Shuteye for the Timebroker

by Paul Di Filippo

  “Latest?” Lingenfelter said. “Others have occurred?”

  “Thanks for doing your duty as a citizen,” the woman replied. “We’ll call if we have any further questions.” Click.

  Lingenfelter set the envelope with its provocative clippings aside and reexamined the squawks in today’s paper. His heart, the pounding of which had eased a bit, began to hammer again at his rib cage. One item annoyed him intensely: Now that ‘The Squawk Box’ has printed me, I have an agent ready to sell movie rights to my life to the highest bidder. What an egomaniac! What a self-deluding boob!

  Oddly, Lingenfelter’s own agent, Morris Vosbury, chose that moment to call him again. He let the phone ring. Just as his answering machine prepared to kick in—provoking Morris’s hanging up, for he refused to talk to a machine—Lingenfelter relented and picked up.

  “Finally,” Morris said. “How goes the latest Ethan Dedicos? You gonna make your April fifteenth deadline?”

  “Tax day?” Lingenfelter moaned. “That’s less than a month off.”

  “Yeah, well, we chose it as a mnemonic aid, Harry. Remember how you forgot your own birthday as a deadline for the last Dedicos?”

  “That book drained me spiritually,” Lingenfelter said. “I had to go deep—deep into myself—for Blessed Are the Debonair.”

  Morris’s long pause suggested that he was biting his tongue. Eventually he said, “So how goes Seven Terriers from Bedlam?”

  “Not bad until you broke my concentration.” After a few closing pleasantries, Lingenfelter hung up. A pox on Morris, anyway. How, after such an intrusion, could he hope to concentrate on his fiction writing? Better to soothe his nerves with a little Wild Turkey and a new strategy for cracking “The Squawk Box.”

  • Some self-obsessed fame seekers think that enlightenment occurs at the pop of a flashbulb.

  • Cellphones have as much business in the front seat of moving motor vehicles as uncapped whiskey bottles.

  • Ever notice how the mayor’s mustache makes him look Adolf Hitler in an elongating funhouse mirror?

  • My condolences to the person who spent two weeks in Los Angeles for brain surgery. Even without surgery, L.A. can appallingly alter the brain.

  • In the long annals of crime, Fulton County’s counterfeiter of Beanie Babies hardly qualifies as an Al Capone clone.

  • Yesterday I got a mailing from an “intellectual” magazine begging me to subscribe: “Think for yourself. Just send in our card.” I thought for myself. I ash-canned the card.

  One more, Lingenfelter thought, just one more and I’ll get back to my novel. He tapped out: Journalism is to literature as a stomach flutter is to all-out panic. What did that mean, exactly? He had no clear idea. He did know that he had killed yet another afternoon, and when none of these submissions appeared in the paper that week, he knew, too, that his career was down-spiraling like a missile-struck F-111.

  How did other writers maintain their focus when day-to-day living threw so many distractions at them? He checked the Activities page in the Harbinger. Conferences and book signings were rampant in Atlanta this weekend, with visits from such eminences as John Updike and A. S. Byatt, such mystery-writing stalwarts as Sue Grafton and Joe R. Lansdale, and such up-and-comers as Ace Atkins and Atlanta’s own Chick Morrow. Lingenfelter had met Chick last year at a Georgia Author of the Year program. Although he had liked Chick, he had also felt a twinge of impending competition. This Saturday the younger writer had a signing, albeit a modest one, at the Science Fiction & Mystery Bookshop on Highland Avenue.

  Chick bore down and wrote. He deserved his success. Lingenfelter could not imagine him sweating bullets to place a silly one- or two-liner in an amateur forum like “The Squawk Box.” This thought sobered Lingenfelter, literally. He set aside his bourbon bottle and applied himself all morning to Seven Terriers from Bedlam, his first long stint of work on the novel in over six weeks. At noon, he felt like a hero—or, at least, a competent human being.

  On Sunday, he paged to the squawks out of habit rather than compulsion. The “Squawk of the Week” leaped out like a mocking jack- in-the-box, but he thought it amusing—and incisive—and wished that he had written it, for it jibed with his own experience:

  Having met several authors at book signings, I can report that most writers are smarter on paper than in person.

  Amen.

  Hold on, Lingenfelter warned himself. If the “Squawk of the Week” provides our anonymous serial killer fantasy fodder for his next murder, why couldn’t he settle on you as his next victim? Ridiculous. For one thing, the previous murders both took place in or around Atlanta, not out in the country. For another, even in the South, writers abound. If you know where to look, you’ll find writers wriggling like maggots.

  Lingenfelter observed the Sabbath. He walked to Ernie Salter’s and played him several games of two-handed poker. And the next week he wrote—on his novel, not on a battery of desperate, doomed-to-rejection squawks. Life seemed almost tolerable again. One night, in fact, he called Nan in Montana—hey, not a bad title for a Western—and apologized for his crazy work schedule and Net surfing, which together had pitched their relationship into the crapper.

  On Thursday morning, though, he opened the Harbinger to find this headline on the front page: Rising Atlanta Mystery Star Chick Morrow / Himself the Subject of a Mystery: / Body Found Strangled in Ponce de Leon Apartment. An inset head read, “Police suspect that killer / uses popular Harbinger column / to target victims.” Jesus, Lingenfelter thought.

  Apparently, the murderer had surprised Chick Morrow at his desk and choked the life out of him. Then the fun had begun. The intruder had affixed a dunce cap to Chick’s head, rolled out a sheet of butcher paper, and laid Chick on the paper. Then he’d sketched a red outline around Chick’s body with a grease pencil, just as the police draw a chalk outline around a murder victim for investigative purposes. This time the killer had not mutilated or dismembered his victim. But when the police moved Chick’s body, they found the paper inside his outline teeming with mathematical formulae, some so abstruse that only Stephen Hawking could have deciphered them.

  “Think last Sunday’s ‘Squawk of the Week,’” said one detective. “You know, ‘smarter on paper than in person.’ Get it? Pretty highbrow. Pretty sick.”

  I’d say, Lingenfelter murmured.

  Bam! Bam! The screen on the kitchen door banged open and shut.

  Lingenfelter jumped up from his computer table. Had the killer come for him, too? He kept no handgun in his house, and this morning he regretted that scruple. In a panic he looked about for a heavy object—doorstop, paperweight, dictionary—to use for self-defense.

  Ernie Salter manifested in the doorway. “Hey, Harry, how you doin’?”

  “Not so good.” Lingenfelter patted his heart. “A friend of mine up in Atlanta was strangled dead yesterday.”

  “That’s why I come over. That damned ‘Squawk Box’ thing. You hear how the paper ain’t gonna run a ‘Squawk of the Week’ no more?”

  “I just read it—last paragraph in the story.”

  “Oh, man,” Ernie said. “Sorry ’bout your friend. Weird how it’s got this screwy squawk tie-in. Weird ’n spooky.”

  “Take me to Atlanta. I’ve got to see about Chick, help the family, something. I’ll pay if you drive me.” Nan had taken their car when she’d skedaddled for Montana, but Lingenfelter had not missed it until now. He got around Mountboro just fine on foot or bicycle.

  “You got it, bro. When you want to leave?”

  * * *

  An hour later, Ernie drove Lingenfelter up I-85 toward Atlanta. Traffic streamed about them, and by chance they fell in behind a slow-moving Parmenter’s chicken truck. White fluff from its stacked cages blew back at them in a diffuse blizzard, along with a sickening stench.

  Ernie said, “Now those birds got something real to squawk about.”

  “You mean Chick Morrow’s murder doesn’t qualify?”

  “I mean I’m
glad you gettin’ over your squawk hang-up. Even as I’m sorry ’bout poor Chick.”

  “I’m just jumpy, Ernie. Chick’s murder has really hit me. The other killings made me feel weird, but this one wrings my heart. There’s more to all this than a robotic ‘Son of Sam’ character taking random instructions from a newspaper. ‘The Squawk Box’ strikes me as—well, flat-out evil. Look at the hold the damn thing had on me. It’s like all my aborted squawks fed something bad, a monster living off ill will.”

  Ernie chewed his unlit cigar. “You trying to say the Squawk Jock’s the killer?”

  “No. Well, maybe. Damn, I don’t know! The cops probably grilled the Jock, once they saw the link between the column and the murders, but he’s still running free. I don’t know what to think.”

  “Best not to think at all then.” Ernie dialed in some gospel music and hummed along with it.

  Traffic in the metro region had worsened nearly every month for the past decade. Today it crawled. Unable to pass the smelly chicken truck, they suffered with rolled-up windows and no air conditioning in the moderate late-March heat.

  Chick Morrow’s well-maintained apartment building stood between an electrical supply store and a laundry-processing plant—hardly the most elite neighborhood. But Lingenfelter knew just how little beginning writers usually earned, and he admired Chick for doing as well as he had. The place had a low redbrick wall in front of it and majestic oaks rearing in back. Lingenfelter stepped onto the sidewalk.

  “Coming with?”

  “I ain’t no Hardy Boy. Got a sister on the south side who wants to see me.”

  “OK. I have some other places to visit here, anyway. But I can get to ’em using the bus. See you later.”

  Ernie scribbled on a matchbook. “Here’s my sister’s number. Call me when you’re ready to head on home.” His pickup grumbled off down the street.

  Lingenfelter climbed the condo steps. The name CHICK MORROW on an embossed strip identified the apartment. He mashed the button.

  A woman’s dispirited voice issued from the speaker grille: “Yes? Who is it?”

  “I’m a friend of Chick’s. Harry Lingenfelter. I just—well, I just wanted to talk to someone about Chick.”

  “Come on up.”

  The door to Chick’s apartment opened on the blotchy face of a red-haired young woman who introduced herself as Lorna Riley. She surprised Lingenfelter by observing that Chick had often talked about him.

  “Don’t worry about defacing the ‘crime scene,’” she said, waving him in. “Once the police had finished, they put me in touch with a company that specializes in cleaning up murder scenes. Can you imagine making your living that way? I never did, before all this. Now, such a service seems a gruesome inevitability.”

  Inside the modest apartment, Lingenfelter had no idea how to proceed, or what he hoped to learn, or how he could help. He asked impulsive questions. Did Chick have any enemies that Lorna knew about? No. Was Chick despondent? No, Lorna rejoined. His first novel was about to receive a favorable review in this Sunday’s Harbinger, and his agent had already fielded a half-dozen inquiries from Hollywood. He had everything to live for.

  Lingenfelter disengaged from his role as inquisitor. He had to go. He extended his hand to Lorna, who flabbergasted him by falling into his arms, her whole body slack with despair. She wept quietly as Lingenfelter patted her back. Eventually, she regained her composure, apologized for the lapse, and told him that the funeral would take place on Sunday in a church near Emory University.

  “Will you come?”

  “Of course.” He gave her both his phone number and that of Ernie’s sister, then tripped down the stairs and strolled to the nearest bus stop.

  * * *

  Like many freelancers, Lingenfelter often took quick assignments for the ready cash. Among these jobs, the one he most enjoyed was writing book reviews for the Harbinger. His editor was Heather Farris, a woman from Rhode Island with a degree in comparative lit from Brown University. He had never met her in person, but on the telephone she had a scrappy personality and a sharp-tongued sense of humor. Surely she could introduce him to the Squawk Jock. Once he detailed his own minor complicity in feeding the beast loose in Atlanta, she had to help him, journalistic ethics be damned.

  Suppose Heather did introduce him to the Jock—what then? Did he confront the man as an accomplice to the murders? Ask him if he knew the identities of any likely serial killers? Badger him about his failure to print any of Lingenfelter’s own squawks? And if he learned something that pointed to the killer, did he call the police? Or did he put on the persona of his own Ethan Dedicos, just as Bruce Wayne put on the regalia of Batman? What role should he play?

  A block from the newspaper building, Lingenfelter got off the bus and walked to its towering facade. At the security desk in the lobby, he explained that he had come to see Heather Farris, the Book Page editor. The guard spoke briefly into a headset mike and nodded him to a bank of elevators with copper-colored doors. Riding an elevator up, Lingenfelter felt like a surreal avatar of himself.

  Heather greeted him warmly. She had a mole on her left jaw on which he fixated. At some moments the olive-complexioned editor glowed like a movie star, at others she went as sallow as a sufferer of jaundice—shifts that discomfited Lingenfelter as he tried to explain why he had come and what he wanted. Her mole had him hypnotized. His mission had him stuttering.

  Finally, Heather broke in: “Our so-called Squawk Jock doesn’t meet folks face to face. He wants to avoid bribery, intimidation, even outright threats on his life. Some people will try almost anything to get a squawk of theirs in print.”

  “I believe it,” Lingenfelter said. “But Chick’s strangulation—this whole series of murders—should alter things radically.”

  “It has. We’ve dropped the ‘Squawk of the Week.’ And the police already know the Jock’s identity. Your need to know, however, seems low-level, if not nonexistent.”

  Lingenfelter said that he had deduced the link between the “Squawk of the Week” and the murders early on, that Chick Morrow was a friend, and that he had a powerful sense that “The Squawk Box” channeled a current of amorphous evil in the city. The Squawk Jock’s weekly selection of a champion squawk focused this evil and put it into deadly real-world play. He, Lingenfelter, understood the mind of the typical squawker as well as, if not better than, anyone. Moreover, for the entire city’s sake, Heather had an obligation to tell him the Squawk Jock’s identity.

  “My God, Harry, you really do believe you’re Ethan Dedicos. What can you do that the police can’t?”

  “Something—something more than they’ve managed. Tell me, Heather.”

  “He’d kill me.” Heather locked her fingers and extended both hands in a tension-reducing stretch. “Oh, not literally of course.”

  “I’ll say a friend on the police force tipped me. He’ll never suspect you.

  Review copies of books—bound galleys, photocopied typescripts, finished hardcovers—teetered on Heather’s desk in untidy stacks. She drummed her fingers on the dust jacket of an illustrated art book titled Topographical Abstracts of the Human Body. She squinted at Lingenfelter. She exhaled and said,

  “Sylvester Jowell.”

  “The Harbinger’s art critic?” This revelation was so unexpected that Lingenfelter thought it bogus, an obvious dodge. “You’re kidding.”

  “Go see him. Check the far end of this floor.” Heather gestured, accidentally toppling a stack of books. “The next time you visit, don’t ask me to play stool pigeon.”

  Lingenfelter nodded good-bye and wandered among the reporters’ workstations toward Sylvester Jowell’s office, fearful that as soon as he had stepped out of earshot, Heather would telephone the police to confess what she had just done.

  Sylvester Jowell! Lingenfelter marveled. The man wrote hoity-toity reviews of art gallery openings, single-artist retrospectives, and the like. He had two Harvard degrees, a Pulitzer Prize for art criticism, and a cit
ywide reputation as an erudite snob. Had he really agreed to take on the proletarian task of editing “The Squawk Box”? Did his duties as art critic give him so much leisure time—and so little leftover discrimination—that he gladly compiled that daily burlesque of good taste? Maybe his well-known fondness for outsider art had a literary counterpart. Atlanta’s squawks probably charmed him in the same way the childlike visual artifacts of Grandma Moses and Howard Finster did.

  Jowell’s cubicle stood empty. A reporter dressed in satiny gray, including even his tie, intercepted Lingenfelter. The illustrious Mr. Jowell, this reporter said, had taken himself for the umpteenth time to the High Museum for yet another encounter with a special exhibition of the horrific paintings of the late British artist Francis Bacon. If Lingenfelter hurried over there, he could find Mr. Jowell in the galleries devoted to this prestigious show.

  As Lingenfelter turned to go, the reporter asked, “Do you like Bacon?”

  Lingenfelter answered, “Usually only on a BLT.”

  * * *

  The High Museum suggested a modernistic castle keep made of big, bone-white Lego blocks. The long-running Francis Bacon exhibit had not attracted families or young children—a parental outcry had put an end to one scheduled middle school field trip—and its most devout fans had already seen it many times. So Lingenfelter had no trouble getting in—for ten dollars—or striding up the access ramp to the maze of rooms filled with Bacon’s unsettling images.

  He declined a headset providing commentary on each of the paintings. He peered about in foreign-feeling awe. The hardwood floors seemed to rise under him like concrete slabs on hidden hydraulic lifts, and the pictures, many under glass, assaulted him with bloody reds and opalescent grays. Moving slowly, he gaped at Bacon’s huge renderings of screaming popes, butchered cow carcasses, feral dogs, and distorted three-part crucifixions. The show bemused and sickened Lingenfelter, who sidled into a small room with only a watercooler and a wicker bench for furnishings. He sat on the bench, his head hanging forward.