The Nothing Man

by Jim Thompson

  Yet it was hard to leave her like this. Something seemed to need doing, some small thing. Something she’d always wanted, perhaps, without conscious awareness of the want.

  I could think of only one thing.

  I pulled the sheet over her now semi-conscious body. I upended the bottle of whisky and sprinkled it over the sheet. I jerked several matches from a pad and struck them.

  “You said to,” I said. “Remember, Ellen? You always said to burn you up.…”

  And I let the matches fall.

  6

  It was still pitch dark outside, still raining a downpour, but the wind was dying and the worst of the storm seemed to be over. I pushed the boat into the bay and hopped in. I started to row. And then, slowly, I let the oars slide out of my hands and drift away into the darkness.…Let the boat decide, I thought. Leave it to the ocean. They brought me here; now, they can return me. Or not return me. I wash my hands of all responsibility.

  I leaned back across the thwarts, letting my fingers trail in the water. I closed my eyes, feeling the boat rock and roll, feeling it turn round and round gently as it moved out into the bay. It was very peaceful for a time. Very restful. I had had nothing to do with anything, and now I had nothing to do with this. I was a man following orders, clear-eyed, clear-thinking, and if those orders had led me—led me…

  She had looked very beautiful. She had glowed, oh, but definitely she had glowed. She had been all lit up, burning with a clear-blue flame, and then the mattress had started to smolder and…

  I screamed but there was no sound. I was throwing up.

  The boat had begun to spin. It was caught in the trough between two tall shore-bound rollers, pulled by one and pushed by the other, and it spun faster and faster. Suddenly it reared up on end and shot to the crest of the first wave. It hung poised there for a moment, then it dropped down, spinning, to the other side.

  Tons of water plunged into it. It went down, vanished as completely as though it had never existed, and I went on. There was a thunderous roar, an incessant crashing. And then I was gripping something hard and slimy…one of the piles of the pier.

  That’s the way it was to be, then. The decision had been made. I pulled myself from pile to pile until I found the ladder. I climbed up to the pier and returned to my car. I drove away.

  My house—to use the noun loosely—is some six miles north of Pacific City. Years ago it was occupied by a railroad section gang—in the days when section hands were largely itinerant Mexicans. When I discovered it, it was a lopsided ruin, headquarters seemingly for the county’s population of creeping and crawling things.

  The railroad gladly rented it to me for five dollars a month. A hundred dollars and a few hundred hours’ work had made it reasonably habitable. It is a little noisy, perhaps, since it sits on railroad right-of-way, and it is more than a little sooty. But as rental properties go in Pacific City—properties within the financial reach of the modest-salaried man—it is still very much a bargain. We do not believe in “government handouts” here, you see. We scorn socialistic housing programs. We hold to the American way of life, the good old laws of supply and demand. That is, the landlords supply what they care to in the way of housing and demand what they feel like. And the tenant, bless him, oh, hail his rugged independence, is perfectly free to pay it and like it. Or sleep in the streets. Where, of course, he will be promptly arrested by Lem Stukey for vagrancy.

  I will say this for Stukey: he is absolutely fearless and relentless where vagrants are concerned. Let Lem and his minions apprehend some penniless wanderer, preferably colored and over sixty-five, and the machinery of the law goes into swift and remorseless action. Sixty days on the road gang, six months on the county farm—so it goes. Nor is that always as far as it goes. In an amazing number of instances, the vagrant appears to be the very person responsible for a long series of hitherto unsolved crimes.…

  Good old Lem and his rubber hose! Unless I missed my guess, I’d be seeing him shortly.

  I parked my car at the side of the house and went inside. I filled a water glass with whisky and put it down at a gulp. Fire blazed through me. My heart did frantic setting-up exercises for a moment, then steadied off into a slow, steady pounding. All at once I felt almost happy. For the first time in a long time, life seemed really interesting. There was a rift—and a widening one—in the dead-gray monotony of existence.

  I went into the bedroom and shucked out of my clothes. The phone rang and I trotted back into the living-room to answer it, pulling a robe around me.

  “Brownie—Clint?” It was Dave Randall.

  “Why, Colonel,” I said. “How nice of you to call! How are all the wee ones and—”

  “Brownie, for God’s sake! Have you seen Lem Stukey?”

  “Frequently,” I said. “As a devoted Courier man, I am brought into contact with many strange—”

  “Please, Brownie! He hasn’t been in touch with you in the last hour or so?”

  “No”—I put a frown into my voice—“what’s up, Dave?”

  “It’s about—Where have you been all evening, Clint? Lem’s been tearing up the town to find you. He called me. He even called Mr. Lovelace.”

  “But why? What about?”

  I smiled to myself. It was wonderful to be interested again.

  “I—I think I’d better come out there, Brownie. I think, perhaps, I’d better bring Mr. Lovelace with me.”

  “Oh?” I said, and I made the voice-frown a little stronger. “What’s the trouble, Dave?”

  “I can’t—I think I’d better tell you in person. Brownie—”

  “Yes?”

  “Where have you been tonight?”

  “Drinking. Riding and drinking. Walking and drinking. Sitting by the roadside and drinking.”

  “Were you with anyone? Is there any way you could establish your whereabouts?”

  “No,” I said, “to both questions.…Look, Dave, I didn’t run over anyone, did I? I was pretty woozy, but—”

  “I’ll see you,” he said. “I’ll be right out.”

  We hung up. I sat down on the lounge and went to work on the bottle. I was feeling better and better. There was nothing in my stomach but this clean, fresh whisky, and there was nothing in my mind but a problem. No Ellen. No oblong of bright-blue flame. Only an interesting problem.

  About ten minutes had passed when a car roared up the lane from the highway and skidded to a stop in the yard. It was Lem Stukey, and he was by himself. Naturally, on anything as good as this, he would be by himself. I looked up as he walked in. I blinked my eyes, frowned, and took another drink from the bottle.

  He stood in the doorway, his hands on his hips, his hat thrust back on his oily head. And there was an expression of sad reproach on his sleek, round face.

  He waited for me to speak. I let him go right on waiting. Finally he crossed the room and pulled up a chair in front of me.

  “Keed,” he said, sorrowfully, “you shouldn’t’ve done it. You should have knowed you couldn’t get away with it.”

  “Well,” I shrugged, “nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

  “She wasn’t worth it, Brownie.”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t suppose she was. But, then, who is?”

  “I don’t see no way out for you, keed. Not unless I was to kind of take a hand personally. If I was to do that, now, call it an accident—”

  “Why don’t you?” I said. “After all, a pal’s a pal, I always say.”

  “You mean that, Brownie? You’ll play ball with me like I been askin’ you to?”

  “Well”—I hesitated—“isn’t it pretty muddy outside?”

  “Muddy? I don’t dig you, keed.”

  “To play ball.”

  “Look!” he snarled, and his hand closed over my arm. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

  He jumped up and stood over me. I started to rise and he shoved me back hard. />
  “I’m talking about murder, you smart bastard! You were over to the island tonight. You killed her. You cold-cocked her and set fire to her. Left her to burn up in the bed. Only she didn’t burn up, see. She didn’t die right away. I figure her hair probably cushioned the blow, and she came to when she felt herself burnin’. Anyway, she got up and got to the dresser. She got something out of her purse. She had it balled up in her hand when the island cops found her.”

  I looked at him, blinking a little owlishly, sifting through the situation one fact at a time. It wasn’t particularly startling, although I suspect that I was guilty of at least a small start. I’d been pretty wobbly on my pins when I swung the bottle, and she did have a thick head of hair. And the whisky would have tended to burn away before the bedclothes themselves caught fire.

  Now, as to this “something” she’d taken from her purse…

  “To borrow an expression,” I said, “I don’t dig you, keed. Just who am I supposed to have killed?”

  “Don’t pull that innocent crap on me! Who the hell else would have killed your wife? She wasn’t robbed. It’s a cinch it wasn’t a rape murder. Anyone that wanted any of that could have had it for—”

  I came up then, and I came up swinging. I hit him an open-palmed slap across the jaw, hit him so hard his hat sailed from his head. His hand darted to his hip, but he didn’t draw the gun. I sat back down again and buried my face in my hands.

  After a while I said, “Are you sure it was murder? It couldn’t have been an accident?”

  “Who you kidding?” he said. “You goin’ to tell me that she fell on top of her head? That she wiped the place clean of fingerprints herself?”

  “Wi—!” I caught myself, choked the word into a meaningless grunt. “This object she had in her hand. What was it?”

  “A poem, kind of a poem. She put the finger right on you, keed. She’d had it a long time; it was practically worn out with all the folding and refolding it had gone through. You wrote it for her, and she’d been carrying it around all this time. Ever since you split up. Yessir, she knew that when we saw it, we’d—”

  “It had my name on it?”

  “It didn’t need no name on it. She never really went for no one but you. Anyway, she sure wasn’t going for anyone three–four years ago when this must’ve been written. When you an’ her were still tied up.”

  “Maybe she wrote it herself.”

  “Huh-uh. She wasn’t up to anything that sharp. And what the hell? A dame’s dying, and she goes for a poem she’s written? You know better than that, keed. You wrote it. It sounds like you to a t, and she knew I’d see that—”

  “What was it?” I said. “Have you got it with you?”

  “It figures, Brownie. It all adds up to just one guy. No one else had any motive. No one else would have written a thing like this. It had to be someone that lives here—someone I’d know—and, palsy, that ain’t no one but—”

  “I’d like to hear it,” I said. “Do you mind?”

  “I don’t mind a bit, keed.” He took a notebook from his pocket and opened it. “Catch a load. I don’t know that I can pronounce all the words just right, but—”

  “Go ahead. I’ll try to interpret.”

  “Sure,” he said, and he read:

  Lady of the endless lust,

  Itching lips and heaving bust,

  Lady save it, lady scram, lady hang it on a nail

  Get thee hence nor leave behind you

  Any vestige of your tail.

  He finished reading and looked at me sharply. I looked back at him indifferently. I’d written it, of course, it and some fifty or sixty similar bits of doggerel. But that had been long ago, and they’d been done on various odds and ends of paper and on a variety of typewriters. On the Red Cross machines in hospitals. In newspaper offices. In dollar-an-hour, type-your-own-letter places. They couldn’t be traced to me. I’d written them out of bitterness and brooding—at a time when I was still bitter and brooding—out of hate and resentment and restlessness. And, finally, I had presented them to Ellen. I had dedicated them to her.

  I’d shown them to no one but her. No one but she knew that I had written them. I wondered what masochistic urge had led her to save this one after destroying the others.

  “Well, keed?” Stukey grinned at me. “What you say?”

  “I gather that that’s a copy,” I said. “Where’s the original?”

  “The cops over on the island have it. They read it off to me over the telephone.”

  “You haven’t seen it yourself, then? You don’t actually know that it’s as they described it? Old and creased and—”

  “What the hell you gettin’ at?”

  “I’ve already arrived. But you, my dear Stukey, are very far behind. You didn’t see the poem. You didn’t see her. You don’t know—”

  “They’re kidding me, huh?” He let out a snort. “They made it all up just to cause some excitement.”

  “You’re chief of detectives. You seem to regard this as a pretty important case. So important that you had to bother my publisher and editor about it. Yet you’ve got your evidence by telephone. Why? Why didn’t you go over there?”

  “Well—uh—” He licked his lips. “You know, keed. The bay’s been kinda choppy. Ain’t no real reason why I couldn’t have gone, if I’d figured it was necessary, but—uh—”

  “A little choppy, eh? The ferries and charter boats aren’t running, and it’s just a little choppy. Cut it out, Stuke. You didn’t go because you couldn’t. No one could have.”

  “That’s what you say! I—”

  “So did you, earlier this evening. Remember our conversation at your office? No one could have crossed that bay tonight. No one. Certainly he couldn’t have crossed it twice. If you don’t know that, you ought to be back walking a beat, which, now that I think of it, might be an excellent idea.”

  His face reddened; his round, overbright little eyes shifted nervously. “Now, look, Brownie. It’s just as plain as day—”

  “—or the nose on your face.” I nodded. “But you can’t see it. You were so red hot to get something on me that you overlooked the plain facts of the matter. You say that she got up and got that poem out of her purse. How do you know she did? How do you know it wasn’t simply made to look that way by the person who killed her?”

  “Well—” His tongue moved over his lips again. “But why would—?”

  “The poem belonged to him, the murderer, not her. Obviously he was a man with a perverted sense of humor, a maniac in the broad sense of the term. He visited her, doubtless as a client. He murdered her. Then he arranged for her to be found in such a way as to throw you off his trail yet satisfy his ego. And, stupid man that you are, he was entirely successful.”

  I smiled at him pleasantly and took another drink. I lighted a cigarette, coughing slightly on the smoke as I choked back a laugh. This was far better than I had thought it would be. There were truly wonderful possibilities in it.

  “That’s what happened, Lem,” I said. “It had to be a maniac. You can’t make sense out of it in any other way.”

  “You call that sense?” he growled.

  “For a maniac, a sadistic killer, yes. By the way, I assume the ferries have resumed service? Well, then, you’ve let him get completely away from you. He’s not even on the island any more.”

  There was something very close to fear in the too-bright eyes. Fear and wonder and awe. “You’re”—he cleared his throat hoarsely—“you’re takin’ it pretty calm, keed. Your wife gets killed in just about the most God-awful way a woman could, and you sit there grinning and—”

  “She wasn’t my wife,” I said. “She hadn’t been my wife in a long, long time. As for my reaction to the—the—well, I don’t wear my emotions on my sleeve, Stuke. My actions don’t necessarily reflect my feelings.”

  “Yeah,” he grunted. “I’ll buy that. I’ll go right on down the line on that one. I sit listenin’ to you sometimes, chewin’ the
fat with you, and I get to wonderin’ what the hell—”

  I held up a hand, interrupting him. “I’ll tell you what you’d better do, Stuke. What you’d better start wondering about. You’ve botched this thing from beginning to end. My wife has been brutally murdered by a maniac, and you’ve let him get away. You’d better start wondering about how you’re going to keep your job.”

  “I had, huh?” He laughed nervously. “Now, look, Brownie, like I said a moment ago, she just wasn’t worth any bad trouble.”

  “I disagree with you.…What did you say when you talked to Dave Randall and Mr. Lovelace tonight? Something rather suggestive, eh, laden with nasty implications?”

  “Me? Me knock a pal?” He made a gesture of hurt denial. “You know I wouldn’t do a thing like that. All I done was mention that your wife had been killed, an’ that I—well, I was trying to get ahold of you to break the bad news. That’s all I said, Brownie. So help me.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t particularly care what he’d said. I still wasn’t letting him off the hook. Mr. Lem Stukey was going to go to work, at long last. He was going to give the city a long-delayed cleaning up. Not strictly because of the entertainment it would provide me, not entirely. Through him I could make atonement. I could offset with good the evil of Ellen’s death.

  “I’m telling you, Brownie,” he said, “I didn’t knock you. There ain’t nothin’ for either of us to get in an uproar about. Now, I been thinkin’, and the way I see it we’re both off base. It was an accident.”

  “It couldn’t have been. You said so yourself.”

  “I can’t change my mind? An accident’s got to be logical? She was drinking. She spilled booze all over herself. She catches herself on fire, lighting a cigarette. She falls down and knocks herself out. She—”

  “Before or after igniting herself? And what about the poem?”

  “Look, Brownie”—he leaned forward, pleading—“we get cases like this all the time. Just about like this. Someone gets stiff in his hotel room. He bangs himself up an’ flops down on the bed smoking, and he wakes up burning an’ the room’s so full of smoke he can’t see. An’—well, you know how it is. He tries to get out of the place, but he wants to take his money with him, so—”