by Peter Israel
Name: Latham, Oliver white Caucasian male
Age: 72
Health: good
Sign: Leo
Function: novelist
Marital status: divorced (1968)
Children: none
Employment: self-employed
Income: $35,000 annum (est)
Net worth: minimal (farm: 2nd mtge; copyrights: negligible mkt value)
Born: San Mateo, Calif. Resides: Monkton, Penna.
Education: B.A. Stanford,
Sexual preference: unknown
His directions had been good, up to a point. Route 80 West to the Delaware Water Gap, over the bridge into Pennsylvania, then south. I knew the way that far because Route 80 keeps going into the Poconos, where I’d spent some weekends in my time. The countryside is beautiful even before you get to the river, rolling hills and brown-earthed farms in the valleys and, every so often, real-live horses and cows nibbling at the ground. By the time we reached the Gap, Stevie had quit, having sung his bit twice through, and I had the windows open and my sleeves rolled up and was inhaling what even a city boy knows the world is supposed to smell like.
But somewhere south on the Pennsylvania side, I lost first the river and then my way. I never did find the town of Monkton. Maybe there wasn’t one. Instead I stopped at one of those combination general store, diner, and gas stations at a country crossroads and asked for directions. No, the proprietor had never heard of a Latham, nor had the beefy blonde (his daughter?) working the diner section. Oliver Latham? Never heard of ’im. I noticed a fresh-looking cherry pie, uncut, on the counter and, sitting down, ordered a piece with coffee. This seemed to thaw the atmosphere to a small degree. The pie dough, at the bottom, resisted even strong measures but the filling was fresh, delicious. A neighboring customer, in coveralls and T-shirt and with a toothpick in his mouth, took an interest in my situation.
“Maybe it’s the old Gorman place,” he suggested, looking over my shoulder at the sheet of instructions I’d written down.
“The name’s Latham,” I corrected over a forkful of pie.
“Isn’t that the one Tiny Babbidge’s workin’?” asked the owner, ignoring me.
“That’s right,” said my neighbor. “The old Gorman place.”
“If it’s Tiny Babbidge,” the blonde said, “he’s a fat pig.” She was rinsing dishes behind the counter and drying them with a grayish towel.
“The man I’m looking for, Latham, is a writer,” I said. “I know it’s a farm.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” the owner said.
“Tiny’s got somebody else livin’ up there,” my neighbor put in, “but I wouldn’t know what he does.”
“Raises sheep,” the blonde said, making a face.
“If it’s Tiny Babbidge,” the owner said, “you’ve come too far.”
“The old Gorman place,” my neighbor said, “that’s all it could be.”
If they were so sure of it, I’d give it a try. I finished the pie, minus the crust, paid up, and headed back for the Fiero accompanied by the man with the toothpick who seemed to want to give me last-minute instructions.
“The old Gorman place,” he repeated one last time.
And, as it turned out, he was right. Two miles back on the road I found the turnoff I’d missed before because of the overhanging trees. A half mile or so, after climbing to the top of a ridge, the macadam gave way to dirt, and soon enough, through the hedgerows to my left and below the level of the road, I glimpsed the gray farmhouse and the larger gray barn. There was no sign, no mailbox, like he’d said, just a narrower dirt lane (really two furrows cut through the meadow) that led to the farmhouse.
I parked the Fiero in the wide place between the barn and the farmhouse, next to a pickup truck and a Buick Riviera. An elderly but robust woman in an apron came through a screen door at the side of the farmhouse and eyed me as I got out of the car.
“Mrs. Babbidge?” I tried.
“Who wants to know?” she called back in a flat voice.
“I’m looking for Oliver Latham.”
“He’s not here.”
“But I’ve got an appointment,” I called back.
I’d misunderstood her meaning, though. She was pointing farther down the slope where, I could now see, there was a second smaller house half hidden behind a stand of trees.
“Can I drive down there?” I asked. “Or should I walk?”
“Suit yourself,” she said. Then she went back inside, the screen door slamming behind her.
I walked down the ruts. When I got closer I saw a dusty VW Beetle baking in the sun and, standing in the doorway of the small house, seeming to duck his head, the writer himself.
He appeared to have been waiting for me.
I’d met Latham but the one time before, at the BashCon. I remember thinking then that he looked a lot younger than his years, a tall lanky figure with a shock of gray-white curly hair and wearing an old-fashioned string-tie costume. But now he looked his age. He seemed to have shrunk some. He moved a little stiffly, as though his joints hurt him. He wore gray dungaree pants and a matching jacket over a faded blue denim shirt. Dusty sandals with thick rubber soles. He had blue eyes, pale blue, overhung by gray-white eyebrows, and his face up close was deeply lined and crisscrossed.
“Come on in,” he said without, I noticed, offering his hand.
I followed him inside, ducking, too, and almost immediately bumping into something. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the sudden dark. Then I realized I’d bumped into the back of a couch, the seat of which was piled with books and papers and cartons with more papers spilling out of them. The inside of the house was smaller than you’d have guessed, made smaller still by the clutter and the crush of furniture. You could see cones of dust in the rays of light coming through the dirt-streaked windows. I learned later that he used to live in the farmhouse himself, then had switched houses with his tenant farmers. It looked like he’d never gotten around to unpacking.
I followed Latham into the kitchen, the largest room I saw. Apparently it was where he spent most of his time. He had his desk in there, a wood-burning fireplace, twin sinks with worn porcelain set in wood and those old-style curved iron faucets, and one of those mammoth ceramic stoves people now pay a fortune for in antique stores. Oak chairs. A drop-leaf oak table. A 1940s style Frigidaire. The remnants of a meal in pots on the stovetop and dishes in one of the sinks, and a kind of musty smell that was hard to identify but seemed to grow out of the linoleum itself.
Latham made no apology for the condition of the place. In fact, once he settled himself at his kitchen desk, in a creaking leather swivel chair, it was like pulling teeth to get him talking about anything. Had he lived on the farm a long time? Yes. Did he enjoy it? Enjoy it? The isolation of it, the country life? It was where he lived. Was it a good place for a writer to work, the quiet of it, no interruptions? He wrote every day, wherever he was. Etc., etc., broken by silences. Broken by my efforts to get comfortable on the straight-backed wooden chair he’d offered me.
“All right,” he said at length, in his quiet voice. “You didn’t come all the way out here because you’re writing a master’s thesis on the living habits of writers. If you have questions to ask, ask them. Otherwise, I’ve work to do.”
The voice was quiet, the tone sharp, direct. The pale blue eyes unblinking. A trifle watery. Bloodshot in the corners.
“You’re right,” I said. “I’m trying to find out who killed Raul Bashard.”
“What makes you think I might have?”
“Anyone who stayed on the second floor of the hotel annex the night of the BashCon might have.”
“I see,” he said. “That includes myself.”
“Yes.”
“And who else was there?”
I ran off the names for him. I no longer needed Bud Fincher’s list.
“Have you talked to all of them?”
“That’s right. You’re the last one.”
“And who do the others think killed him?”
I hesitated a moment. In an odd way, he’d managed to become the one asking the questions. Then I said: “Most people tend to think Grace Bashard did.”
For the first and only time that day I heard his laugh. It made a dry and scornful sound, like crumpled paper. The lines in his face cracked and crisscrossed even more. Then abruptly the laugh changed into a cough, and he coughed so violently, his face reddening, that I thought he might choke. He excused himself with a wave, stumbled from the kitchen head bent over and still coughing, and a few moments later I heard a toilet flush. Then he was back and in his chair, recovered.
“Why did you think that was so funny?” I asked him.
“Why? Because people never fail to amaze me. They’re so true to themselves. All they can think about is the money.”
“But Grace was going to inherit everything anyway, wasn’t she?”
“You’d know that better than I would,” he answered. “But I would have assumed so. Once he died.”
“Did you know he was going to die anyway?”
“Aren’t we all?”
“I mean, that doctors had told him he had only a limited time left to live?”
“I’ve heard that since,” he said with a shrug, “but I don’t give it much credence. It wouldn’t have changed anything. He was always dying, only he never did. You could argue that he’d lived too long as it was.”
The remark registered, acid in content if not in delivery, but I had something else on my mind.
“About his money,” I said. “I understand that you got some of it, too. Is that right?”
“What do you mean by that?” he answered sharply.
“The Twenty-fifth Century Tales set?”
“Who told you about that?”
“A couple of people. They also told me you took him for about twice what it was worth.”
“I see. And why did they say I did it?”
“One of them said you needed the money. In fact several people I’ve talked to seem to feel you need money.”
I watched him closely for a reaction, but there was none. Actually, although it didn’t altogether register at the time, he was a man of remarkably few gestures, few physical tics or movements. He simply sat in his chair, gazing either at me or at the clutter of papers on his desk, which seemed to have been pushed to either side to make room for the Smith-Corona electric that occupied the center. Half the time, he seemed far off. It wasn’t that his face was without expression, but that I had trouble reading the changes.
“It’s as I told you. People like Richard, Sidney, whoever it was you talked to, that’s the only way they can interpret other people’s motives. The money. Do you realize how long it took Raul to earn what he paid for the set? Two days’ work. Less.”
“But that’s not true for people like you and me,” I said.
“No,” he said reflectively. “No, it isn’t.” Then: “Us mere mortals,” but without any bitter sound to it.
The conversation lagged again. He shifted in his chair as though he supposed, or hoped, I was finished.
“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” I said. “I’ve talked now to a lot of people who knew him, in one degree or another. Some who knew him well. But not a single one of them seems to mourn him.”
“Does that surprise you?”
“Well, yes,” I said. “Some.”
“Why should they?” Latham said matter-of-factly, leaning back. “He was a son of a whore. A real one. Particularly to people close to him.”
“But you were close to him,” I answered. “How was he one to you?”
“Close to him? Who told you that?”
“Practically everybody I’ve talked to. They say you were his oldest and closest friend.”
He fell silent, apparently reflecting on it, as though his mind was far off. Then he looked back at me.
“Oldest?” he asked. “Yes, I guess that’s true. Oldest living one, anyway. But closest? That would have been a long time ago. If ever.”
“When did you break with him?”
“Break with him? I don’t know that I broke with him. Better that you ask him that, if you could.”
“Did you know his son?” I asked, trying a shot in the dark, some way to get a reaction out of him.
The question did seem to startle him momentarily.
“Who, Johnny? Of course I did. I was the boy’s godfather, a long time ago.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, I was.”
“You must have been around, then, when Bashard disowned him.”
“Around? Of course I was around.”
“Well?” I said.
“Well what?” He seemed, at last, a bit irritated.
“Were you involved?”
“Involved? Involved in what, the disowning? Fathers and sons, that’s the most complicated of themes. I’ve used it myself on occasion, in books, or tried to. John was homosexual, and his father detested homosexuals. He loathed them. Now that you mention it, I was involved in a way.”
“How’s that?”
“John came to me for advice at the time.”
“And …?”
“And nothing. I told him that if he didn’t care about the baby—he had a new baby then and he admitted finally that he didn’t care—he should take the money and run. Which is what he did. He changed his name and went to Australia.”
“Why did he change his name?”
“I guess because he was Bashard’s son.”
“And have you been in touch with him since?”
“With John? For a time, we corresponded. He used to ask me for money. Once I think I sent him some.”
“Why only once?” I asked.
A slight chuckle.
“Probably because I didn’t have it the other times.”
“And since? Have you heard from him since?”
But Latham didn’t seem to hear the question. He was leaning back in the tall leather chair and for a moment he closed his eyes, as though resting. His body, though, was rigidly held and his hands, I noticed, were splayed out stiffly and down the faded denim of his trousers. Long fingers. Then he revived and stared at me, as though waiting for me to go on.
“You said before,” I said, “something to the effect that maybe Bashard had lived too long. What exactly did you mean by that?”
“It’s neither here nor there,” he said. “A literary observation. It so happens I think the craft of writing is a very serious one … to writers anyway. What the rest of the world makes of it, that’s something else.”
“Do you think Bashard didn’t take writing seriously?”
“I didn’t say that.”
I pushed him on the point. Finally he said: “What he cared about was being the acknowledged master. But he should have quit years ago. He didn’t have anything more to say, except to repeat himself.”
“Did he know that?”
He glanced at me testily.
“Why do you care?” he said. “What difference does it make?”
“Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t,” I answered. “But it’s interesting.”
“Interesting?” he asked, his eyebrows arching briefly. “Well, maybe it is at that. The fact is, though nobody knew it, we used to exchange manuscripts. One of us would finish a book and, before showing it to anyone else, send it to the other. I was a better reader for him than he was for me. Not that he ever acknowledged it publicly, but some of his books, including the more famous ones, were heavily rewritten before they were published.
“Rewritten by you?”
“By me?” He laughed briefly. “Of course not. But I’d tell him what to do. I even gave him some of his titles. He had a terrible sense of titles.”
“Then why did it stop?” I asked. “I mean, exchanging manuscripts?”
“Stop? I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. Then, correcting himself: “That’s not true. It doesn’t matter anymore anyway. Did you re
ad a book of his—some six, seven years ago—called The Second Vale of Tears? His title, mind you.”
I shook my head.
“It’s just as well,” he went on. “It was a terrible book. I told him so. I even advised him to put it on the shelf and get on with something else. He didn’t listen. He went ahead and published it, word for word, as written. Same title. If money’s what counts, he was right, too: it was a big bestseller. I don’t know if anybody read it, much less his publishers, but people bought it. By that time, I guess he could have published books with blank pages and people would have bought them. Only after that one, he stopped sending me his manuscripts.”
“Did you stop sending him yours?”
“Mine? No. I kept on sending them, but whether he read them or not, I couldn’t say. I never heard from him about them.”
He patted his pockets, rummaged briefly among the papers on his desk, then leaned forward toward me.
“Say,” he said conspiratorially, “you wouldn’t happen to have any cigarettes on you, would you?” I told him I didn’t. “No? Nobody smokes anymore. I’m trying to quit, I’m a great expert on quitting. Never mind, I think I know where I might find some. Excuse me a minute.”
He got up. I heard his bones crack. Ducking his head, he went into the living room. I listened to him moving around, thinking—again—that though the content of what he said was cynical he said it without affect, like it was past history, done. Stiffly.
He came back, holding a wrinkled pack of Camel Lights. I watched him fish one out, straighten it carefully between his fingers, then light it. The hand holding the match trembled a little. He inhaled deeply, like a man who knows and relishes his poison.
The smoke made him cough.
“Filthy habit,” he said when he’d stopped coughing. “Do you have any other questions?”
“Yes,” I said, “in fact I do.”
I asked him about S.O.W. He said he’d never heard of it, didn’t know what it referred to. I asked him about Viola Harmel and Leo Mackes. He said they sounded like the names of characters in a private-eye novel. I told him they were people who’d written Bashard threatening letters. He expressed surprise that the Grand Old Man of Science Fiction had gotten threatening letters. I asked him if he didn’t get any himself. He said he got some fan letters from time to time, but that was all. I asked him if he was still writing, and he said of course he was. In fact, he and his agent were thinking of changing publishers. Helga Hewitt—I knew her, didn’t I?—wanted a chance to bid when his new book was done.
