1 Breakfast at Madeline's

by Matt Witten

  Which put the panel members in a dangerous bind. Ever since the NEA awarded money for some guy to exhibit a crucifix in a jar of piss, oversight on arts grants has gotten more rigorous. Maybe not rigorous enough to stop every little conflict of interest, but definitely enough to uncover a preposterous $5000 award to a derelict with no resume. If the panel said yes to The Penn, they'd have to face fierce questioning from both NYFA in New York and the Arts Council Executive Board in Saratoga. At best they'd come off looking like total idiots; at worst, someone would smell something shady.

  On the other hand, if they said no, they'd risk having Penn expose whatever nefarious deeds he'd been blackmailing them about. They were lucky that The Penn died just in the nick of time, only two days before their big meeting, so they never had to decide what to do about him.

  But maybe it wasn't luck at all. Maybe someone on the grant panel had solved the problem by killing The Penn.

  Suddenly The Penn's application started shaking in my hands; then I realized it was my hands that were shaking. He had dropped dead at 9:50, less than an hour after guzzling his daily Arts Council Ethiopian. Maybe that was the Ethiopian that killed him.

  One or more of the panel members could have dropped in at the Arts Council that morning between 8:45 and 9:00, after Molly Otis made the coffee but before The Penn picked it up, and slipped a hit of poison into his drink. It would have been as easy as making fun of Ross Perot's ears. That early in the morning the Arts Council was probably deserted, so the killer could sneak in and out the back door with no one ever seeing him.

  Except, of course, for Molly.

  Oh, my God. Why hadn't I seen this before? I sipped the last dregs of my java, trying to steady myself.

  Was this the real reason why someone was so desperate to shut that girl up?

  If Molly Otis saw somebody in the Arts Council office between eight forty-five and nine a.m. that morning, then she might know, without realizing it, who killed Donald Penn.

  22

  I checked my watch. Eleven-twenty already; Andrea would be seriously pissed. I better haul my ass back home immediately.

  But first, it was high time to give Molly Otis another call. After all, Dave was at my house holding down the fort, and I could always blame my lateness on Amtrak. So I pocketed the application and headed to the pay phone outside Uncommon Grounds.

  Unfortunately, the pay phone was booked. Some Skidmore pib (person in black) was having a conversation with either her boyfriend or her worst enemy. The way she was cussing at him, it was hard to tell which. I withdrew a few yards to give her fury some room and took out the application again, looking for further clues. I turned the page and found The Penn's "Budget of Project," which started out looking like the exact same pathetic budget he'd submitted two years before.

  EXPENSES, MONTHLY

  Rent including utilities $350

  Food—daily consumption of 1 can chunk tuna, 8 oz. milk,

  2 cups Tastee-O's breakfast cereal, 8 oz. frozen orange juice,

  4 slices day-old bread, and 2 TBS butter 62.40

  Notebooks, pens of various colors, pencils, erasers,

  and other writing material 14.36

  Entertainment—1 movie matinee 4.75

  Toothpaste, miscellaneous 4.75

  Safety-deposit box 1.25

  Transportation—bus to and from mall for movie 1.20

  Telephone, clothing, shoes 0

  Coffee, 3 or more cups daily, at various

  establishments (necessary for creativity) 0

  (donations)

  I stopped and reread the last entry. That "0 (donations)" business was new. I guess "donations" was The Penn's cute way of saying "blackmail money." And I was pretty sure "3 or more cups" was new too; it used to be just "3 cups." Was an increased caffeine intake responsible for The Penn's increasingly grandiose schemes?

  Those schemes were very much in evidence in the next budget item:

  Computer (PC portable PowerBook 1400, with RAM expanded to

  64MB, 1.0GB hard disk, and added CD-Rom drive) $2458

  (includes shipping charges)

  A damn nice computer. The same type of machine I used to use at Madeline's, back when I was writing, but about three levels fancier. The Penn may have been thinking portable, but he definitely wasn't thinking small.

  Printer and supplies (Apple LaserWriter 12/640; one year's supply

  of toner cartridges—i.e., four cartridges; and printer paper) $2207.96

  (includes shipping charges)

  Once again, the same type of machine I used to use; but once again, a lot fancier. I put the application down for a moment, intrigued that The Penn was both mimicking me and one-upping me at the same time. Just coincidence? Or was he jealous of my sudden success? I had gone from fellow unsuccessful writer to millionaire in one stroke of a Hollywood producer's pen. Maybe The Penn thought if he got himself a computer that was more expensive than mine, it would sort of even the score.

  Also, I was willing to bet the guy convinced himself the only reason I broke through and he didn't was because I had a computer. It scared me how well I understood this guy. I guess that was one dubious benefit of my many unsuccessful years as a screenwriter: I understood failure.

  And I felt like I understood his blackmailing, too. It wasn't just about the money or the free java. No, it was about all the bitterness, rage, and despair that had built up inside him during his three decades as an unsuccessful artist, until he finally exploded.

  I wondered, since I never brought my printer to Madeline's, how did The Penn know what kind I had? He must have eavesdropped on me talking about it. Or maybe he was even spying on me, looking for stuff to blackmail me about. What a creepy thought. This guy Penn was a sick fuck. Of course, if I hadn't gotten lucky with Gas, and if I'd kept writing unproduced screenplays for another fifteen years, no doubt I would have turned into a pretty sick fuck myself. I turned the page.

  Software, disks 330

  Eight ballpoint pens (for revising hard copy of manuscript) 4.04

  I had to smile about those eight ballpoint pens. The old Donald Penn poking through. He poked through later too, in the "Income" section, where he still listed $7.75/month from bottle and can returns.

  But when I turned the page again, my smile froze. Under "Additional Comments," The Penn had written: Thank you, but I've said all I need to say. The threats that have been made against my life do not frighten me. I may be killed, but I will not be silenced.

  After those ominous words, there was nothing but extremely aggravating blank white space.

  Goddamn it, who? Who had threatened The Penn's life?

  I stood there staring at the whiteness, perhaps hoping that the answer would mysteriously reveal itself there, but my thoughts were interrupted by a loud shout of "You prick!" It was the Skidmore girl, slamming down the phone. She glared at me and snapped, "You, too!" and then stormed off. Oh well, at least now the phone was free. Hopefully I'd get a friendlier response from the Skidmore girl I was about to call. I dialed the operator and asked for Molly Otis's number.

  "Unlisted at the customer's request," some woman with a lisp informed me.

  "No, that's not possible. I got her number from the operator just two days ago."

  "The number has been changed since then, sir."

  "Let me talk to your supervisor," I began, but she hung up. Terrific.

  What were my chances of getting Molly's new number from her overprotective father? Probably about as good as the Mets' chances of winning the pennant.

  I'd have to leave Molly for the morning. Right now I figured I better not push my luck with Andrea, so I got in the Camry and drove home. Oh no, 11:45. I'd tell Andrea and Dave the train got stuck for an extra hour near Albany. Unless they had called Amtrak for info, in which case I'd have to come up with something else. But what? I had a feeling that "I'm sorry, honey, it's just that I was busy almost getting seduced" wouldn't play too well in Peoria.

  I opened the door
and called out, "Hi, guys."

  No one answered. "Hi, guys!" I called again, louder.

  Still no answer. I went in the living room. Dave wasn't there.

  My heart raced, and I did too, frantically dashing upstairs and opening my bedroom door. There was Andrea, sprawled on the bed, not moving.

  I gasped, sure she was dead. But then she gave out a loud snore.

  I sat down and listened. Funny, I'd never noticed before how truly beautiful Andrea's snore was.

  I took off my clothes and snuggled into her, with my nose next to her right armpit. Her post-workout odor was still clinging to her, and I lay there inhaling her, letting her smells flow into my muddled brain, cleansing it of Marcie's smoke and all the other events of the night.

  I did have one last mental image of Marcie, a momentary flash of red from her skimpy dress. But the red quickly faded into darkness and slipped away into the night.

  Then I relaxed and fell asleep.

  Andrea and I were in the west of Ireland on our honeymoon. We slipped into an abandoned medieval fort, threw off our clothes, and were about to make passionate love when I happened to notice that Donald Penn was dead on the ground next to us. A pair of cross-country skis lay on his body, forming an X. I woke up.

  Donald fucking Penn.

  So far as I could figure it out, something had happened to him "one dark and snowy night" when he was young. Something involving his father, clister, and cross-country skiing. This event was so traumatic that he spent every single day of his entire adult life trying to put it into words. And failing.

  I got out of bed, went to the study, and turned on my trusty, if slightly outdated, Powerbook. Maybe the miracles of modern technology would help me get to the bottom of this strange, obsessed man who had somehow taken over my life.

  Through her work at the community college, my wife had access to a database called Nexis that I vaguely knew how to use. Unfortunately I didn't know the first names of Penn's parents. I didn't even know if Penn was his real name, or just a "pen" name. But in any case, I searched for "Donald Penn" and got a grand total of zero hits. Then I widened my search to "Penn" and got more than five hundred hits. I settled into my chair. There were probably ways to speed up this search, but I didn't know them, and I doubted Andrea would appreciate it if I woke her up to ask her.

  The first hit was from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, about a Doris Penn from Spokane who won first prize for a coffee cake recipe. Hardly the sort of traumatic event a son would spend his whole life obsessed about. Though come to think of it, my grandmother used to make an incredible chocolate cake that none of her six children was ever able to replicate after she died, and it's haunted them for decades.

  I got umpteen hits for William Penn, the seventeenth-century Quaker. There were three more hits for Doris's coffee cake, from as far away as Birmingham, Alabama; maybe I should print out that recipe. Up in Minnesota, a man named Joe Penn ran for Congress as a Republican, and lost. Served him right. A Buffalo man named Elmer Penn died in 1992, survived by his wife and three daughters, none of whom was named Donald.

  I started to recognize a pattern; none of these hits came from before 1970, and most of them were from no earlier than 1988 or so. Evidently Nexis hadn't gotten around to incorporating older newspapers and magazines into their database.

  Which probably made my whole search useless. Since Penn was fifty-three when he died, and a child when the traumatic thing happened, that meant my search needed to cover the period from about 1948 to 1958.

  I looked up a few William Penn hits for further evidence that Nexis didn't go back that far... and was surprised to find a New York Times hit from 1949. Hmm. Apparently the nation's "newspaper of record" was considered sufficiently important that Nexis had gone to the trouble of incorporating their older issues.

  Personally I'd always found this "newspaper of record" business ridiculous. Or I'd felt that way ever since they began reporting on the making of The Gas that Ate San Francisco, and I noticed there were at least three factual inaccuracies in every article they wrote. But what the heck. Right now the newspaper of record was my last hope. I figured out how to search the Times for other articles about the Penns of the world... and on my very first hit I got lucky.

  John Penn. A headline from 1953: "Tragedy in New Hampshire."

  My fingers trembled as I hit the computer keys to bring up the article. My Powerbook, which felt incredibly fast when I first bought it, now felt like something out of the Old Stone Age. Finally the article appeared.

  Berlin, New Hampshire, January 23. In one of the worst tragedies in this state in recent history, a Berlin man killed his wife and then himself early this morning with his shotgun, as their eight-year-old son hid in a bedroom closet.

  Policemen and neighbors at the scene were unable to offer any explanation as to why John Penn, a factory worker at International Shoes in nearby Gorham, might have committed this horrific deed. Louise Wentworth, the next-door neighbor who was awakened by the shots and found the bodies, says that John and Marian Penn were a quiet, unremarkable couple—"a typical family," she says. "Marian went to church every Sunday, and John loved his cross-country skiing. We always thought the skiing business was a little odd, but we sure never thought he'd kill someone."

  Another neighbor, Dennis Olson, was similarly baffled by the horrible crime. "Maybe it was just the weather," he said. "It's been blasted cold around here."

  The young son, Donald, is temporarily under the care of a neighboring family.

  During the next few days the Times ran two follow-ups. I guess horrific crimes were more rare in those days; if this happened now, the Times probably wouldn't bother. In the first follow-up, there were background interviews with coworkers and friends. In the second one they talked to the cops, who had gotten a statement from the distraught young Donald.

  Apparently, all week long Donald's father had been looking forward to going cross-country skiing. According to Al Wenningham, who called himself "the closest buddy John had, even though we weren't all that close," John Penn lived to go skiing, "the same way everybody else up here lives to go hunting."

  Reading between the lines, working at the shoe factory offered little in the way of job satisfaction, and there was no way out except on Sundays, when John Penn strapped on his skis and glided off alone into the snowy yonder and found peace.

  Unfortunately, that Sunday, when his long-awaited day off came, there had been a freezing rain and the top layer of snow was so icy and crunchy that none of the usual ski waxes worked. So John went down to the basement searching for a special clister that he had carefully stashed away, which might possibly allow him to ski in this god-awful snow.

  But he couldn't find it. His wife had rearranged the basement to store her canning supplies. As Donald lay in bed half-asleep, he heard his father storm upstairs and ask his mother furiously, "Where did you put my clister?"

  In response, Marian said, "Shut up, I'm sleeping."

  So John repeated himself, louder and even angrier. Marian snapped back at him. They began shouting. John yelled at her for ruining his life, along with his bosses at International Shoes. Marian yelled back. Donald, listening, huddled in his bed.

  Then he heard crashing noises from the other room—they were throwing things at each other. Marian must have picked up a ski, because Donald heard his father yell, "Put that ski down!"

  But she didn't. She swung the ski at a wall or something, and it broke in two.

  The next thing Donald remembered was a shotgun blast. His father killed his mother with one point-blank shot in the face.

  Donald ran to his closet and hid, just before John came in the room looking for him. John sobbed out his apologies for killing Marian, and promised to make everything all right again by killing Donald and then himself.

  Then the closet door opened. John called his son's name. The son lay still, not daring to breathe, beneath his old gray Army blanket.

  Finally the door closed again. Donald
wasn't sure if his father had seen him or not. For a while there was silence. Then a shot blasted out. Then more silence. Eventually Donald snuck out of his closet and went in his parents' bedroom, where he found John and Marian lying in bed together. As one of the cops quoted in the article put it, "neither of them had faces left."

  I turned off the computer and sat there for a while in the dark. Then I went into the boys' room and hugged and kissed them as they slept. They both had warm blankets curled around them, just like Donald Penn, many years ago, on that deathly cold winter morning.

  It was five a.m. and I was finally slipping into a troubled semi-oblivion when Gretzky came into our bedroom crying. I found out soon enough what the problem was: His pants were soaking wet.

  For several months now Gretzky had been wearing "big boy pullups" to bed, sort of a cross between diapers and regular underwear. Usually they absorbed any bedwetting easily. But tonight he had so much peepee from holding it in all day that when he finally let loose he got flooded. "Honey, let me change your pants," I said.

  "No!" Gretzky shouted, irate.

  "But they're all wet—"

  "No, they're not!"

  "Sweetheart, they're full of peepee—"

  "Hockey players don't make peepee!"

  From the other side of the bed, Andrea broke in. "I can't stand this anymore. If he doesn't stop this hockey-players-don't-make-peepee business, I'll put him in diapers again!"

  This horrible threat sent Gretzky bawling. "No! Nooooooo!" he howled desperately.

  While Andrea covered her ears with a pillow, I finally talked the Great One out of his wet pants and back to bed. But then Babe Ruth came in carrying yesterday's sports page and demanding to know why the Mets were starting John Olerud at first base instead of Butch Huskey. Before we could get that issue resolved, Gretzky woke up again and ordered me to get up this very minute so I could go to the store to buy him a goalie helmet. When I told him it was only 5:30 and the stores were all closed, that didn't faze him in the slightest. "You can open the store yourself, Daddy, with a key," he explained impatiently.