The Henderson Equation

by Warren Adler

  “I think you better go,” Nick shouted, struggling to keep Charlie’s arms pinned to his sides.

  “I will not go,” she said, recovering some determination. “I belong here. I have every right.”

  Charlie became slack in his arms, a ruse, Nick discovered, for as soon as he relaxed his hold, Charlie stiffened, managing to loosen an arm which he swung in Myra’s direction, catching her in the upper arm, the force of the blow pushing her against the wall.

  “If you don’t stop, Charlie, I’ll have to call someone.” Nick’s threat seemed to calm him.

  “I just want her out of here,” he said quietly, almost pleading.

  “Please, Myra,” Nick begged.

  “Let him go,” she said, rubbing her arm, glancing toward the city room, watching the tense faces. Charlie seemed suddenly spent as Nick released him. Sitting down on a chair, he slumped over and put his hands over his face. Myra came forward and put a hand on his head.

  “It’s all right, Charlie,” she said, tears misting her eyes, as she raised them and looked helplessly at Nick. He was sorry for her now, sorry for them both.

  “I’ll go now,” she said, looking at Nick, who could sense the beginning of their alliance. Or was it a conspiracy?

  Apparently the realization that he could be violent had some effect and Charlie quickly submitted himself to treatment, allowing himself to be registered in a local sanitorium. There they attempted to dry him out while a battery of doctors poked around in his head for some hint of his malady. Even Myra could appear hopeful on the telephone, reporting to Nick as part of their new relationship, although she obediently refrained from setting foot in the city room.

  “He’s improving, Nick. Really improving. And he looks marvelous. He’s even beginning to talk to me.” She laughed gaily, like a young girl.

  “Great,” he would comment, then reassuringly, “Everything is under control up here. Tell Charlie we’re not letting him down.”

  “I know that, Nick. I’m very grateful.” He felt her sincerity and he threw himself into his work with passion.

  It was the first of many cures. Charlie always returned well rested, tanned, filled with enthusiasm, and with vials of pills, which he lined in his desk drawer, but quickly refused to take.

  “They’re trying to poison me,” he assured Nick, and soon he was back at Matt Kane’s, caught in the mist of his confusion, now complicated by an odd sexuality, as if booze could no longer be an efficient escape.

  He had befriended a huge, big-buttocked woman named Mary Lou. Coarse-featured, with hair dyed a reddish mouse color. She drank great quantities of beer and possessed a howling laugh that could splinter the air, an abrasive, nerve-racking sound.

  By then, Nick was paying Murray regularly to make sure he got home in one piece. Even his driver had quit and Nick had refused to play watchdog again. One couldn’t possibly keep up with Charlie’s pace, losing sleep, then be expected to put in a grueling day at the Chronicle. This did not prevent shattering intrusions of telephone calls in the night, when Charlie could not be placated.

  “You better come over, Mr. Gold. I can’t be responsible,” Murray would hiss urgently into the phone. On the first occasion of the complication with Mary Lou, he had rushed into his pants with a sweater thrown over his pajama top and jumped into his car for a wild ride to Matt Kane’s. When he banged on the now closed door Murray opened it swiftly, his face oddly calm with a broad smile breaking on his face, irritating to Nick, whose heart had not yet stopped beating in anxiety. Without a word, Murray’s head indicated the direction in which Charlie could be found.

  Charlie and Mary Lou half lay, half stood, in an amorphous mass, totally senseless, knotted together it seemed, obviously too much for one man to extricate.

  “I just couldn’t lift them.” Murray shrugged as he looked at the ceiling. “What the hell was I supposed to do?”

  “They’re gone,” Nick said.

  “Gone,” Murray agreed.

  Between him and Murray they managed to get Charlie and Mary Lou separated. It was ludicrous, Nick thought, sadly seeing his friend’s deterioration, the sympathy waning, since Charlie was a burden now, beyond rationality. Seeing them, the blank mooning paralyzed faces, the rubbery limbs, the deadweight immobility, he could not resist the humor the scene invoked.

  “The lovers,” Murray said.

  “A beautiful couple,” Nick replied with disgust.

  Black humor, it seemed in retrospect, for Charlie and Mary Lou became in the next few weeks a weird kind of Bonnie and Clyde duo.

  To make matters worse there were moments of lucidity, or apparent lucidity, since the words were clear but the logic faulty, in which he was forced to witness his friend’s further debasement. One afternoon Charlie called at the Chronicle, urging him to rush over to his house, an invitation he would just as soon have declined, especially in the middle of the day with the endless pressures of the Chronicle building to their peak.

  Charlie apparently had shaved and cleaned himself up, dressed himself in a silk robe, and seemed unaccountably steady after his usual night’s revelries. He rarely showed up at the Chronicle anymore. He and Myra sat facing each other on the matching wing chairs, the ones that later had been used to front the fireplace of her cozy den. There was a strange air of calm in the room. Myra looked at him briefly as he came in, lowering her eyes. It was apparent she had been humoring him. Charlie sat stiffly in the chair, pale, the first traces of his future gauntness beginning, since his diet was now erratic, as if the act of eating were offensive.

  “We’ve agreed to separate, Nick,” Charlie said. Myra nodded, shrugging.

  “I told him I wouldn’t stand in the way of his happiness,” Myra said. She seemed to be playing a role.

  “I love Mary Lou, Nick,” Charlie said. He had half expected him to wink. Nick summoned up the memory of the woman, a glob of flab in Matt Kane’s bar. They had since been checking into various Washington hotels from which he had finally been called upon to extract them. It was becoming a public embarrassment to both Myra and himself, not to mention the Chronicle, although one could depend on the discreet Washington hotel managers to keep the matter quiet. Besides, he controlled what went into the Chronicle and there was, after all, a gentlemen’s agreement between competitive editors. It was quite rare, almost nonexistent, to find media competition spilling over into the denigration of editorial personalities. Myra knew they were quite safe on that score.

  “You should follow your loving instincts, Charlie,” Myra responded, as if she were speaking to a small child.

  “I know I’ve been acting strange these last few months, but I’m convinced now that Mary Lou is what I need.”

  “Whatever you say, Charlie,” Myra said. “Don’t try to talk him out of it, Nick,” she said, winking.

  “I don’t intend to.”

  Charlie stood up.

  “You can’t know how it feels to be in love,” he said. Nick wondered why he had been called, then realized that Myra had persuaded Charlie to call, to witness this new aberration, a kind of final validation of his madness, which indeed it was. She, too, had seen Mary Lou. Keeping an eye on them had been a full-time job and she had been reluctant to recommit him, but this meeting was apparently an attempt to convince herself that there was no longer any choice. The evidence was compelling. Myra looked at him, her eyes indicating that she was about at the end of the rope.

  “I know when I’m licked,” Myra said to Charlie, who took the remark in a totally different context.

  “You’re very understanding, Myra,” Charlie said. “Considering the way I’ve treated you, that’s very understanding. Don’t you think so, Nick?”

  “Yes, Charlie, very understanding.”

  “But I do think you should check yourself into the hospital. Get yourself together. You’ll see how wonderful you’ll feel.” She winked again. “Even Mary Lou will think so.”

  Reacting like a wind-bent tree snapping back after a heavy gust,
Charlie stood up, his face contorting.

  “Never,” he said. “See, Nick. See, she wants me out of the way. I’ll never go back there.”

  “It was just a suggestion,” Myra said quickly.

  “All I need is Mary Lou.”

  “Sure, Charlie, sure,” Nick responded. Charlie sat-down again, briefly placated.

  “You’ll see,” he said, then looked ominously at Myra.

  “She’ll never put me away again.” Charlie’s hands began to shake and sweat started to show on his forehead. Nick watched him, glazed, lucidity fading, lips twisting as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether to laugh or smile. Suddenly he got up and walked out of the room.

  “I’m scared to death, Nick.”

  “You’ve got good reason,” he conceded.

  “This thing with Mary Lou. It’s beyond belief. It’s a wonder he hasn’t come down with a physical disease.” She stood up, walked the length of the large room, then back again. He noted that her fingers clutched a handkerchief. “I’ve got to put him away, Nick. I think we’ve both got to face the fact that he’s almost beyond hope.” Nick didn’t answer. He couldn’t bring himself to echo her sentiment, to articulate the truth of it, legitimize it. Myra was no Mr. Pell, no dedicated saint ready to sacrifice her life to someone else’s madness. As if reading his thoughts, she said, “He could do something crazy at the Chronicle. Undermine all that has been built up.”

  “That he built up,” Nick corrected, annoyed at his compulsion. What good did it do to defend Charlie now? It seemed a lost cause.

  “I know, Nick. Believe me, I’m grateful.” It was a clue to the way she thought, that Charlie had built up the Chronicle for them, her and her father, always the son-in-law. She looked at her watch.

  “I told them to come at four,” she said, looking at the grandfather clock in the corner. “I don’t think I have a choice.”

  He still refused to agree. He knew he was being selfish, insuring himself against future regrets. When Charlie came back into the room, he held a glass of whiskey in his hand. He sat down cross-legged in the wing chair.

  “My father hid my bicycle,” he said, suddenly giggling. Something tugged at Nick’s memory, the neat house, the clean snow, the painted face of his mother, the talk of bicycles. It was almost as though he had willed himself to madness. Myra looked at him and sighed. See, she seemed to say, there is no hope.

  It was not easy for them to remove him from the living room. Two big burly men held him down on the floor while they strapped him into an ugly khaki-colored straitjacket. He writhed and fought them, finally in his helplessness reverting to spitting, screaming like some abandoned animal. Myra gripped Nick’s arm, digging her fingernails into his biceps as she watched them lift Charlie between them and carry him to the waiting ambulance.

  “What could I have done?” she said, turning to Nick as they heard the ambulance leave the driveway. “I had no choice.” Still he refused to respond, feeling that to do so would be a betrayal of his doomed friend.

  “I didn’t want this to happen, Nick.”

  But he only half-believed it, not that it was the first time that Charlie had been committed. “What choice did I have?”

  Remembering that scene, he had secretly agreed with her decision, although he could not, would not give her the satisfaction of affirming it. She had, indeed, been abused by Charlie in the last months, physically, mentally, cruelly used. He, Nick, had also been driven to despair. But why couldn’t he trust her, with the same warm openness that he imagined had existed between him and Charlie? Had Charlie ruined that possibility forever?

  Perhaps that was why he was confused when she had called him that day and told him that Charlie was coming home again, that he had made great progress, that he was ready for a return to meaningful living. It had been a placid time at the paper. He was careful not to make major changes, as if to tamper with the existent chemistry would somehow be an act of disloyalty. Besides, the Chronicle seemed to be moving relentlessly forward, powered by Charlie’s early decisions, creating the inertia of success. Even Myra held back, although they met occasionally with advisors, the various business types, whom he detested.

  He wondered if he, too, had been actually expecting to hear the shotgun blast, a single sound-searing explosion that shook the windows in the room and twinkled the bric-a-brac. Neither he nor Myra had moved quickly, rooted. He had wondered why Myra had turned her face from his, as he finally roused himself and opened the sliding doors. The room was a mess, the ceiling and walls slopped with bloody pulp. Even at the initial horror of the sight, he remembered Charlie’s sloppiness when they lived together in New York. With his usual disdain for neatness, he had put the shotgun in his mouth, pointed upward. Even in death, his features showed no calm, distorted by the blast, as if he had exited cursing. Stepping backward, he slid the doors closed and turned to Myra, shaking helplessly now in a far corner of the room. He would save the questions for later, he decided, the matter of the oiled guns, the access to the case, the availability of ammunition.

  18

  Saturday was a day when Washington motors were revved down and those workaholics who insisted on attending to the bureaucracy’s business, or their own, could be seen in their offices blue-jeaned and sport-shirted, assuaging loneliness, persuading themselves that they were involved with their highest priorities.

  In the city room of the Chronicle, the difference of the day could be detected in subtle ways. The sound of the reporters’ typewriters, more thoughtful and labored. The murmur of conversation among the staff, leisurely, expansive. For the staff of the Chronicle, Saturday was distinctively make-work, a time of suspended hopefulness.

  In his office, the coffee steaming beside him, its pungent odor deliciously tranquilizing, he could feel again the mastery of himself, the agitation dissipating as his mind picked up the rhythm of his work. He assured himself that he would not let emotions rule his judgment, that he would preserve this oasis within himself, this place of purity, where there would be no ruffling breezes, no changes in temperature, or seasons, or time, or even light. Let people victimize others or themselves by betrayal and mendacity. He would simply lock himself in that pure place, that chamber of weighted judgments, through which the information would have to pass, through him, the screen. He would become the disembodied brain, all mysterious inner systems alert and ready for decision. No amount of outside interference would deflect his concentration.

  From where he sat he could see Gunderstein, Phelps, and Martha Gates, a triumvirate of conspirators, he thought, glancing at him in turn, waiting for the word. It would not be the first time he had dashed golden hopes. What did it matter? It was all a pinprick on the ass of time, he told himself. He had made his decision. His resolution was clear. It must not be deflected by what he had just learned about Jennie and Myra. One thing had absolutely nothing to do with the other. He was surprised, too, that he could not sustain the anger, or the humiliation of having been deceived. To have illusions about Jennie’s sense of faithfulness would have been the epitome of self-deception. Her ambitions were suspect from the beginning and he had just been a simple rock across the stream, the stepping-stone. A fair trade, he had concluded. He had gotten his money’s worth.

  He looked at his watch. The editorial meeting was scheduled for nine-thirty, a half hour away. Lifting his head again, he watched the unholy three waiting for their chance, animals anticipating raw meat. He could sense the tension transmitted between them, as his mind sought logical explanations, credible rationalizations. He might say, for example: “Look, kids. If we run that piece, yours truly will be wasted.” It was a good-word for honesty, a military word incongruously hatched in connection with Viet Nam. “You wouldn’t want to see the old boy canned, would you now? Truth? Responsibility? Come on now, kids. He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day. Besides, there is no absolute, positive, conclusive, undeniable. proof.” He could always use that as the final cop-out, the ultimate ploy. “
You must understand that nothing is all black or all white. We’re newspaper people, not judges.”

  Better face them now, he told himself, feeling the inadequacy of his hypothetical explanations. Perhaps in the give and take he would think of something more convincing. Maybe he would find some clue in them, in their reaction. Lifting his arm, he hailed them.

  Watching their faces as they came in, he could feel their anticipation. Martha Gates, her blonde hair glistening and fresh, like golden thread, her eyes dancing, smiled as she entered. He could actually read what the others must have felt in the young girl’s face, the clean, satisfied look of dedication. Apparently there was an agreement between them that the older man would provide the opening gambit. Phelps was clean-shaven, clear-eyed, the pipe jaunty in his teeth, the grey hair neatly combed.

  “We’ve written the story, Nick,” he said, putting a sheaf of copy paper on the desk. “Spent half the night at it.” Gunderstein, who surely had guided the typewriter keys, sat impassively picking his pimples. Nick had not expected this complication. He looked down at the offering with revulsion, resisting the impulse to read it.

  “We’ve concluded,” Phelps said, “that there can only be one decision you can make. The issue demands presentation. It goes to the very heart of the system, not only of ethics in the intelligence community, but the moral obligation of our national leadership. It simply can’t be ignored.”

  “And you’re absolutely convinced,” Nick said, stupidly, he felt.

  “There is not a shadow of a doubt that this was standard practice for the CIA, on direct orders of the President—all presidents since Eisenhower. There is enough evidence to cast suspicion.”