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The Hog Murders
A Niccolo Benedetti Mystery
William L. DeAndrea
With a new introduction by Orania Papazoglou
For Joann and Mary, two good kids
Contents
Introduction
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
INTRODUCTION
WHEN BILL DEANDREA WAS dying, he told his mother that the only way he would allow her to have a funeral Mass said for him was if she could guarantee that the first hymn would be Leader of the Pack. She was holding a rosary at the time. He was close enough to dying that he was almost never himself any more, almost never turned on and alert, almost never out of pain. I was a walking catatonic. We had been together over thirteen years by then, and less than a month before it looked as if he were going to beat it: this strange cancer that he had, so rare that one of his doctors once told him there were better odds he’d win the New York lottery jackpot two weeks running than that he’d get what he’d got. Now there were times when he was himself only in body, times when the things he did made no more sense to him than they did to me. Once, he woke up everyone in the house, sure that the smoke alarm was going off. Once, he came to me and told me with great urgency that we had to get in touch with my mother right away if we wanted to have wild turkey for Thanksgiving. I can tell you exactly how long it lasted, that very bad time. It started on the day after Labor Day, 1996, and went to one twenty two in the afternoon on October 9th. October 9th, 1996, was the day he died.
The first time I ever heard of William L. DeAndrea, it was March 21st, 1980, and I was standing in the Open Book Annex in Grand Central Terminal in the middle of the evening rush hour. I was twenty nine years old and scared to death. A week before, I had resigned from my doctoral program, ditched my teaching job, and got on a plane for New York City, convinced that if I didn’t do something right now, right that minute, I would be stuck forever in academia and never be a writer at all. I had fifty dollars to my name and a place to stay on the floor of a friend’s apartment in Greenwich Village. I was on my way home to Connecticut to tell my father what it was I had done with my life. Mostly I was having trouble finding air to breathe.
“Don’t go home if it scares you so much,” my friend with the apartment told me—but I couldn’t do that. I didn’t know how to do that. So I went to Grand Central instead, and bought a ticket to Danbury, and went into the Open Book Annex to find something to take my mind off the horrendous scene I was sure was about to blow up. I found the book you are holding now, in almost the identical cover. That cover must be one of the most effective pieces of book art ever designed. I was surrounded by a cloud of tension the way some people say they are surrounded by an aura. The man with the pig’s head pierced right through that—and half an hour later, as the train made its way past Fordham and Greenwich and Noroton Heights, so did the words on the pages inside. Bill DeAndrea had a very distinct narrative voice, in life as well as in his work. It always commanded my attention.
Some of the people who are reading this book will have read everything Bill ever wrote: all the Matt Cobb novels, all the Benedetti novels, the two short works he published as Philip DeGrave, the short stories that appeared in one anthology or another over the course of two decades, even the last two historical mysteries about Quinn Booker and Lobo Blacke. Others will never have heard of him at all, or be familiar only with his nonfiction: the Encyclopedia Mysteriosa, say, or the columns in The Armchair Detective. For that second group, this novel may come as something of a surprise. As a columnist and an historian of the field, Bill was known for the sharpness of both his insights and his criticism. His columns in TAD tended to provoke flame wars on the Letters to the Editor page. Some of his analyses in the Encyclopedia resulted in fellow mystery writers threatening never to speak to him again. Politically, he was a passionate and radical libertarian, a foe of all things Politically Correct. Personally, he was the product of the great Baby Boom social shift, the son of a factory worker and a nurse who got scholarships and Made Good, the second person in his family to go to college and the eventual winner of more awards than he could keep track of, including three Edgars. He lost two of his friends to drug addiction before he was eighteen. He lost half a dozen to AIDS before he was thirty-five. He never smoked a cigarette, or touched a drug of any kind, not even in the early-Seventies craziness about the transformative power of marijuana. In the end what mattered to him most—his marriage, his family, his friends, his work—seemed to him to lack some grandness of vision, some great romantic gesture that would provide him with a suitable summing up. He could only manage small things, he thought, but those small things were what I found so breathtaking. Once, in the middle of winter, convinced that I was going to run out of money and be unable to buy our older son a new winter coat, he lied to me about how many painkillers he had left in the bottle he kept by the side of his bed. He rationed them out to himself, at less than a quarter the prescribed dose, for two solid weeks before I realized what was going on. The pills were expensive—$150 for a month’s supply—and we’d run through the prescription drug allowance on his health plan. He wanted desperately to do the right thing.
“Sometimes all I can do is nothing,” he said, when I confronted him with what he’d done. I was angry about it, although I knew I shouldn’t be. It frightened me when I thought he had given in to the pain.
The novels are written in Bill’s personal voice, the one he used at home, the one he used with the people he was closest to. That is true whether they are written in first person or third, as is the fact that there is always one character who is Bill himself. In The Hog Murders, that character is Ron Gentry, who would go on in later Benedetti novels to marry the woman of his dreams, the oh-so-intellectual Janet.
In The Hog Murders, Ron is what Bill thought himself to be: single and at loose ends, happy with his job but not very happy with his life. Niccolo Benedetti is The Great Detective, in the tradition of Poirot and Nero Wolfe. In real life, Bill loved Wolfe and couldn’t stand Poirot. He always knew what the problem with The Great Detective was, though: nobody could approach him straight on without making him laughable. Rex Stout never wrote from Wolfe’s point of view, and Bill never wrote from Benedetti’s. Benedetti was always to be seen through the eyes of other people, mostly of people who worshiped him.
As a Great Detective, Benedetti is necessarily eccentric: a painter in his spare time with the ego of a Picasso if not the talent; a first class old goat with a penchant for chasing middle-aged women in restaurants and airports; the kind of person who is likely to insult the clients before the check is even in the mail. Genius has its privileges, and one of those privileges is to live without resorting to common sense. Ron Gentry, on the other hand, is common sense personified. He has so much common sense that, without Benedetti, he would be in a rut.
I sometimes think of Bill writing this novel, on the kitchen table in his parents’ apartment in Port Chester, New York, while his first book was out in the void, making the rounds of agents and
publishers. That was Killed In The Ratings, and eventually it would win him his first Edgar, for Best First Novel, in 1979. Bill didn’t know that while he was inventing Benedetti. He only knew he had a plan, and that was to have two books circulating that were as different as possible from each other while still being mysteries. One—Ratings—would be in first person, set in a major city, and focus on an everyday working guy with a job (as network troubleshooter) that gave him a franchise to investigate crime. The other—Hog—would be in third person, set in a small town, and feature a larger-than-life sized, mythically-proportioned genius whose life and works would be more important than the cases he solved.
Like a lot of other writers, before and since, he had no idea if either of these books was any good. He was too close to the work, and too emotionally committed to it, to make an objective assessment. He just knew that he loved Matt Cobb and Benedetti both.
He didn’t love Sparta, New York, the fictional setting of The Hog Murders, any more than he loved Syracuse, New York, the real town on which it was based. Syracuse was where Bill went to college—at Syracuse University—and although he loved the people he met there and the life of the university, he’d had enough of upstate New York by his third week in residence. For one thing, it was cold, too cold, and the weather was awful. When it wasn’t raining it was snowing, and when it was snowing it went on for hours and covered everything. For another thing, it was in something like a media black-out. In those days before cable and satellites, being outside the ADI of a major metropolitan area meant getting four channels on your television set and all of them depressingly fuzzy. It also meant “weird lacunae,” as Bill sometimes put it. You could get decent bagels but had to import lox. You could get Miles Davis but had to go south to hear Thelonius Monk.
Most of all, what bothered Bill about Syracuse—and what bothers Ron Gentry about Sparta—is the emptiness there, the sense that there are vast stretches of land with nobody and nothing in them. A lot of people are looking for exactly that, but Bill was an urban animal, and Ron Gentry is too. There was something about the silence of the country that seemed ominous to both of them. In the city there are almost always people around, witnesses, people to call on for help. In the country, there may be nobody at all. The old cliché might really come true. Nobody would hear you if you screamed.
Bill did a few books with serial killers in them, and all of those serial killers operated in rural or near rural areas. In The Hog Murders, where the first killing takes place in the first chapter and nearly on the first page, the backdrop to the murders is almost brutally conventional and light. A earful of college girls driving down an Interstate, pine trees and withered grass, houses put up from supermarket stock plans and looking too much alike: what was ordinary to those of us who grew up in small towns was exotic to Bill, who grew up thinking that Armonk was “the sticks.”
“Syracuse isn’t the sticks,” one of his dorm mates informed him, his first week in college. “The roads are paved.”
Bill had never lived on an unpaved road in his life until I dragged him out to rural Connecticut, and would cheerfully never have lived on one at all. All three Benedetti books would eventually be set in very small towns, and all of them would have that same quality of underlying unease, of a vision of the Garden of Eden as rotten to the core.
It was a good trick, really—a kind of professional sleight of hand—because The Hog Murders is most assuredly a humorous mystery. Humor was important to Bill DeAndrea, in everything he did. He never understood the conventional wisdom that said that a crime novel was not really “art” unless its tone was unrelentingly grim.
Oddly enough, he never understood the use of humor to wound—in his books. He was very good at using humor for just that purpose in his nonfiction, especially when he was angry or outraged. But even when he dealt with outrages beyond number, the tone of the humor in his fiction remained good-natured, even if it was sometimes incredulous. He found a lot to be incredulous about in Sparta, New York, and everywhere else. The self-absorbed cluelessness of so many members of the human race gave him a lot of material.
“Nobody lives forever,” a character in one of the last of the Matt Cobb novels says.
“Yeah,” Matt Cobb answers. “But have you ever noticed, everybody tries?”
The Hog Murders is a gateway into Bill DeAndrea’s and Ron Gentry’s and Niccolo Benedetti’s world—a world where the good guys at least would like to live forever, because they’re having such a very good time; where most people are basically good if also basically nuts; where the bad guys are bad because they can never see anybody or anything outside themselves.
It’s not a bad place to live, and it comes with a few extras in the way of humor, and compassion, and solid, inspired prose.
If you have never read a novel by William L. DeAndrea, I hope you will like this one. I can still see myself sitting on that train, thinking how incredibly good it was, and not knowing that, in less than five years, I would be married to the man who wrote it.
Things happen to Ron Gentry that do not happen to you and me—but then, things happened to Bill DeAndrea that do not happen to you and me, either. Once, in the fall of 1984, he took me to the Burger King on the Champs Elysses and Kareem Abdul Jabar was there, carrying a plastic tray loaded down with Whoppers and large-sized fries. If I’d gone into the Burger King on the Champs Elysses on my own, all that would have happened to me was that I would have been insulted by the check-out girl.
“I just want to make sure you think I was worth it,” he said to me, pulling himself into lucidity less than twenty-four hours before he died.
He was worth it. This book is worth it. So is every book he wrote.
I hope you read them all.
—Jane Haddam
ONE
EVEN IF NO ONE HAD been murdered, it’s a safe assumption that the citizens of Sparta, New York (population approx. 191,000), would have been a long time forgetting that winter. Even for Central New York State, where (as the saying goes) the year is divided into winter and July, there was some memorable weather. From October to April, an even fourteen feet of snow fell on Sparta, including the thirty-inch blizzard on Ground Hog Day.
At the time, the date of the blizzard seemed like a particularly grim jest of fate. Sparta residents compared the Hog’s day weather that stifled the activity of the community, with the mysterious individual who signed “HOG” on his notes boasting of the deaths; they told each other it figured. “He’s tired of killing us off one at a time,” an anonymous old woman told a local radio station. “He’s gonna wipe out the whole city at once.” The city laughed along with her. It was a way to hide the fear.
There had been mass murderers in the past—London’s Jack the Ripper, New York City’s Son of Sam, the L.A. Slasher, and Zebra and Zodiac in San Francisco. But these were big cities. The people of Sparta expected that kind of thing from a big city. But Sparta was only a nice, good-sized town halfway between Syracuse and Rochester, with a bunch of subassembly plants and a university in it. Why pick on us? they asked the powers that be. They had no answers.
And another thing. Jack the Ripper carved up whores. The Slasher took a razor to helpless derelicts. Son of Sam shot attractive young couples. Zebra and Zodiac, along with the other serial murderers of history, all had their preferences in victims.
But Hog would kill anybody, in any way, for no apparent reason, then laugh about it afterward. In a city like Sparta, where twenty homicides a year is a lot, six in the span of three short weeks (all apparently committed by the same hand, one that seemed to have God-sure control over people and events) were sure to provoke more than a little uneasiness in the population.
Benedetti took the case, though he proclaimed loudly (as always) that he was a philosopher, not a detective. He charged the usual stiff fee of course, but there is no doubt an affectionate regard for the city, Ron Gentry, and Inspector Joseph Fleisher, had something to do with the professor’s decision.
The ave
rage Spartan didn’t care. All he knew was that if Benedetti couldn’t catch Hog, Sparta’s own mass murderer would join most of his famous predecessors among the ranks of the uncaught.
As the professor was later to remark, if that woman in Oswego hadn’t reached her 118th birthday, it would have been a different case.
Buell Tatham was composing his daily column for the Courant as he drove back to Sparta, mentally filling in the blanks in the standard centenarian-plus birthday story—I owe my long and productive life to — , — has changed most since I was a young boy/girl. You could get a computer to write it as well. A columnist’s curse, he thought wryly—human interest starts to get boring.
It wasn’t always like that, of course. During the civil rights struggles of the early and mid-sixties, Buell, as a bona fide expatriate southern liberal, had put the Courant on the journalistic map with a series of sensitive articles about the suffering and anguish he’d seen racism cause blacks and whites, and why it had to stop if the South were to survive. Some of the columns had even been picked up by the wire services, though he was sure the Knox County Register had never run any of them. He laughed at the idea of the home folk reading his words and never knowing it was his work hidden behind a new name.
He’d had offers to move up to papers in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, but had turned them down. It left scars, he had discovered, to leave the land his family had owned since George I granted it to an adventurous ancestor, and to leave behind the ancestor’s privileges and name as well. He couldn’t face the idea of leaving Sparta, when it had taken the better part of ten years to make that feel like a home.
Now, he had been in the North country twenty-five years, and was a kind of institution, a middle-aging champion of the little guy, and a slightly jaded celebrant of his small, heartwarming (Buell winced) triumphs. Oh, there was still good to be done, he knew, and he fully intended to do it. If they didn’t muck it up on him. If they just didn’t—
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