright. “What is she doing now?”

  “She’s the wife of a senator. Before that, she was married to the CEO of a Fortune five hundred company. When they got divorced, she took him for thirty million dollars, plus an estate in Connecticut, which she sold to buy something a little bigger in Virginia or North Carolina, I forget, wherever the senator is senator from. He’s a Republican. She wants him to be president.”

  “I’ll be damned,” I said.

  “No, she will. It’s like something got into her.” He glanced at the wall beside him, then shifted his body to take it in more directly. The paintings on the wall seemed to have distracted him. They were by Eric Fischl and David Salle, who had been young art stars back when I bought the paintings. I would not have thought Don Olson would be particularly interested in them.

  “Got into her back then, you mean?”

  “Yeah. Before she started on her career of sucking the life out of rich guys, or whatever the hell it is she does.” He shifted around on the sofa, trying to figure out a way to describe what had happened to Meredith Bright. “You know how people sometimes have a kind of internal temperature, an internal climate? Meredith Bright has the internal climate of a vampire. That’s the best way I can say it. She makes you see the whole idea of demonic possession in a whole nother way. And we loved that woman, man, we were crazy about her. She’s scary, man.”

  “I guess her husbands didn’t think so.”

  “Millionaire senators and CEOs got different standards for a wife than other people. If the package looks really classy, they don’t care if she’s a zombie vampire. And this woman can pretend like a motherfucker.”

  “Boatman once said to me your whole group was ruined by what happened in that agronomy meadow. It looks that way to me, even though Meredith Bright is sort of a special case. Do you think you were ruined?”

  “Of course I was ruined. Look at my life! I need your help to get back on my feet. I just got out of jail. It was Menard, by the way, the prison in that Fugitive movie. Menard Correctional Institution.”

  I nodded but said nothing.

  Olson snapped his fingers. “That waitress at Ditka’s
, what was her name? Ashleigh? You know who she reminded me of? The Eel.”

  “I know, yes,” I said. “Me too. Except Ashleigh isn’t as beautiful as your friend the Eel. You should see the way she looks now.”

  “No offense, but she’s the same age we are.”

  “Just wait,” I said, and left the room, using a gesture that would tell a dog it would earn a treat if it sat down long enough. A few minutes later, I returned with a black-and-white photograph in a simple black frame with a foldout stand at the back. I handed it to Olson.

  “This was taken about a year ago. I’d show you more, but my wife hates having her picture taken.”

  “Again, Lee, no offense, but …” Olson was leaning against the back of the sofa and holding the photograph in both hands. “Wait.”

  He sat up, placed the photograph on the tops of his knees, and bent over to peer at it. “Wait a second here.”

  Olson was shaking his head and grinning. “Here’s this little gray-haired woman, but … it sort of sneaks up on you, doesn’t it? She’s amazing. Beauty like that, where does it come from?”

  “Sometimes in restaurants, or on airplanes, I see these guys staring at her as if they’re asking themselves, How the hell did that happen? Waiters fall in love with her. Cops fall in love with her. Cabdrivers fall in love with her. Baggage handlers. Doormen. Crossing guards.”

  “She’s really … stunning. Once you see it, you can never miss it again. She still looks like herself. The gray hair doesn’t matter, she has a couple of lines on her face, they don’t matter. She still looks like the Eel, only she grew up into this amazing woman.”

  Olson was still staring down at the photograph of Lee Truax, the former Eel, her luminous face tilted up to gather or shed sunlight apparently produced from within. “Anyhow, your wife gets out and about, I gather? She does a lot of traveling? That works out okay?”

  “Are you asking me about something else now, Don?”

  “Well, isn’t she … is she blind?”

  “Blind as a bat,” I said. “Has been for years now. It never actually slowed her down. It doesn’t even get in her way very much. If she happens to need help, there’s always some cabdriver, or doorman, or passing cop, to give her a hand. She could raise a dozen volunteers just by holding up that stick leaning against the chair. She calls it her distaff.”

  Olson shivered. “Really?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “A distaff is supposed to be this harmless thing you wind wool around, but … Oh, never mind. Now, I guess, it just refers to things connected to women. You knew that.”

  “Of course. I’m sure it’s a reference to something she saw back in the meadow. That’s why she went blind, you know—because of something she saw. Or because of everything she saw. It happened gradually. Over about ten years—roughly 1980 to 1990. She said it was being kind to her, taking so long to become complete.”

  “I saw a distaff,” Don said, a little reluctantly. “On that day. Just for a second.”

  He pushed himself up from the sofa and moved to the windows at the front of the house. Hands in the pockets of the khakis, he bent forward and looked out at Cedar Street. “You got anything to drink here, by the way? Been a long time since lunch.”

  “Follow me,” I said, and brought him back into the kitchen. Last in the row of gleaming cabinetry, down from the refrigerator and immediately above the glass-fronted wine fridge, the liquor cabinet contained dozens of bottles arrayed in ranks.

  “And a very merry Christmas to you, too,” Olson said. “Do I see some fancy-schmancy tequila back there?”

  I poured him a juicy, cognac-like tequila and gave myself a beer. It was a few minutes past six, at least an hour before I would ordinarily permit himself to take alcohol. At a level not quite conscious, I supposed that Don Olson would be more forthcoming if he put away some tequila.

  We carried our drinks to the slab of the kitchen table and sat facing each other, as my wife and I usually did. Olson gulped tequila, swished it around in his mouth, swallowed, smacked his lips in appreciation, and said, “Hey, it’s not like I want to be ungrateful or anything, but I feel like an imposter in these clothes, man. Blue button-down shirts and khakis might be a great look for you, Lee, but my own personal style is a little edgier, I guess you could say.”

  “You’d like some new clothes.”

  “That’s what I’m saying, basically.”

  “We could go to a couple places down on Michigan Avenue. No reason you should feel uncomfortable.”

  “Man … you’re like a saint. No wonder the Eel married you.”

  I let that one go, irritating though it was.

  On we talked, and later went shopping and had a simple dinner of fish and pasta and talked some more, and I had the odd thought that I was becoming better friends with the former Dilly than we had been in the years when we had seen each other every day.

  Olson’s abrupt departure on the evening of October 16, 1966, had felt like a wound, all the more painful for being so absolute. There had been something about a rising tide, apparently, but I had assumed this vague prediction to apply to Boats. Unexpectedly, Boats had been left behind, reeling with shock and loss like the rest of the survivors. According to three eyewitnesses, Meredith Bright had bounded harelike through the scraps of orange-yellow fog drifting across the meadow, scramming back into the safety of what we assumed to be her privileged life. At least, her disappearance made sense of a kind. Hootie was another matter. Howard Bly, like us a child of West Madison, had vanished into a world at once eerily utterly unknown and dreadful to contemplate.

  This history, and more, formed the substance of the endless conversation between Donald Olson and myself that went for days on Cedar Street. I knew perfectly well that nothing was stopping me from disappearing into my office five or six hours a day, and that I was taking a deliberate break from work (something my wife had only rarely succeeded in getting me to do), yet I could tell myself that spending time with Olson amounted to research of a kind. And it was somehow as though my wife had given me permission to poke around in the only locked room in our marriage—the only one I knew about, anyhow.

  On the fourth evening of his stay, Don Olson gave striking corroboration to her conviction that Keith Hayward was a dangerous character. What Don said about Hayward also backed up Detective Cooper’s theory that the murdered boy was related to the Milwaukee villain known as the Ladykiller.

  “Hootie and your wife used to tell Spencer that Hayward was even worse than he imagined, which was pretty funny anyhow, because how did they know what he thought? Besides, they were only going on impressions and intuitions.”

  “But you had some kind of proof?” I asked.

  “Well, it wasn’t proof, but it looked crazy enough to spook me.”

  “What was it?”

  “A place, a special place Hayward set up. I wandered into an antiwar rally behind the library and saw him mooching around, trying to pick up girls. He wasn’t getting anywhere, let’s put it that way. Every girl he went up to shot him down. After he struck out four or five times, he got pissed off. Even that tells you a lot about the guy, doesn’t it? He didn’t get depressed, he didn’t get unhappy, he got angry.”

  “The girls refused to follow his script.”

  “That’s right. And he changed—his face got tight, and his eyes shrank. He looked around to see if anybody was watching him. Never saw me, thank God, because I’d parked myself in a pretty inconspicuous spot. I could tell he had some kind of secret. So when he took off up State Street, I just puttered along behind him.

  “The guy marched straight up to Henry Street, where he turned left and zoomed on by the Plaza Bar and right into this vacant lot that had three old sheds, like small garages, at the far end. As soon as he stepped into the lot, he pulled his big ball of keys out of his pocket, and he let himself into the last little shed. Even back where I was, I could hear him slam the door and lock it. Then I waited a couple of seconds and hustled acro
ss the lot to look into the little windows in the door.”

  I had some ideas about Hayward’s idea of amusement, but I asked, “What was he doing?”

  “Talking to a knife, that’s what he was doing,” Don said. “And singing to it. Singing. He was standing in front of a table, picking up this big knife, kind of fondling it, and putting it back down. The whole deal struck me as really creepy. Who sings to a knife? In a locked shed?”

  “Hayward was a disturbed guy, that’s for sure. I’ve been looking through some … No, I can’t talk about it yet.”

  “Hey, Chief, that’s up to you.” Don slumped in his chair and pushed aside his plate. We had lingered at the irregular slab of dark-gray stone that served as the kitchen table. “Is it too late for a nightcap?”

  “You know where the bottles are.”

  Olson slid out of his chair and began to move toward the liquor cabinet.

  “Oh, hell,” I said. “Get me another beer out of the fridge, will you?” I felt an underlying heaviness tugging at my voice.

  “You got it.”

  Olson handed me a beer and sat down again. His story had excited him, and he would be damned if he would go to bed: Donald Olson was still only a few days out of jail, he was dressed in new clothes, and he had his mitt around a glass of the finest tequila he had ever tasted.

  “How’s the Eel?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Is her conference going well? Or whatever it is?”

  “It is, yes. In fact, she told me she’s going to stay in Washington for another week. There’s plenty for her to do there.”

  “She knows I’m here?”

  “Yes. You can stay a while longer, if you like. There are a few ideas I want to explore, a couple of things I’d like to suggest.”

  “Okay. And here’s some actual good news I was saving up. From now on I won’t have to sponge off you anymore.”

  “You scared up some money? How’d you do that?”

  “Called in a few favors. Maybe you could give me a hand setting up a new bank account, arranging for a checkbook, stuff like that?”