The Nothing Man

by Jim Thompson

  I wanted to say, You won’t last a shift, boy. There’ll be a deadline every hour, and all hell will pop if you miss one. There’s no time to work your stuff over. You have to hit it on the nose the first shot. And you can’t let everything else slide while you’re doing it. You’ll have to keep answering your phones, two of them, taking down notes on other stories. You’ll have a half dozen stories going at the same time. Sure, they’ve got plenty of help; they need it. And whether you knock yourself out or not is up to you. That’s strictly your own problem, and they’re not concerned with it. You…

  But why tell him something that he probably already knew? The truth, which fear and false pride kept him from admitting?

  “Tom,” I said, “that’s swell. I know you’ll make out fine, boy.”

  “Yeah,” he said, frowning down vaguely at the floor. “I’ve got to, so I guess I will. I—I’ve got to get out of this burg. I can’t…There’s nothing around here for me.”

  He took another outsize drink, gulped it, shuddered, and stood up. “Well, I guess I better shove off. Guess I ought to have gone home long ago. I’ve been out wandering around since about six, kind of giving the old town a last once-over, and Midge might be getting worried.”

  I offered to drive him home, but he declined. He’d just take a taxi, he guessed. He’d just remembered that there was a fellow in town he wanted to see, and…

  I called a cab for him. We shook hands and he left.

  I had an idea that I was acquainted with the fellow he wanted to see, that one and all the other bartenders in town. And I could understand his unease and restlessness. He couldn’t have got more than a couple of hundred bucks for his furniture. With that and a wife and baby—and almost no ability—he was tackling one of the toughest towns and toughest jobs in the world.

  What would he do when his money ran out? What does a man do when he can accept nothing less than the unachievable?

  It was difficult to say, I thought. There was no telling what Tom Judge would do. Something desperate, of course, something foolish. But exactly what…?

  21

  Subconsciously, I think I must have been prepared for an unusual aftermath to my strangling of Constance Wakefield. I must have been—for I was not particularly startled when that aftermath came—and it seems only logical that I should have been so prepared. This was my third murder, the third time I had gone through the motions of murder. Yet in each of the first two cases…

  I couldn’t be positive that I’d killed Ellen. I’d slugged her and set fire to her, but she hadn’t died of the blow or the flames. Asphyxiation had been the cause of death, and it did seem strange that, once on her feet, she couldn’t have escaped from that small cabin.

  I couldn’t be positive that I’d killed Deborah. I’d left her alone in the shack and she’d been lying so very still when I returned. And in my haste to get the hateful deed over—Well? How could I be sure? How could I know that she wasn’t already dead when I broke her neck?

  So with Constance Wakefield—my “murder” number three. Murder in quotes, yes, for here again there was a strong element of doubt. Again I couldn’t be sure that I had actually killed. In fact, it seemed quite certain that I hadn’t.

  Her body was found late the following morning. It was lying beside the railroad tracks about thirty miles outside of Pacific City.

  There was a handful of dimes in her purse and, of course, the poem.

  Her death was attributed to heart failure, with concussion a contributory factor.

  It was believed that she had fallen or been pushed from the train, with the emphasis very heavily on the fallen.

  After all, there’d been no other passengers in the coach—the train crew swore to that. And the train hadn’t stopped until it was almost seventy miles up the line. True, there was the poem, but that had been penciled over and marked up so much as to be almost indecipherable. It could not be definitely stated that it was another of the Sneering Slayer rhymes. There was at least as good a chance that, intrigued by the other poems, she had tried her hand at one herself.

  She was a publisher, wasn’t she? She’d be interested in such things, wouldn’t she?

  Of course, the police were “investigating thoroughly” and “leaving no stone unturned” but what they expected to find under those stones was obviously nothing.

  The old girl was half blind. The coach was dark. She’d gone out to the rear platform for some fresh air—a rarity on the milk train—and taken a tumble.

  Yes, I am aware of the holes in this line of reasoning. But since this is fact, not fiction, there is nothing I can do about them. If they irritate you sufficiently, you might take them up with the police of the next county, where Miss Wakefield’s body was discovered.

  I wouldn’t say they were stupid. I am reasonably confident, say, that they are capable of tracking an elephant through a snow drift. They could do it, but they wouldn’t—unless the elephant was traveling more than thirty miles an hour or sneaking fruit from the orange groves. They would see no occasion to. It would be a “needless expense.” And the cops in the next county, like the cops in so many other counties, are under firm edict not to waste the taxpayers’ money.

  So that was the way things stood with Constance Wakefield. The cops believed it was an accident. They finished their thorough investigation with its incidental upturning of stones in some forty-eight hours, and they were convinced it was an accident.

  The Los Angeles papers tried to build the case up as murder. They whooped it up, mixing its meager facts in with rewrites of the previous two cases. And they even sent their own “special investigators” into the county. That went on for three or four days, and then there was a nice juicy murder right in Los Angeles—a B-girl carved up and hidden in, of all places, an ice cream cart—and you can guess what happened to the Wakefield story. To hell with that. This was something hot.

  Although I had seen evidence of great shrewdness in Lem Stukey, I was still surprised at his positive conviction that Constance Wakefield had been murdered. Or, I should say, I was surprised at the insight that brought him to that conviction.

  “Maybe I wouldn’t feel that way if she’d died in this county.” He grinned. “I’d probably let it slide just like those guys are doing. But I figure they got to see it, even if they ain’t doing anything about it. Look, now, just looky here. The first one he sets on fire. The next one he tosses to the dogs. The third one he pushes off a train. He—”

  “Hold it,” I said. “How did he know it was going to kill her when he pushed her off the train?”

  “You ain’t listening, keed. You’re stealing my stanzas. He don’t know it’s going to kill her. That’s what I’m talking about. He couldn’t be sure, and he couldn’t be sure that what he did to Ellen was going to finish her, and this Mrs. Chasen—he couldn’t be—”

  “Hold it again,” I said. “He could have finished her off before he put her in the—”

  “I tell you it’s a pattern,” Stukey insisted. “I can’t lay it out for you like wallpaper, but it’s got to be the same guy. He don’t carry through, see? He leaves too much to chance. He ain’t—well, he don’t seem serious about it.”

  “Murder isn’t serious?”

  “So maybe he don’t really mean to murder ’em. He thinks he does, maybe, but all he’s really up to is a rough sort of kidding. You watch a bunch of youngsters sometime, keed. They’ll start off talking, razzing each other, and pretty soon they’ve used up all the dirty cracks they got and they start punching. They’re fed up with the talk, see, so they start making with the fists.…It figures, pal. You really want to kill someone, you don’t play around at it like this guy. You get you a knife or a gun, and you do the job fast and permanent.”

  I found myself staring at him. I wondered if…

  “…Take them dimes in her purse now.” He was talking about Constance again. “There was thirty-three of them, wasn’t there? And what would a dame be doin’ with more than two or three dim
es in her purse? I’d say that that was all she did have, Brownie. The guy that bumped her put the other thirty there. He was razzing her, see? Thirty pieces of silver, like Judas got paid off with.”

  I lighted a cigarette. I said I would like to offer him my theory.

  “I’m convinced,” I said, “that she was killed by an enraged redcap. Driven mad by dime tips, he followed her onto the train and poured the dimes down her throat with the intent to strangle her. Then, driven by the wild strength born of fear, she disgorged the dimes—frugally stowing them away in her purse—and—”

  “Yeah?” He waited a moment for me to continue, then shrugged. “So go on and laugh about it. For all you know he maybe did exactly that. Not any redcap, dammit. The guy that did the other two jobs would fit his pattern.”

  I asked him how some of his other theories fitted into the pattern, as, for example, his one-time belief that Tom Judge had killed Ellen.

  “You say that the same man killed all three. But he was in jail at the time Mrs. Chasen was killed, and he was with me on the night of Miss Wakefield’s demise.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He frowned doggedly. “So I can’t lay it all out for you. I don’t know all the answers. All I’m saying is that every killing’s got the same earmarks, and it ain’t got ’em accidentally. The same guy’s mixed up in—in—”

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing. What the hell? I was just going to say that it looks almost like two guys. One of ’em, this joker, he half-asses the job up and the second one makes it stick. Now, wait a minute!” He held up a hand. “I said it looked that way. I didn’t say it was that way.”

  “You know,” I said, “that’s a very interesting idea, Stuke. Why don’t you work on it?”

  “Me? Now that the guy’s finally pulled out of the county?” He shook his head firmly. “Not me, keed. He ain’t no skin off my nose from now on.”

  The Courier carried the Wakefield story one day and gave it a back-page squib in one edition the next. And that was the last Pacific City residents heard of her, unless they read the out-of-town papers.

  Mr. Lovelace felt that the story lacked local interest. He felt that it was “negative”—the sort of news we’d been printing far too much of lately. We’d have to have less of it from now on, much, much less. It was “unconstructive.” It was “depressing.” It took up space needed for “worthwhile” items.

  He was very firm during our discussion, and I made no very large effort to soften him up. The clean-up campaign was getting a little tiresome. At least, I was getting very tired of writing about it. It was the same thing day after day, dry, repetitious—completely lacking in any possibilities for humor. And with the murderer supposedly gone from Pacific City, the basis for keeping it alive was gone.

  So I didn’t argue with Lovelace at any length or with any great insistence. Perhaps you “couldn’t legislate public morals.” Perhaps “these things worked themselves out if you gave them time.” And perhaps I knew damned well that it would do me no good to argue.

  There was that in his manner which said as much.

  The discussion was embarrassing to him, for some reason. He seemed prepared to be angry if forced to continue it.

  All things considered, it seemed a poor time to test my influence with him.

  The clean-up story had been getting a daily play in every edition. We dropped it to one edition a day, then to one every other day, then one every three days. And very soon we had dropped it completely.

  There was no further mention of it after that. No further mention of the murders. The paper resumed its puerile emptiness, a newspaper in name only as I was a man in name only. There was nothing in either of us. We were façades for emptiness.

  Broadly speaking, things became as they were before the murders. Yet the outlines of those things were becoming dimmer to me. It was hard to reach out to them any more—lash out at them any more. It was difficult to remember why I had ever wanted to.

  Dave Randall was as he had always been. A little more nervous and jumpy, perhaps, but generally unchanged. So, likewise, with Lovelace and Stukey and everyone else. All the same, as I was the same. And still a change had taken place.

  They were receding from me, growing hazier and wobblier of outline. It was increasingly hard to bring them back into focus.

  I wondered if the booze could be responsible, and I swore off for twelve of the longest hours in my existence. It was not enough, of course; months would be required to desaturate me. But further abstinence was unthinkable. Perhaps I could not go on as I had without serious consequences, but neither could I stop. It made me too ill physically. The clarity it brought me was not the kind I desired.

  Without whisky, that circle in my mind began to dissolve, I ceased to move around it endlessly, and my vision turned inward. And while I caught only a glimpse of what lay there, that little was so bewildering and maddening—and frightful—that I could look no more.

  I tried cutting down gradually on the whisky, and I have continued to try. But these attempts like the other have not been successful. When I reach a certain stage in the cutting down, the circle begins to dissolve, and I must quickly reverse the cutting-down process. I—

  I am not like that; that which I caught a glimpse of is not me. I will not accept it nor look at it.

  But I am getting ahead of myself again. I am rushing toward the end, and the end will come soon enough.

  The emptiness, the meaninglessness went on. Pushing the others farther away from me. Pushing them out of my reach.

  It was unbearable. I could not let them go. They were the life I did not have, my one handhold on existence. I had to do something. And I did.

  We have a Republican postmaster in Pacific City, and he owes a considerable political debt to the Courier. He was glad to let me look into the records of money orders issued. I went back through them. I found what I was looking for within an hour.

  Except that I had some idle time to pass, I had no reason to look farther. Nevertheless, I did look, and what I found was definitely not what I had expected to find.

  I was puzzled, startled, at first. Then the puzzledness gave way to excitement, and a curious kind of relief.

  So this was it. This was why, and possibly how…

  Well, it was the day before yesterday when I made the discovery; and as I entered the house the phone rang. It was Stukey. He was up on the Hill, he said, up in Italian town. He’d been kind of takin’ it easy this afternoon—just sorta screwing around and cutting up touches with the boys. If I wasn’t doing nothing, maybe he’d pick up some grub and saunter on down to the shack.

  I said that would be fine, I’d been hoping he would call. He said, swell, he’d be right down then. He was on foot, yeah; he’d sent his car back to the station. But it was a nice day, and he kind of felt like walkin’ and…

  “Fine,” I said. “That’s perfect, Stuke.”

  22

  He brought steaks, et cetera, and prepared them as before.

  We ate as we had before, myself at the coffee table, he from a tray placed upon a chair.

  We finished eating and I reached for the whisky bottle. He tilted his chair back against the wall, sipping a bottle of the beer he had brought.

  He was giving the beer a play for a while, he said. He’d been hittin’ the old whiz too hard, and a guy could only do that so long before it got him. It sneaked up on him before he knew it. Maybe it didn’t show on him, but—well, what was the sense in waitin’ until you was knocked out? Ain’t that the way you see it, keed?

  I shook my head. Nodded. Shrugged. I wasn’t thinking about what he was saying. I was wondering how I could bring the subject up, how to best mention my discovery.

  It should be done obliquely, I thought. I should come in at an angle, letting him see the approach but leaving its terminus in temporary doubt. First a small hint, then a stronger one—watching him, smiling at him. Turning the heat on gradually and—

  And letting him sweat.

&
nbsp; He rambled on aimlessly, pausing now and then for some comment from me. I nodded and shrugged and shook my head, and finally he lapsed into silence.

  That lasted for several minutes, or what I believe on reflection was several minutes. Then he let the legs of his chair down to the floor and announced that maybe he’d better go. I looked kind of tired, like I didn’t feel too good, so—

  I came out of my reverie. I said that I wouldn’t think of letting him go. “We haven’t been seeing nearly enough of each other,” I said. “Tell me, what great deeds are afoot with Pacific City’s finest? How goes the fearless pursuit of panhandlers and unlicensed peddlers?”

  “Aaaah.” He raised and dropped his shoulders uncomfortably. “Lookit here, keed. You’re talkin’ to the wrong boy about that. You really want to do somethin’ about it, which I don’t figure you do, I’ll tell you who to see.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yeah. You talk to the merchants’ association, see how they feel about peddlers. You see how the tourist bureau an’ the chamber of commerce feels about panhandlers. They’ll say I’m too easy on ’em, keed. I don’t treat ’em rough enough.”

  “But you can’t be swayed by outside influences,” I said. “I am confident of it. The clean-up campaign is a case in point.…You are proceeding with it, are you not? The mere absence of publicity has not deterred you?”

  “No,” he said, “it ain’t.”

  “I was sure of it. I knew that with one such as you there—”

  “Listen to me, keed. I want to tell you somethin’.”

  I tilted the whisky bottle again. I raised my glass and gestured. “By all means,” I said. “You tell me something, and then perhaps I shall tell you something.”

  “The clean-up’s over an’ done with, and I ain’t sorry. But there ain’t a damned thing I could do if I was.…You really don’t see it, Brownie? I didn’t expect old Lovey to know straight up, but I didn’t figure I’d have to draw a map for you. Who do you think owns all these whorehouses and policy joints? Who do you think owns the horse parlors and deadfalls and mitt mills? Well, it ain’t the grifters, keed. They just work ’em. And they pay goddamned fancy rents for the privilege. And the people that get them rents swing plenty of weight around town. Sure, I graft. Why not? If the dirty money ain’t too dirty for our best people, like they call them, it’s plenty clean for me. But I tell you this, pal. If the stuff wasn’t there, I couldn’t take it.”