The Triple Shot Box (Goodey's Last Stand, Not Sleeping Just Dead & Fighting Back): Three Gritty Crime Novels

by Charles Alverson

  Hugo has called a megathon for 2400 hours tonight. The below listed will appear in the Horizon Room at that hour:

  Lenore Fischer

  Pops Martin

  James Carey

  Harold Fischer

  Don Moffitt

  Jonah Goodey

  Rachel Schute

  Genie Martin

  Emma Carter

  Susan Wallstrom

  Mark Kinsey

  Aileen Moffitt

  Michael Grenby

  Frederick Crenshaw

  The notice went on to list a large number of lesser beings who weren’t included in the megathon but who apparently had some function to perform. One of the few names I recognized was that of Jack Gillette.

  When I walked back over to him, Gillette was smiling broadly.

  “Do you know what a megathon is, Joe?” he asked.

  “I’ve got a general idea,” I said. “And I’m going to catch some sleep.” I turned to Crenshaw, who was looking bemused. “Jack will find you a room,” I told him. “See you at midnight.”

  17

  I was suddenly wide awake. My watch on the bedside table told me that it was five minutes to midnight. No sooner had I swung my feet to the floor than a peremptory knock hit the door, and two characters in shapeless blue gowns came in and turned on the overhead light. They were a couple of mugs I’d seen hanging around downstairs, and in the gowns they looked like they were going to a Mafia Halloween party. But they seemed to be taking the whole thing very seriously.

  I reached for my trousers, but one of them said: “You won’t need those.” The other one held out his arms, on which was folded something of purest white.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Your robe.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No,” he said. “All participants in a megathon wear these robes. It’s part of the ritual.” He shoved the robe toward me.

  I shrugged, took the robe from him and slipped it over my head. There was no mirror in the room, but I imagined that I looked lovely. The other one held out a pair of Japanese-style sandals and I put them on.

  “What,” I said, “no turban?” But neither of them even cracked a smile.

  I started to put on my watch, but one of them said: “Leave it. You won’t need it.” For some reason, I obeyed.

  “Follow us, please.”

  I did. And as we came out into the half-darkened hall, I saw another white-robed figure turning ghostlike down the stairs. I couldn’t tell who it was. I followed my guides down the stairs to the same room to which I’d been summoned the night before. But the Horizon Room had changed. For a start, the lights were out, and the room was dimly lighted entirely with tall, white candles. All the furniture had been removed, and a circle of large cushions left in place of it. Most of the cushions had white-robed figures on them, but in the dimness it wasn’t easy to make out who they were.

  My attendants led me to a cushion on the side of the circle near the door and indicated that I should sit down. Then they stepped back against the wall. The cushion on one side of mine was empty, but the other was occupied by Aileen Moffitt. She was sitting in a modified lotus position and seemed to be communing with the verities with little spare time for neighborly chitchat.

  I turned my head to see Rachel sitting down on the empty cushion to my left. I whispered, “What’s the schedule?”

  “You’ll find out, Joe,” she said, in less than a whisper. “Just relax and let it happen.”

  Since I didn’t have much choice, I took her advice. The gaps in the circle were filling in. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I could see that Pops Martin and Genie had come in and taken places across the room, leaving only two empty cushions directly across from my position. I had an idea who these were for.

  Then all the white-clad figures were standing up, some more gracefully than others, and, not to be a spoilsport, I joined them. All eyes in the room seemed to turn in my direction, but I knew they weren’t looking at me. By turning my head slightly, I could see that Lenore Fischer had entered the room and was heading for one of the two empty places. She stopped behind a cushion with her eyes riveted on the door behind me.

  I could have turned and watched the door, but instead I watched Lenore Fischer’s face. It seemed totally blank, but then, at once, her face took on life, and, almost as if it were a mirror, I could see reflected in it Fischer’s presence in the doorway. Her eyes followed Fischer as he slowly walked around the circle to my left and stood behind the only remaining empty cushion. He took Lenore’s hand, and as if on command, all of the rest of us in the circle joined hands with those on either side. I didn’t will my hands to move; they just did. Rachel’s hand was warm—and slightly damp. Aileen’s was as dry and cool as marble. In his white robes, Fischer took on Olympian stature. There was dignity in his flawed face that was not assumed. There was no question who was in command in that room. His robe was no different from any of the others, but he wore it with absolute authority. I couldn’t say that I liked the feeling. Sitting there in my underwear in that unaccustomed garment, I felt very vulnerable.

  “Let us sit, friends,” said Fischer, and we did. My knees cracked loudly, and Rachel gave me a cautionary look as if I’d fired them off on purpose.

  As we sat, the blue-robed functionaries blew out most of the candles and disappeared. The door closed behind the last of them, and it was as if the room, and all of us in it, were cut off completely from the rest of the world. As if there were nothing but a void on the other side of that door. I didn’t much like the feeling.

  Out of the near darkness, Fischer’s voice, deep, mellow and somber, said: “As those of you who have attended a megathon will know, we always begin with a period of total silence to empty our minds, to cleanse our faculties of outside influences. Let the silence begin.”

  And it did. Not that it had been all that noisy before, except for a certain amount of restrained coughing and clearing of throats. Now complete silence fell over the room, and I was afraid of even swallowing too vigorously for fear of making someone fall out of a trance. The others may have been emptying their minds, but I was busy trying to figure how I could turn Fischer’s megathon to my own advantage. I wasn’t quite sure exactly what he was out to accomplish. It was probably to get me and Crenshaw off his back and somehow help Grenby satisfy Dominguez. That was a tall order even for a megathon, and I was going to be watching with interest.

  But I suspected that I was going to be more than an observer at this clambake. With the knowledge I had picked up at J. B. Carter’s cave, I figured I could at least enliven matters a bit if they threatened to get dull. I had a feeling that this was going to be an unusual megathon.

  I got a bizarre image of J.B. at the megathon in which he’d starred, sitting perched on one of those cushions with his white beard jutting out over those flowing robes like a renegade monk. He must have been as full of anticipation as I was at that very moment. The mandatory silence wasn’t very exciting, but I wasn’t exactly eager to have it end.

  “Somebody is not concentrating,” Fischer rapped out, and I wondered if I’d involuntarily let out a snort at the mental image of J.B. under the gun. A barely audible but impatient sound coming from Rachel’s direction gave me the idea that maybe I had. I silently vowed to be a better boy in the future, but I couldn’t help looking around the circle.

  It wasn’t easy to make out much in that light, but most of them seemed to be sitting and staring blankly into the near darkness. I was finding it a bit hard to keep my own eyes open and to stifle the yawns that came rolling up from my throat.

  I tried to fight them off by mechanically moving my eyes from one person in the circle to the other. Genie was at Pop’s left, and the white robe made her look more like a depraved pixie than ever, although it wasn’t nearly as becoming as the sweet nothing she’d worn to my room.

  I wondered whether Fischer could detect impure thoughts during a megathon.

  Across th
e circle from Genie, Emma Carter sat with all the serenity of the lead soprano in a hard-shell Baptist choir. It seemed pretty obvious that she was drawing considerable support from Fischer and the others, but I found it hard to believe that J.B. wasn’t dominating her thoughts no matter what Fischer said. It would be interesting to see whether Fischer had the chutzpah to bring up the matter of signing over the estate during the megathon.

  Before I could move my survey to the next cushion, the lights of the room began to grow brighter like a false dawn. Pops Martin jumped as if someone had stuck him with a pin. I looked around at a few faces, and I imagined that I wasn’t the only one who felt a bit disoriented. I noticed that the anti-Hugo graffiti had been covered with a sheet.

  “Friends,” said Fischer, winning all our attention, “for the purposes of this megathon, I want you to forget all about time. The megathon is timeless and so, for as long as you are in it, are you. I shall establish the time reference that we will use. And it is now time for breakfast.”

  The door opened and a squad of blue-robed minions under the direction of Jack Gillette came into the room bearing large covered trays. One rolled a cart loaded with plates and metal serving dishes. In a very short time, we were all eating bacon and eggs and chatting with our neighbors as if it were 9 A.M. and not the middle of the night.

  Rachel seemed to have declared a truce with me.

  “This is my first megathon, Joe,” she said, with the shining eyes of a girl at the junior prom.

  “Me, too,” I said, a bit fatuously. “Rachel,” I said, “will you tell me something?”

  “Of course, Joe,” she said sincerely.

  “What are you wearing under your robe?”

  I shouldn’t have done that. Rachel’s mouth went as tight as a triple bigamist’s schedule. “Joe,” she said piercing me with scornful eyes, “you’re impossible,” and dove back into her coffee cup.

  I finished my breakfast trying to look penitent. Before I could ask for a second cup of coffee, the dishes had been whisked away, and Hugo Fischer had a vise-grip on our attention. There was no question who was running this séance.

  “Although not always successful,” Fischer said, “the period of silence with which we traditionally begin a megathon is intended to purge the mind of inconsequentials, to scour it of the petty concerns of everyday life. In cases where there is a rational faculty,” he said with a slightly sardonic smile as he raked the circle with his powerful eyes, “it is often beneficial.” Some sycophant chuckled, and I allowed myself a grim smile.

  “But what of the soul?” Fischer said, in the rising tones of an orator. “How shall we cleanse it? How, indeed?”

  This wasn’t a question that had kept me up nights, but my fellow megathoners were taking it to heart. Nobody said anything. I don’t think they were meant to. I certainly didn’t raise my hand.

  “Howwwww?” Fischer ululated the word at the ornate ceiling like a fleshy wolf. If I’d known, I’d have been glad to tell him, if only to get him to stop doing that.

  When he was finally pretty sure that he had all our attention, Fischer said: “Nobody knows? I’ll give you a hint. Did not the Apostle James say ‘Confess ye, one to another’?”

  If he did, he didn’t say it to me, but the rest of our company bobbed their collective chins up and down like a bunch of drinking birds. I tried to look noncommittal. I glanced at Crenshaw, and he looked bewildered by the entire proceeding. Perhaps symbolically, he still had a bit of egg yolk on the sides of his mouth.

  “Well, then,” Fischer said, “suppose we have a little session of true confessions just to steam-clean those psyches, shall we?” He looked around the circle with a faintly predatory eye. “Who will start?”

  This was more like it. I looked around the room as eagerly as Fischer did. Right. Let’s have it. One or two confessions of murder, by the numbers. At last, Fischer and I were in accord. All we wanted was a teensy-weensy confession, and we could all go back to bed. I imagined that was what Grenby wanted, too.

  But we were all disappointed. Nobody said anything. Not a word. Somebody was not cooperating.

  “Well?” demanded Fischer, and he spoke for both of us, “doesn’t anybody have anything to confess? Nothing? Am I living, among saints? Have I died and gone to heaven. Do I—”

  Fischer stopped short because Aileen Moffitt had silently gotten to her feet and was standing in front of her cushion. Her eyes were on the floor.

  “Yes, Aileen?” Fischer said, and his voice was suddenly the essence of gentleness. Don Moffitt looked stricken; his eyes were locked on the slim form of his wife.

  “I have a confession to make, Hugo,” she said in a mechanical monotone. She was still looking at the carpet. “I want to confess. I want to confess to—to…”

  She paused as if weighed down by our eyes, but I don’t think she was aware of anyone but Fischer. He said nothing more, but waited patiently for her to continue. Slowly, Aileen raised her eyes until they were on Fischer’s face. Her expression was tense, controlled.

  “I’ve been ungrateful, Hugo,” she continued. “To you, to The Institute, to all my brothers and sisters. I have been trying to make Don leave The Institute. I wanted a home of my own, all the stupid little things people in the outside world have. I wanted them.”

  Aileen looked down as if she were finished, but soon raised her eyes again. “But I wanted more than that,” she went on. “Much more. I wanted Don to leave here…to leave you…to get out because…because you are killing him. Killing him as a man!”

  Moffitt flinched but said nothing.

  “It’s true, Hugo,” she continued, apparently not so much confessing as justifying her heresy. “When he’s in your shadow, Don’s not a man. He’s a boy—a child in your house. You call him the vice-president, but there is no vice-president of The Institute. Because there is only one man here, and that’s you, Hugo, just you. The rest of us are only children.”

  An amazed silence settled on the circle. Even Fischer didn’t seem to know what to do with this accusation which had crept up on him disguised as recantation. He looked at Don Moffitt, but Moffitt seemed to be waiting for the meaning of Aileen’s words to soak through his skull to his brain.

  Aileen saved him the trouble.

  “But I forgot,” she said, continuing as if there had been no pause. “I forgot these.” She raised her hands palms up, and the flowing sleeves of her robe fell back, revealing the insides of her elbows. She was talking about the ghosts of ancient needle tracks on the veins of her dead-white inner arms.

  “I forgot that when I came here,” she said, “my whole life—my whole death—was shooting poison into these as fast as I could find a vein. I forgot that I was turning tricks with anybody Don could find so that we could get more dope. I forgot that when I came to your door even the baby I was carrying in my body—little Donny—had been poisoned by the shit I was sticking in my arm. He was born a hype.”

  She said this impassively as if she were talking about somebody else’s life. As if she were telling a story. “I forgot,” she continued, “that if it weren’t for you, I’d probably be dead now. And Don, too, or at least in prison. And there would be no Donny. We owe you our lives, Hugo. Our lives. I forgot that. And I’m sorry.” Aileen lowered her arms to her sides. She took an uncertain step toward Fischer and began to cry. Her thin face vas like a crumpled mask, and tears left little streaks of mascara on her flat cheeks. She took another step.

  With a strangled sound in his throat, Moffitt jumped to his feet. I wondered if anyone else noticed Fischer catch his wrist in a powerful grip and hold him back. Most must have been watching Aileen as she took a third step, stopped and started to sway. Even I started to unwind from my cushion, but before I could, Fischer was up—with Moffitt at his shoulder—and had caught Aileen before she could fall. Gently, he took her weight on his arms and let his thick legs bend until they were both kneeling with Mofitt poised over them just half a step too slow.

  “It’s ok
ay, Aileen,” Fischer said, stroking her hair. “I understand. Hugo understands.” Shifting her weight to his left arm, Fischer reached back and pulled Moffitt to a kneeling position, too. Moffitt put his arm around Aileen’s shoulders. The three were frozen in the middle of the circle like figures out of an illustrated Bible: God forgiving the sinners.

  I won’t say that mine were the only dry eyes in the room, but all of the women were having hanky trouble, and some of the men looked suspiciously moist. Even old Crenshaw looked as though somebody had hit him with a sneak punch.

  Eventually, Fischer stood up over the kneeling figures of Don and Aileen as if about to announce his next miracle. Then Moffitt helped his sobbing wife over to his cushion, and Fischer completed the circle again. His face said that he had things back under control.

  A heavy silence fell over the room, broken only by Aileen’s muffled whimpers. Soon, even those subsided, and tension began to build up again. I wondered who would be the next turn.

  Close to the last thing I expected to hear was Rachel’s husky voice say: “Hugo, I have a confession to make, too.” I turned, noting her calm expression and determined eye. She went on, ignoring me: “I have failed in my responsibility to the house and to my brothers and sisters.”

  I thought I detected a minute glance in my direction before she said: “Hugo, I failed to tell you that this afternoon, when I went up to Joe Goodey’s room, Genie Martin was there. And I’m pretty sure she was there last night, too.”

  18

  Have you ever had the feeling that somebody had snuck up behind you and quick-frozen your brain? Mine was thirty degrees below zero and getting more numb by the second. Hundreds of little men were busily packing it with dry ice and whistling while they worked.

  Everyone else in the happy circle seemed to be feeling the same. Rachel’s bombshell had frozen us where we sat. Years from then they would find us, fifteen skeletons in a circle of rotted cushions, and would wonder what evil demon had bewitched us. But then, Fischer, like the wizard he passed for, broke the spell by swiveling his great head, first toward Genie, then toward me. Then back to Genie.