The Nothing Man

by Jim Thompson

  He nodded firmly. I reached for a cigarette, then dropped it to the floor unlit. And I was back there in the room with her, looking down on her body—her tense, stretched-out straight body—even her fingers stiff as dead wood. Dead, all right, that’s what she was—and somehow I must have known it. Half of me, anyway, half of me must have known it. But the two-way pull had been working, and the other half had to keep at it, pushing and plunging and needling. So I hit her and picked her up and tossed her into the dog pound, even though I knew she was dead.

  Christ.

  His eyes softened a little. “She was a pretty lonely little lady, wasn’t she, keed? From what I hear, she didn’t get along with most people. So she was kind of nuts about you, and you didn’t know how to stave her off and—well, maybe you’d better tell me what happened. Your guess would be better than mine. I figure she must have found out what was wrong with you. She must’ve seen that things weren’t going to be like she’d thought. And I guess a little lady like that…I guess she couldn’t take it. She didn’t want to take it.”

  No one but you, Brownie. If I couldn’t have you…

  “You see, keed? Once I got that first murder out of the way, the real one, the others fell right into line. I could take ’em for what they were, a suicide and an accident.”

  “You don’t know,” I said. “You can’t be sure. If I confessed to—”

  “They’d put you in a nuthouse, Brownie. They wouldn’t give you the gas chamber.”

  “Constance Wakefield was trying to blackmail me. I stalled her and got her to take that late train, and then I got on with her—”

  “Save it, keed.” He held up his hand. “I got a pretty good idea of what you did, and it don’t make no difference, see? You didn’t kill her. You didn’t ride over into the next county and shove her off the train. It was just what it looked like—an accident.”

  “But I—I—”

  “Okay,” he shrugged. “Have it your own way. A couple years for assault and battery, six months for maiming a dead body, a couple of years more on this Wakefield deal—whatever they’d call that. About five years in the pen, say, if they believe you. That or the nuthouse. Is that what you want, keed?”

  My throat was dry. I shook my head silently.

  He sighed, and the sound was weary and a little sad. “It ain’t much fun, is it, keed? You’ve been slidin’ down the rope and havin’ a hell of a time for yourself. And now you’re at the bottom, and all you can do is hang there. You can’t let go and you can’t get anyone to give you a shove. It wouldn’t make ’em nothing. They can’t do your job for you. It—it ain’t much fun, is it, keed?”

  The Teletypes were clicking again. I turned and stared at them blankly, at the words marching across the yellow paper—across a vast and empty desert where a dead man walked through:

  …TODAY’S WEATHER IN SOUTHERN AND LOWER CALIFORNIA. CLOUDY WITH THUNDER SHOWERS THIS MORNING, FOLLOWED BY…

  “You know what I figured on doin’, Brownie? Why I came up here? Well, I was goin’ to give you the old horse laugh, keed. You were at the end of the line, I figured, and you’d be sittin’ here waiting for someone to pick you off. Maybe you’d kidded yourself you was going to do a brodie, but I knew you wouldn’t. You couldn’t, any more’n you could have killed those other people. You’d make a pass at doin’ it, but that’d be as far as it would go. You couldn’t carry through with it. And like I been tellin’ you, no one else is goin’ to do it. There ain’t going to be no pinch—no gas chamber. No easy way out. So I was going to lay it on the line for you, and watch you squirm. Make you beg like you’ve made me beg. Laugh at you like you’ve laughed at me. But—well, I’ll tell you something, keed…”

  …FOLLOWED BY CLEARING SKIES, STRONG TO MODERATE WINDS AND…

  “…There’s one thing about bein’ a louse, keed. A no-good like maybe I am. When you’re that way—”

  “You’re not that way,” I said. “You’re a long way from being a louse, Stuke. I don’t know why I ever thought—”

  “I’m telling you. When you’re a louse yourself, keed, when you know you’re a long way from being perfect yourself, the other lice don’t look so bad to you. You’re all in the same family, and you don’t hurt ’em unless you have to. You don’t make things no tougher on ’em than you have to. Look at me, Brownie.” He gripped me by the shoulders. “I ain’t laughin’, am I? I didn’t stay here to laugh. I’m here to help you.”

  He gave me a little shake, a brisk puffed-lipped nod of his head.

  I said, “There’s just one way you can help, Stuke. I—”

  “Huh-uh,” he said, firmly. “That’s out, keed. I couldn’t do it. I ain’t goin’ to. So forget it. You’re goin’ to snap out of it, Brownie. You’re goin’ to get your mind off of that—off of yourself, and start thinkin’ about something else. That—it ain’t everything. It—”

  “Isn’t it?” I said. “Isn’t it rather easy for you to talk, Stuke?”

  “It’d be easier not to, keed. A hell of a lot easier.”

  “But you don’t know! You don’t know what it’s like to—”

  “Keed”—he tapped me on the chest—“don’t tell me what I don’t know. You’d be talking for the next forty years and we ain’t got much time. You’ve got to get cleaned up, get yourself something to eat and a little sleep. You’ve got to be in here on the job in the morning, and you’ve got to work harder than you ever worked before. You’re going to go on swinging your weight against the rats and the cheaters in this town, but this time you’re going to swing it the right way. It ain’t going to be a needle job. It’s going to mean something.…Remember what I told you the other night? Well, I meant it. If the graft wasn’t here to take, I wouldn’t be taking it.”

  “But you don’t know—I can’t! God, how can I?”

  “You ain’t got no choice,” he said.

  His eyes were soft, sympathetic, friendly. They were firm and unwavering.

  I looked away from him to the Teletype machines and the last lines of the weather forecast:

  …THUNDER SHOWERS IN THE AFTERNOON. POSSIBLE CLEARING BY EVENING.

  About the Author

  James Meyers Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma, in 1906. In all, Jim Thompson wrote twenty-nine novels and two screenplays (for the Stanley Kubrick films The Killing and Paths of Glory). Films based on his novels include The Getaway, The Killer Inside Me, The Grifters, and After Dark, My Sweet.

  …and The Grifters

  In November 2011, Mulholland Books will publish Jim Thompson’s The Grifters. Following is an excerpt from the novel’s opening pages.

  The Grifters

  I’d finished my pie and was having a second cup of coffee when I saw him. The midnight freight had come in a few minutes before; and he was peering in one end of the restaurant window, the end nearest the depot, shading his eyes with his hand and blinking against the light. He saw me watching him, and his face faded back into the shadows. But I knew he was still there. I knew he was waiting. The bums always size me up for an easy mark.

  I lit a cigar and slid off my stool. The waitress, a new girl from Dallas, watched as I buttoned my coat. “Why, you don’t even carry a gun!” she said, as though she was giving me a piece of news.

  “No,” I smiled. “No gun, no blackjack, nothing like that. Why should I?”

  “But you’re a cop—a deputy sheriff, I mean. What if some crook should try to shoot you?”

  “We don’t have many crooks here in Central City, ma’am,” I said. “Anyway, people are people, even when they’re a little misguided. You don’t hurt them, they won’t hurt you. They’ll listen to reason.”

  She shook her head, wide-eyed with awe, and I strolled up to the front. The proprietor shoved back my money and laid a couple of cigars on top of it. He thanked me again for taking his son in hand.

  “He’s a different boy now, Lou,” he said, kind of running his words together like foreigners do. “Stays in nights; gets along fine in sch
ool. And always he talks about you—what a good man is Deputy Lou Ford.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I said. “Just talked to him. Showed him a little interest. Anyone else could have done as much.”

  “Only you,” he said. “Because you are good, you make others so.” He was all ready to sign off with that, but I wasn’t. I leaned an elbow on the counter, crossed one foot behind the other and took a long slow drag on my cigar. I liked the guy—as much as I like most people, anyway—but he was too good to let go. Polite, intelligent: guys like that are my meat.

  “Well, I tell you,” I drawled. “I tell you the way I look at it, a man doesn’t get any more out of life than what he puts into it.”

  “Umm,” he said, fidgeting. “I guess you’re right, Lou.”

  “I was thinking the other day, Max; and all of a sudden I had the doggonedest thought. It came to me out of a clear sky—the boy is father to the man. Just like that. The boy is father to the man.”

  The smile on his face was getting strained. I could hear his shoes creak as he squirmed. If there’s anything worse than a bore, it’s a corny bore. But how can you brush off a nice friendly fellow who’d give you his shirt if you asked for it?

  “I reckon I should have been a college professor or something like that,” I said. “Even when I’m asleep I’m working out problems. Take that heat wave we had a few weeks ago; a lot of people think it’s the heat that makes it so hot. But it’s not like that, Max. It’s not the heat, but the humidity. I’ll bet you didn’t know that, did you?”

  He cleared his throat and muttered something about being wanted in the kitchen. I pretended like I didn’t hear him.

  “Another thing about the weather,” I said. “Everyone talks about it, but no one does anything. But maybe it’s better that way. Every cloud has its silver lining, at least that’s the way I figure it. I mean, if we didn’t have the rain we wouldn’t have the rainbows, now would we?”

  “Lou…”

  “Well,” I said, “I guess I’d better shove off. I’ve got quite a bit of getting around to do, and I don’t want to rush. Haste makes waste, in my opinion. I like to look before I leap.”

  That was dragging ’em in by the feet, but I couldn’t hold ’em back. Striking at people that way is almost as good as the other, the real way. The way I’d fought to forget—and had almost forgot—until I met her.

  I was thinking about her as I stepped out into the cool West Texas night and saw the bum waiting for me.

  Books by Jim Thompson

  After Dark, My Sweet

  The Alcoholics

  Bad Boy

  The Criminal

  Cropper’s Cabin

  The Getaway

  The Golden Gizmo

  The Grifters

  Heed the Thunder

  A Hell of a Woman

  The Killer Inside Me

  The Kill-Off

  The Nothing Man

  Nothing More than Murder

  Now and on Earth

  Pop. 1280

  Recoil

  The Rip-Off

  Savage Night

  South of Heaven

  A Swell-Looking Babe

  Texas by the Tail

  The Transgressors

  Wild Town

  Acclaim for Jim Thompson

  “The best suspense writer going, bar none.”

  —New York Times

  “My favorite crime novelist—often imitated but never duplicated.”

  —Stephen King

  “If Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Cornell Woolrich would have joined together in some ungodly union and produced a literary offspring, Jim Thompson would be it.…His work casts a dazzling light on the human condition.”

  —Washington Post

  “Like Clint Eastwood’s pictures it’s the stuff for rednecks, truckers, failures, psychopaths and professors.…One of the finest American writers and the most frightening, Thompson is on best terms with the devil. Read Jim Thompson and take a tour of hell.”

  —New Republic

  “The master of the American groin-kick novel.”

  —Vanity Fair

  “The most hard-boiled of all the American writers of crime fiction.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright 1954 by Jim Thompson, copyright © renewed 1982 by Alberta H. Thompson

  Excerpt from The Killer Inside Me copyright 1952 by Jim Thompson, copyright © renewed 1980 by Alberta Thompson

  Cover design by Allison J. Warner copyright © 2011 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Mulholland Books / Little, Brown and Company

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  First e-book edition, November 2011

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-316-19586-7