The Nothing Man

by Jim Thompson

  “Let’s have it, Colonel,” I said. “I didn’t damned near die of rotten meat served up by the Mayonnaise Queen, so what is the ailment that keeps me from work at a time when I’m badly needed? Creeping clap? Too much marijuana? A slight case of—”

  “Please, Clint! Don’t make me feel any cheaper than I do already.”

  “Tell me,” I said, “And tell me what I do if Lovelace decides to check up.”

  “He won’t. I told him it was nothing serious, but you were supposed to have absolute rest for a few days. That’s not too far from the truth, is it, Brownie? You do need a rest. You’ve been under a terrific emotional strain.”

  “Old Reporters’ Home,” I said, “roll wide your doors and trundle out the straitjacket. Here comes Brownie.”

  “All right, Clint. Have your own way about it. If you don’t know me well enough by this time to—”

  “Oh, I do, Colonel,” I said. “I don’t doubt your motives in the slightest. Until Monday, then, eh, when I shall stagger wan and wild-eyed into the Courier city room.”

  “Clint. I wish you didn’t feel—”

  “So do I,” I said. “And a very good morning to you, Colonel.”

  I hung up. I dug under the pillow for the bottle before I remembered that it wasn’t there.

  Well, I didn’t have to have a drink. I could use one, but I didn’t have to have it. My hand wandered under the pillow again, and I jerked it back with a suddenness that set the fingers to tingling.

  Damn the bottle. Damn Dave. Yes, and a double-damn for Clinton Brown. Dave couldn’t hurt me with Lovelace. He hadn’t tried to get me in trouble, only to keep himself out of it. But still, I wished he hadn’t done this.

  It didn’t mean anything. That answering-service deal didn’t mean anything. Nor the reef, nor the cab across the border, nor—None of them meant a thing, by itself.

  But when you put them all together…?

  Meaningless even then. They still added up to nothing that I could see.

  But I wished he hadn’t done this.

  17

  I was half-starved by Saturday morning, and I made the mistake of saying so as Lem Stukey drove me home.

  He knew exactly what I needed, Stuke did. It seemed that his middle name was Grub, he was a chow hound from way back. His old lady, his mother, had taught him how to cook—when she wasn’t busy droppin’ another kid—and he was kinda hungry himself. He’d been screwing around on this case for goddamned near twenty-four hours straight, and some chow would fit right into the old spot.

  It was no trouble at all, keed. Honest. We was pals, wasn’t we, and he wanted to eat himself. Anyway, he didn’t have a thing to do. He was already half nuts from this screwy deal, and he was going to have to pull out a while. Jesus, a guy couldn’t keep goin’ night and day, could he? A guy was entitled to eat, wasn’t he?

  And he wasn’t gettin’ nowhere nohow. Just puttin’ out, and not gettin’ a goddamned thing back.

  We got to the house, and he lugged the stuff he’d bought into the kitchen. I wasn’t to do a thing, he insisted. I was to park it and let it rest, and he’d take care of everything.

  He hung his coat over the back of a chair, tucked an apron into the belt of his high-waisted pants, and rolled up the sleeves of his striped silk shirt. I lingered a moment, watching him. He studied the various packages, his hands absently stroking his oily black hair. Then he nodded, deciding to begin with the steaks. He unwrapped them, and his polished nails trailed over them lovingly.

  “Ain’t that something, keed? You ever—What’s the matter, pal? You don’t like ’em?”

  “They look wonderful,” I said. “I was just reminded suddenly that I was out of salad oil.”

  “Not now you ain’t. I got some. I got everything we need, keed, so you just park it and leave the chow to me.”

  I went into the living room, taking a bottle with me. I parked it.

  I was being needlessly finicky, I supposed. That was probably salad oil on Lem’s hair, entirely edible and harmless. As for the nail polish, well, it would cook off. The fire would take care of it.

  I called that I was going to take a bath, and Lem called back to go right ahead. There was plenty of time. You tried to hurry good chow and you’d screw it up sure as hell.

  I wished he wouldn’t use that word—at least in connection with food. More than that, I wished he’d clear out. I wondered why he was hanging around.

  I took a quick cold shower, necessarily having to dress and undress in the bathroom. I got the cuffs of my pants wet, and they clung irritatingly around my ankles. I began to feel a little toward Stuke as I felt toward Kay Randall.

  I went back to the living-room and picked up the bottle.

  We ate in there, the living-room, my food on the coffee table, Stuke’s on one of the kitchen chairs with another chair pulled up in front of it.

  It was very good. I forgot all about the hair oil and the nail polish. Almost all about it. I ate, stealing a glance now and then at Stukey. He was tackling the food with both hands, stuffing it down. Eating as though it might be snatched away from him. It made me wince a little to watch him. I felt a faint twinge of sickness that was not entirely of the stomach.

  “You mentioned your mother a while ago,” I said. “Something about your family. You came from a large one?”

  “Well”—he gulped, swallowed, and stabbed another piece of steak—“kind of. Six boys and three girls. Yeah”—gulp—“they was nine of us, one right behind the other. They used to call us the stairsteps over at the ol’ sixth-ward school.”

  “You mean…you mean this is your home, where you were born?” I don’t know why I was startled by this idea. “Somehow, I—”

  “Yeah? Yeah, we was all born and raised here. Not the old folks, y’know, but all us kids was. All livin’ here right now.”

  “No,” I said. “No, they are not, Stukey. And I say that as a close student of the city payroll.”

  He choked on a mouthful of salad. Chuckled. “You—Off the record, keed?”

  “Off the record.”

  “Well, you look for Stowe sometime. Or Sutton. Or Sutke or—le’s see. I guess that’s about the crop, countin’ the two Stowes. The girls is married and don’t hold jobs.” He forked more steak and stacked salad on top of it. He nodded to me seriously. “There’s nothin’ crooked about it, you understand. O’ course, I got ’em all in with the city, but there ain’t nothin’ funny about the names. We just couldn’t use the other, see, and we kind of switched it around to suit ourselves. You ever hear of a goddamned name with two z’s and an x in it?”

  I said I had been spared that. “Your parents. Are they still living?”

  “Yeah, they’re still around. I—You didn’t know that? I thought you knew I lived with ’em.…Kind of funny, ain’t it? I mean, you see a guy day in and day out, and it comes up you don’t know hardly nothin’ about him.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, that is strange, Stuke.”

  “Yeah, I got a couple acres out on West Road. Gives the old man some place to screw around. He never had no trade, y’see. He was a farmer in the old country, and about all he could do over here was yard work. Spading up gardens an’ mowing lawns an’ trimming hedges and stuff like that. He—” Stukey swallowed and laughed suddenly. “Jesus, I just remembered something.”

  “Yes?” I said. “Share it with me, Stuke.”

  “Sure.” His eyes brimmed with laughter. “I wonder what in the hell made me think of it. Why, Christ, it must’ve been almost thirty years ago. I was—yeah—I was just about seven, an’—or was it eight? Well, anyway. The old man was working on a place out in Hacienda Hills, an’ this dame—the lady of the house—finds herself short a diamond brooch. She’d just misplaced the damn thing, you know, and she found it the same day. But meanwhile she just knows the old man hooked it, and she calls the cops on him. An’—ha, ha—Jesus, keed—ha, ha, ha, ha…”

  He paused and brushed the tears from his eyes. He went
on: “He couldn’t talk English, see? Just maybe a few words. He didn’t know what it was all about an’ he was scared as hell, naturally, and all he could think of to do was keep his mouth shut. Well—ha, ha—you know how that would sit with the cops. They dragged him out in the garage of this place, and they took turns workin’ on him. Hit him with everything they could lay hands on. Hoehandles, rakes, spades, every goddamned thing. If that dame hadn’t found her brooch an hour later, they’d’ve broken every hand tool on the place.…You never seen nothin’ like it, Clint; the old man was black and blue for the next three months.”

  “And that’s funny?” I said. “You can laugh about that?”

  “Cryin’s better? What the hell, the old man thought it was a good joke, too. But I ain’t told you all of it.…The cops was kind of worried an’ sorry about makin’ the mistake, so they brought him out to the house and helped the old lady put him to bed. They were pretty good guys, it turned out. Kind of tough and stupid maybe, but they wasn’t makin’ no one trouble just for the hell of it. They turned out their pockets before they left, gave the old man every nickel they had. Came to almost four bucks in all.”

  I set my coffee cup down and leaned forward on the lounge. “Stuke,” I said. “Lem. How in the name of God, just how, with an example like that before you, can you be like you are?”

  “I don’t dig you, keed.” A puzzled frown wrinkled his forehead. “How you mean? What example?”

  “Let it go,” I said. “What could I mean? They gave your father four bucks, and that was that. That fixed up everything.”

  “Yeah, it kind of did.” Stuke nodded. “The old man took the dough and started to night school. Learned to talk English real good.”

  I couldn’t say why I was annoyed by the story. I couldn’t say, for that matter, that the story was the source of my annoyance. Probably it was Stukey. I was tired and drowsy. I had much on my mind. I wanted to be alone, and there seemed to be no immediate prospect of that. He showed no signs of leaving.

  He sat with his chair tilted back against the wall, the pointed toes of his shoes hooked through the rungs. He was looking down at the food plates, frowning thoughtfully, and picking at his teeth, with a match.

  He raised his eyes slowly, letting them come to rest on me. He stared at me, frowning, so deep in thought, apparently, that he was unaware of his stare.

  He must have studied me for several minutes, the small bright eyes never shifting from my face. I coughed and cleared my throat, and he gave a little start. But he continued to look at me, and his frown deepened.

  “Look, Brownie, what’s it all about, anyhow?”

  “A very good question,” I said, “but I’m afraid I can’t give you the answer, offhand. I suggest that you consult an encyclopedia—the A to Z section.”

  “Why, keed? Why you doin’ it to me? We ain’t goin’ to pull this guy in in no dragnet. You know we ain’t. All this—all it’s gettin’ is me.”

  “Not solely,” I said.

  “So? So we’re gettin’ rid of the hustlers and fast boys. We’re cleanin’ things up. What does that mean to you?”

  “That,” I said, “would probably be impossible for you to understand, my friend. I’m not implying, of course, that you are not a highly sentient and understanding soul. I wouldn’t think of doing that, old pals that we are.”

  He grinned feebly, letting the chair legs down to the floor. “Always clownin’,” he grumbled. “All the time clownin’.…Just the same, keed, why’n’t you give it a rest? It ain’t doin’ you no good, if you ask me. It’s gettin’ to where you don’t seem to feel right no more unless you’re—”

  “Yes?” I said, for he had abruptly cut off the sentence, and there was a trace of furtiveness about him. “You were about to say?”

  “Nothin’.” He shrugged. “What’s the difference? I got two murders on my hands, I couldn’t lay off of ’em even if you wasn’t pokin’ at me.”

  “But you’d much sooner I wouldn’t poke, wouldn’t you?” I said. “You could be much more leisurely about your investigation. And you could drop it at your own convenience.”

  “Well—” He began another shrug, then looked at me in sudden alarm. “Now, wait a min-ute, keed. That ain’t very nice, is it? You make it sound like—like—”

  The tiredness and drowsiness had dropped from me like a robe. I was still irritated with him, but I was no longer in any hurry to have him leave. “I was just thinking,” I said, “about Ellen. Wondering about her. Do you suppose someone had her come back here—sent her the money to come on?”

  “I—how you mean? Who’d want to do that?”

  “Who, indeed? But it should be easy to find out, don’t you think? The person wouldn’t have sent her cash; at least, I don’t believe he would. And I doubt very much if he’d’ve sent anything as potentially incriminating as a check. So that leaves us money orders, records of which, naturally, should be readily available to us.…Why don’t you look into them? Or would you like to have me do it?”

  “That”—he hesitated—“that wouldn’t prove nothin’. Just because he sent her some dough.”

  “We-ell,” I said, “I think it might, Stuke. Particularly if he didn’t have a satisfactory explanation for his whereabouts at the time of the murder or murders.”

  “Maybe he couldn’t give no good alibi without foulin’ himself up. Maybe he was bedded down with a doll or something like that. Maybe”—his tongue flicked over his lips—“maybe the people who could alibi for him are sore at him now. He might’ve had to push ’em around since then, and they’d like to see him stuck.”

  I leaned back against the wall, folding my hands behind my head. “But you agree that she might have been sent some money by one of our local residents? Why do you suppose he did it, Stuke?”

  “What’s the difference? What if I told—could tell you? You wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Oh, come, now,” I said. “You mean one old pal wouldn’t believe another old pal? Why don’t you—”

  “I’ll tell you,” he said. “I’ll tell you this, Brownie. You’re going to forget all about anyone sendin’ her a money order. You ain’t going to nose around them money-order records a goddamned bit. You been pushin’ me all over the map, keed, and I been takin’ it an’ it kind of looks like I got to keep on takin’ it for a while. But this way—huh-uh. We don’t go no further in this direction.”

  He had moved over in front of me, as he talked, and now he was looking straight down into my face. He didn’t appear threatening, only intensely, deadly serious.

  “I’m going to drop it, eh?” I said. “Just what makes you so sure of that, Stuke?”

  “I got a couple of reasons. For one thing, you know damned well I didn’t kill her, her or the other dame. I didn’t have no cause to. It wouldn’t have made me nothin’. Huh-uh, Brownie. I ain’t killed anyone, and you know I ain’t. You can dig me into this deal an’ make me look pretty bad. You can turn on the heat until I start stinkin’ and they toss me on the dump. But you won’t be doin’ it because you think I’m the killer.”

  “And your second reason? The remaining half of the why I am not going to nose around those money-order records a goddamned bit?”

  “Why don’t we let it lay, keed? Let’s skip that one.”

  “Let’s not,” I said.

  “Okay. I’m tellin’ you. You start pushin’ me on this frammis an’ I’ll make you the saddest, sorriest son-of-a-bitch on the West Coast. I wouldn’t want to, understand. I’d maybe screw myself by doin’ it. But I’d be gettin’ it anyway, so that wouldn’t matter. Lay off of it, Brownie; don’t do no more pushin’ on it. Because the old crap will fly and most of it’ll be yours.”

  Well…

  He sounded like he meant it. It was just possible that, sufficiently aroused, he could carry the threat out. He was a resourceful man when he chose to be, and he had connections in various shady places.

  Of prime consideration, of course, was my knowledge that he hadn�
��t committed the murders. Not only because I had, but because they would have got him nothing. Stukey did not do things which got him nothing.

  There was no point, then, at least for the present, in pursuing the matter. There was no point in forcing him out of his job. I didn’t want him to lose it. As with Dave, the status quo suited me fine.

  “Lem,” I said, “this has been a very nice morning. Good whiskey, inspired food, and intriguing conversation. Two old pals, eating and drinking together, baring their souls in long significant silences and occasional muted bursts of profanity. I think I shall let you ride a while, Lem. ’Twere obscene to do otherwise. Amid such beatitude, the smallest flaw would loom as hideously large as a shotgun at a wedding.”

  “The keed.” He grinned. “You want I should wash up these dishes, Brownie?”

  18

  The status quo continued—with almost indiscernible deviations. Dave was his usual jumpy, worried-sick self. Or more so. Lovelace was his normal, dim-witted self—or more so. And Stukey, of course, remained Stukey. I was still his old pal, the keed, and this goddamned clean-up was killin’ him and he was gettin’ nowhere fast on them goddamned murders.…There was just nothin’ to go on, keed. Nothin’ but nothin’.

  Stories about the murders and the consequent manhunt became fewer and shorter. Even the big Los Angeles papers, with unlimited space to fill, began making it a second-section item.

  The emptiness…that continued, too. Only broadening now, widening, spreading its deadening atmosphere farther and farther, until as far as one could see there was nothing but desert, parched and withered and lifeless, where a dead man walked through eternity.

  The two-way pull…that did not continue. It lay dormant within me, of course, awaiting summons. But there was no urgency for the present, and so for all practical purposes it did not exist. Somehow that made the emptiness worse. There was no relief from it, no excursions into that strange outer world where all things moved at a tangent. I was tied to this world…and the emptiness. The shack represented something absolutely essential to me, though completely undefinable. I had to stay there, and…And she had been there. I couldn’t leave the place where she had been. I couldn’t disturb it. The lounge where she had sat, the stove where she had cooked, the bed where she had lain.