Dead Girl Blues

by Lawrence Block

  HARD TO SAY. Hard to know what to believe, and how anxious to be.

  Just now, I opened the top center drawer of my desk. I was looking for the key that opens the locked drawer, and I found it readily enough, but didn’t pick it up, didn’t even touch it. All I did was look at it for a moment before I closed the drawer again.

  To reassure myself that it was there? And that, by extension, the locked drawer was mine to open?

  Maybe.

  I always knew this could happen. I had hoped that it wouldn’t, but had known all along that it might. I can’t say I’d anticipated seeing my young self on the television screen, nor had I ever imagined a computer-aged version.

  But I had relatives who’d submitted DNA, and when the right person looked in the right place, a match would turn up. And one thing would lead to another, and before too long they’d have the name of the brother who’d just plain vanished.

  If America’s Most Wanted were still on the air, its next episode would show those photos, and whatever else they could turn up. But the program went off the air a few years ago.

  Well, they did have a run of almost twenty-five years. That’s pretty good. And I’ve had an even longer run, haven’t I?

  I don’t know where this goes. I can’t rule out the possibility that someone right here in Lima will have seen something in those photographs. Someone who knows me from one of my clubs, someone who’s seen me at the store. Or walking in the neighborhood, or standing in line at the grocery store.

  Someone who knows only that there’s something vaguely familiar about the guy in the picture. And then, a day or a week later, he catches a glimpse of me and the bell rings or the penny drops, however you want to put it, and it all comes together for him.

  Should he pick up the phone, call the number? You don’t want to get involved, and you certainly don’t want to make trouble for an innocent man, but how often do you get a chance to solve a horrible crime and bring a vicious killer to justice? When you do, how can you shirk your responsibilities?

  But of course you didn’t bother to write down the 800 number, so maybe you should just let it go. If the connection’s a real one, you can’t be the only person who made it. Let someone else pick up the phone.

  Still, how hard would it be to Google your way to the number?

  And so on.

  All I can do is wait. And that may not be easy, but neither will it be impossible, because God knows it’s something I know how to do.

  I’ve been waiting for all these years.

  THREE WEEKS SINCE my last entry.

  Not quite. It was nineteen days ago that Lester Holt showed my high school yearbook photo to his substantial and far-flung audience. It may have appeared elsewhere—on other network news broadcasts, on true-crime cable channels. The only newspaper I read regularly is the Lima News, and it would be bad news indeed if my picture showed up there, as that would only happen after I’d been arrested and charged.

  I pick up the New York Times now and then, and USA Today once in a while, but I haven’t seen either in the past three weeks. In fact I’ve made it a point not to look at them, or to check them out online. I’m sure the news item got attention in and around Bakersfield, and there’d surely be coverage in the local paper there at least as extensive as NBC’s, but I don’t feel the need to see it. And I doubt the Bakersfield Californian has many regular readers in western Ohio.

  Easy enough to Google Roger Borden and see what shows up.

  Easier still not to bother.

  I did have the impulse, immediately after I got to see myself on NBC, to do what I could to make myself less visible. I could show up less frequently at the store, and spend more of my time there out of sight in the office in back. I could use the excuse of a bad back to skip a couple of bowling sessions; all of my teammates are apt to be sidelined now and then by a backache or a troublesome knee or some other age-appropriate infirmity.

  I could miss a few meetings of my clubs and civic groups, and make fewer lunch dates. I could even invent a pretext—a household retailers’ convention, the funeral of an imaginary relative—and leave town for a week or two.

  There was some logic to all of that. Why put my face where people might see it before time had given them a chance to forget what they’d glimpsed on TV? Wasn’t it better to keep my exposure to a minimum?

  I shared the notion with Louella, and she thought it over. “Where would you go?” she wondered. “And what would you do when you got there?”

  “Some chain motel,” I said. “At some Interstate exit in Indiana or Kentucky.”

  “In other words, out of state.”

  “I would think, though I’m not sure it would make any difference. As far as what I’d do there, probably as little as possible. Sit in my room, read a book, watch a movie on TV. Go to the nearest diner for my meals.”

  “The same place every time?”

  “Maybe not. Maybe I’d pick up fast food at a drive-through window. Or order in.”

  “You might get tired of pizza.”

  “I’m tired already just thinking about it. You know what? It’s not a good idea.”

  “No.”

  “I’d be that guy who never leaves his room and has all his meals delivered. Pays in cash, too, and what’s that about? And when I did go out, anybody who caught sight of me would see a stranger, and wonder if I looked familiar, and if they’d seen me anywhere before.”

  “While anybody who sees you at Thompson Dawes or the bowling alley would think Oh, there’s John.”

  “ ‘Good old John. Hell of a nice guy.’ ”

  “They’d know right off who you were and wouldn’t have to waste time thinking about you.”

  “And thinking about me,” I said, “has always been a waste of time. But you’re right. Better to be seen by people who don’t have to wonder who it is they’re looking at.”

  AND SO I’VE been living my life, doing what I’ve always done, going where I’ve always gone. It seems to me that the best way to draw unwanted attention is to make an effort to avoid it. Shrink into the shadows and people want to get a clearer view of you. Act as if you have something to hide and people can’t help wondering what it might be.

  This didn’t mean that I had to overcompensate, shouldering my way into any spotlight, asserting my opinion in every conversation. The answer, I decided, lay somewhere in the middle: “Just be yourself.”

  Whoever that might be.

  IT FEELS STRANGE.

  It’s been almost a full year since the last entry. I rarely go more than a few days between visits to my home office, and I generally boot up the laptop and do what one does on one’s computer. I cope with email, I visit some websites I find interesting, I even make occasional entries in a rudimentary daybook I’ve taken to keeping.

  It’s nothing like this document, where I’ve allowed myself to think out loud.

  Well, not out loud, obviously. How to phrase it? To ruminate in print, or perhaps in pixels. To do my thinking on screen.

  I jot things down, keep certain records. My weight, on which my doctor wants me to keep an eye. My blood pressure, for which I now take a pill every morning.

  The same annual physical which occasioned these measures led Alden and Kristin to buy me a birthday present, a wristwatch I’m to wear 24/7, except when I take it off to recharge it. It tells me far more than the time, monitoring my heartbeat and keeping track of my physical activity.

  If the device had its way, I’d take upwards of ten thousand steps every day. That would presumably make my physician happy, even as it would lead to my wearing out my shoes faster, but I’m not all that certain it would have a discernible effect on either my weight or my blood pressure. There are days when I log ten thousand steps, and there are days when I don’t, and I don’t get all that worked up about it one way or the other.

  Still, one has to pay a certain amount of attention to the damned thing. I’ll look at it, and see that I’m less than a thousand steps short of my da
ily goal, and as often as not I’ll grab the leash and whistle up Chester for a walk around the block. Sometimes, of course, I’ll say the hell with it and make myself a sandwich instead, but all in all our faithful Rottweiler gets more exercise than he used to, and so, I must admit, do I.

  And if I remember, I log the day’s step count in my daybook, along with my weight and blood pressure and anything else I feel like keeping track of.

  Bowling scores. Books I’m reading.

  Odds and ends.

  THE DAYBOOK’S A habit I got into without much thought, and it’s only now that I can see I can’t attribute it solely to my birthday present. Now that I’ve opened up this file, which began with my recalling significant chunks of my past and led to my recording day-to-day developments, I realize how much a part of my life it had become.

  It was the place where I could tell myself what I’d never told myself before, a place for all those matters I couldn’t mention to anyone else. I was selective, I’d run sentences through my mind before I wrote them out, but most of what went on inside me wound up on the computer screen in one form or another.

  And even when I elected not to jot something down, or did so only to delete it, it got more of my attention than it would otherwise have received. At this desk, on this computer, with my eyes on the screen and my fingers poised above the keyboard, I had no choice but to look at myself and my life a little differently.

  I guess that’s obvious.

  Maybe it’s time for me to read what I’ve written. All of it, top to bottom.

  SO I’M HERE, and after typing the last sentence I sat down and read the last entry from a year ago, and then I scrolled all the way up to the very beginning of the file and read through everything that preceded it. All of it, all the way from A man walks into a bar to Just be yourself, whoever that might be.

  A curious experience. There were sections I could almost take in at a glance, so familiar to me, so much a part of my consciousness, that I could probably have reproduced them word for word. And there were other passages I could only barely recall, as if I’d come across them in a dream.

  I’m struck by how the tone has changed over time. It’s as if several different men have shared the task of narration. At first we hear Buddy, and somewhere along the way he passes the microphone to Mr. Thompson. And now it’s in the hands of Old Man Thompson, still reasonably hale and hearty but mellowed and rendered more pensive by the passing years.

  And still a free man. There were indeed a handful of people who’d thought they recognized the two photographs of Roger Borden, one as he once was, the other as he might have grown to be. In a few instances the recognition was real enough; they’d gone to school with Roger, or remembered him from the neighborhood. That was enough to get them to call the 800 number, but it didn’t give them anything useful to report. Yes, I remember Roger. The last person you’d figure would do something like that. Or, just as likely: That’s Roger, all right. You know, there was always something about him. So I can’t say I’m surprised.

  Right.

  Others must have been more promising, and in the long run more of a nuisance. They were from viewers who were fairly certain they recognized the man who was being sought, that he was assistant produce manager of a supermarket in Bend, Oregon, or a night clerk at a none-too-reputable motel outside of Boise, or their own next-door neighbor, who revealed his own dark nature when a neighborhood dog had an accident on his lawn.

  And so on.

  Promising, because those were the sort of leads the police could not ignore. And a nuisance because they never led anywhere.

  Did anyone turn up who thought that the kid in the sport coat and striped tie, given a change of clothes, might have filled their gas tank back in the day? Did anybody remember seeing Buddy across a liquor-store counter, or grabbing a burger at Denny’s?

  If so, I never heard about it.

  As far as I can make out, the long arm of the law never reached over the Rockies, let alone across the Mississippi River or the Ohio state line. My guess is the state and local authorities congratulated themselves on having taken it as far as they had, and getting prime air time on a network newscast. The response let them feel good about their efforts, and they could even draw some measure of satisfaction from the essentially useless confirmation, furnished by my one-time schoolmates and neighbors, that the picture on the screen was indeed that of young Roger. They already knew that, but wouldn’t it gladden their hearts all the same?

  And I think I can guess the prevailing attitude once every lead had been shown to lead nowhere. If I were involved in the investigation, it seems to me I’d take note of a couple undeniable facts about Roger Borden. First of all, he’d committed what looked like a random and impulsive murder all those years ago—and had never been arrested since, for any infraction of the law.

  All those years? A drifter, capable of homicide, never getting picked up and charged with anything?

  I’d think about that, and I’d think about just how many years it had been, and how old he’d have to be now. Living the life he must have led, very likely abusing drugs and alcohol, capable of violence, ruled by his impulses, almost certainly a sociopath.

  And another thing. All those years, and all those brothers and sisters, and he’d never been in touch with any of them? No drunken phone calls? No urgent appeals for cash, or a night’s lodging? Nothing? They’d been in touch with everybody, every surviving relative, every classmate they could find, and not a single person had had a single word from him since he killed that girl.

  Well, hell, do the math. The son of a bitch would have to be dead by now, wouldn’t you say? I mean, what are the odds?

  I’M SURE IT’S still an open case. And I’m sure the cable channels, with their apparently unquenchable appetite for true crime, will do what they can to keep Cindy Raschmann—and Roger Borden—from slipping entirely out of sight. But there’s always someone with a new solution to the unknowable identity of Jack the Ripper, or freshly discovered positive proof as to the actual authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. That’s enough to draw a little media attention, but it never seems to amount to very much.

  So it really does look as though I’ve gotten away with it.

  This evening—and it’s early morning at this point, closer to daybreak than to bedtime—this evening, as I was reading, I found myself wondering if anybody ever gets away with anything. Who I am, what I’ve become, the life I’ve led and am leading now, are all part of a direct progression that began when a man walked into a bar.

  I’ve had, as it turns out, a rich and satisfying life. I’m sure it looks enviable from a distance—a fairly prosperous businessman, active in civic affairs, still in reasonably good health, a devoted husband and father genuinely loved by his wife and children.

  Not a few men would look at me and wish they could trade places.

  And it’s at least as satisfying from my point of view. I never could have predicted anything like this for myself. I’d never have dreamed of it, wished for it, imagined it as attainable.

  And I’ve so utterly grown into it that it seems the life I was born to lead.

  BUT, LEST I forget, it could still all end tomorrow. Someone somewhere could be struck by a blinding flash of recognition. By God, that photograph! You know who that has to be?

  And then a phone call.

  That’s always something that could happen, and it will continue to be a possibility for as long as I am alive. The moving finger writes, or doesn’t write. And no one can say which it’ll be.

  And if it happens?

  I’m sure the revolver’s still in the locked drawer. And I’m at least as sure that it will remain there, no matter who shows up on our front porch. I can’t say whether that would be the easy or the hard way out, but it’s not one I’ll choose.

  For now, all I know is it’s way past my bedtime, and I’d like to get a couple of hours of sleep before I get up to face another day.

  Whatever happens, I have
the feeling I’ll be okay with it.

  T H E • E N D

  About the Author

  * * *

  Lawrence Block is a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master. His work over the past half century has earned him multiple Edgar Allan Poe and Shamus awards, the U.K. Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement, and recognition in Germany, France, Taiwan, and Japan. His latest novel is Dead Girl Blues; other recent fiction includes A Time to Scatter Stones, Keller’s Fedora, and The Burglar in Short Order. In addition to novels and short fiction, he has written episodic television (Tilt!) and the Wong Kar-wai film, My Blueberry Nights.

  Block contributed a fiction column in Writer’s Digest for fourteen years, and has published several books for writers, including the classic Telling Lies for Fun & Profit and the updated and expanded Writing the Novel from Plot to Print to Pixel. His nonfiction has been collected in The Crime of Our Lives (about mystery fiction) and Hunting Buffalo with Bent Nails (about everything else). Most recently, his collection of columns about stamp collecting, Generally Speaking, has found a substantial audience throughout and far beyond the philatelic community.

  Lawrence Block has lately found a new career as an anthologist (At Home in the Dark; From Sea to Stormy Sea) and holds the position of writer-in-residence at South Carolina’s Newberry College. He is a modest and humble fellow, although you would never guess as much from this biographical note.

  Email: lawbloc@gmail.com

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