by John Gardner
Meakins, poor devil, had no such clarity of purpose. Existed in a condition of sorrowful bafflement, loving father and husband, self-sacrificing heart, a man obsessively aware that there are always two sides. Craine gave him, for the most part, legwork, paperwork; and though his squeamishness was, to Craine, a source of irritation, he made no attempt to reform him. They’d grown old together, “worn out in the service,” as Meakins said. From the lugubrious tone (his voice, however, was high, like a boy’s), you’d have thought he had in mind some kind of church service. But Craine more or less understood Tom Meakins; had a good deal in common with the man, in fact. Meakins too had been drinking too much since God knew when. His belly and hind end were as soft as Bunny Bread; his huge, rumpled trousers hung limply from his suspenders like some poor woman’s wash from a clothesline. On his right hand, his gun hand, he was missing two fingers, and you couldn’t help but trunk, from the looks of him, that he’d lost them by pure carelessness, maybe just misplaced them in the junk on his desk. He was, like Royce, a doomed man. Self-destructive tendency, indifference to disaster.
“Don’t fool yourself, Meakins,” Craine had said that morning, looking at him over his spectacles, severe, or mock-severe. (Craine himself could hardly have said which—in fact he no longer remembered exactly what he’d said, if anything; he had a tendency, in these reveries, to make things up—but his voice had been, or would have been, intense, as if someone had done him a disservice.) “Society needs us. We redress grievances.”
Though it might have been sarcasm and then again might not, Meakins took it simply. He lifted his eyebrows, feeble and inoffensive. “Not often,” he said. “At least that’s my opinion. Mostly, seems to me, we just snoop into other people’s business.” He turned away, pivoted toward his office like an elderly, fat dancer or a slow-brustling whale, ready to dismiss it. But not Craine, not today.
“That’s true too,” Craine barked, and his voice went taut as harpoon line, holding him. “But we’re professional snoops. Imagine what the world would be like out there if all those crazies did their own snooping.” Boredom and irritation lured him further, toward rhetoric. High-falutin language was one of his talents, a gift he’d inherited from his grandfather, perhaps. “We’re objective, dispassionate. Bring me your suspicions, your free-floating guilt, your grudges, your fears, your dark secret hungers and unmentionable willies; I’ll defuse ’em, lay yer ghosts in triplicate, guaranteed! It’s a fact, Meakins. To them—” He pointed out angrily at the street. “—to them it’s a matter of life or death: revenge, safety after dark, reputation. To us it’s statistics. So many credit skips, so many divorces, so many cases of dogs fed glass. We’re the pressure valve, Meakins! We dry up their fury to courtroom talk!”
Hannah Johnson was bent forward at her desk, looking in through the door at him, eyes yellow-white against her midnight skin, her halo of steel-wool hair.
“All I meant,” Meakins said, staring at Craine’s glass.
Craine glanced down suddenly to the writing in reverse, like Arabic or Hebrew, on his desk blotter. “I wonder,” he said, “what happens to all that emotion we defuse?”
“Beg your pardon?” said Meakins.
“Nothing,” Craine said, and with eyes gone suddenly petulant he shot out a look at the man, more annoyed at the stupidity of his own muttered question than at Meakins’ having half overheard it. “Talking to myself.”
“Sorry,” said Meakins, and tentatively bowed. He moved away toward his own, smaller office, at the far end of the suite.
“Damn right,” Craine said, his hand slowly coiling around the whiskey. Something stirred behind him, and he turned his head slowly, glancing—heart racing—past his shoulder.
“Meakins!” he said, and carefully raised his glass.
“Sir?”
It seemed to Craine that there was something odd about the way Meakins stood, as if it were not really Meakins but someone else, an ingenious impostor, master of disguise. He thought, God knew why, of the article he’d read over breakfast that morning, or some other morning, black holes spiralling out through space, grinding up all that came near them, even light, even dreams, Tom Meakins’ fourth and middle fingers, and—the opposite of black holes—white holes in space, energy fountains inexplicably spewing out brand-new creation—soybean hamburgers, pyramids for sharpening old razor blades—and between those murderous black holes and strangely fecund white holes, million-mile chasms crazed with time warps, gloomy with intelligence, aclutter with vast, unearthly bodies drifting phlegmatically through patches of antimatter, leavings of some older universe, perhaps, like dark, archaic ships sailing mine-filled seas. He felt a queer trembling coming over him and saw an image of a towering ship, ablaze with lights, all around it blackness.
Meakins stood waiting with his hand on the doorknob, his mouth slightly open, eye bags sagging down his dull, freckled face. If he were not Tom Meakins, father of prostitutes, he would be, perhaps, some god of the rain forests gazing morosely through the veil of illusion, weighty with ruinous knowledge and unlikely to speak.
“Never mind,” Craine said at last, and waved him away. Again Meakins bowed, distant, perhaps wounded, and something flashed through Craine’s mind—a faintness. When that too passed, Craine’s world, though normal, felt odd, endangered, as he felt when alone after dark in some faraway place like Moline, where there were whores on prowl, laughing, circling outward from the darkest streets, dimmed-out rubies, practically invisible; yet he felt, at the same time, back in command: he’d found the thread of conversation again. Detectives were objective, dispassionate. Yes. (He thought of Inspector McClaren and suppressed quick alarm.) Did their work without personal involvement: bored professionals.
“Hired killers do the same,” some observer might have told him, gaze moving off toward the corner of the room.
Good point,” Craine muttered, loud enough to hear, then slyly glanced around to see if anyone, anything, was listening.
So Craine’s mind ran, half remembering, half dreaming, making up his life out of bits and pieces, some real, some not, as if Gerald Craine were indeed fictitious—Craine almost wholly unaware that he was doing it, sipping his whiskey from time to time, some of the time half asleep. The mail came, Royce just behind it, chewing gum. Hannah slit open the envelopes and skimmed their contents, fat, pink Tom Meakins at her elbow. “What the devil!” she said suddenly. Royce looked over at them, red-eyed and grouchy; he’d been up all night—so he told them all—in pursuit of a young woman who in the end had cried and vomited. Tom Meakins leaned closer to read.
“What you got?” Craine called.
Hannah came over with the letter.
The minute Craine’s hand touched the paper the letter was written on, he was filled with a sharp sensation like anguish. He was not yet ready to admit it to himself, and later, when he was ready, he would have forgotten the event. Nevertheless, the letter came up through his fingers like a shock of electricity. If you’d asked him, he could not have told you that he knew who the letter was from; nevertheless, he knew. The first time he’d seen her—a passing glance—he’d registered her face more deeply than he’d registered anything in years. Who knows why? Perhaps Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften, some powerful chemical affinity only a poet would risk belief in. Or perhaps, “scanning,” as Dr. Tummelty would say, he’d unconsciously locked on to something his consciousness could never have guessed. He’d thought her quite beautiful, as he would again think her, by the time he remembered (an objective observer would have said she was not)—though also he’d thought her dangerous, alien. From that moment on, each time she watched him he’d been dimly aware of it, though his drunkenness confused him. He’d been walking down a corridor, the second time, and, glancing past his shoulder, he’d seen her behind him. She’d been wearing a poncho, gray and black, and her hair was as black as coal, he’d thought— mistakenly. She had about her an alarming intensity, as if she were a creature from a collapsing planet, every pound
of her body like a thousand pounds on earth, though she walked without a sound, light as air. He’d nodded, embarrassed. She’d nodded back, eyes widening. It had of course not yet occurred to Craine that she was following him, watching his every move.
In any event, he could now see that his sense of being watched, shadowed as if by spirits, was perhaps no more than this, an eerie combination of his whiskey-blur and the fact that he was, indeed, being shadowed, if the letter told the truth. (Why it made him furious he couldn’t make out. He was shaky with rage.) Hannah loomed silent and large beside his desk—one hand on her hip, the other on his desk top, small-fingered and elegant as the blue jade hand of some Oriental figure in the National Geographic—watching him read through the letter and waiting for his comment. He was aware of her as he read—faintly, neither pleasantly nor unpleasantly distracted; fractionally drawn from the immediate to the timeless, from the mortal nuisance of the daily mail to the age-old comfort of beings with whom one feels at home, more or less unjudged. Hannah had no doubt been beautiful in her time. Tall, high-domed, queenly, full of confidence in herself. She had even now a sanguine, handsome face, eyes just noticeably slanted, nose like an Indian’s. She had beautiful daughters, handsome sons, all the color of her husband, coffee with cream, none of much account. T.J. was locked up in Menard Prison. He’d been there six years and on numerous occasions. If he ever got out, he’d be back within a month. Prison had become his philosophy of life. It was what he was best at, “a man’s world,” as Hannah had once said cheerfully. He knew how to duck the risks, draw maximum benefit.
Craine’s fingers tightened on the edge of the letter; his cheek muscles tensed. The sender’s handwriting was like a pinched, self-pitying female yawp. He could see her, not at all as he’d dreamed her—big, soft mouth slightly trembling, murderous wet eyes.
Tom Meakins gazed down at the hospital parking lot, undecided as to just what expression he should wear. His wife, Margaret, wrote fierce, illiterate, and God-filled letters to the Southern Illinoisian about Women’s Liberation. It led, she claimed, to promiscuity. “Could be,” Meakins had said when Craine had asked him what he thought. As for Royce, he sat in his chair, big-jawed, big-shouldered, clowning with his gun as usual, waiting for the coffee in the yellow percolator on the table by Hannah’s door, and waiting for Craine to give him his day’s assignment. Though it was hot in here—hot and dry, full of hisses and sudden sharp clunks (the office was steam heated)—Royce had his heavy leather jacket on. The front was unzipped and his work shirt was open to show off his iron medallion—some kind of religious medal—and curly, silver hair.
Craine reached over for his Scotch glass, then paused, lowered his eyebrows, and changed his mind, rereading. “In the Yellow Pages you’re the only detection agency in Carbondale that advertises male and female operatives,” the letter said, “and for this reason I’ve chosen your organization. I might mention that after personally shadowing your agency’s activities for several weeks, I’d like to know just where you keep your alleged female operatives.”
Craine sucked at his teeth and glanced up at Hannah.
“Go on,” she said. She was interested, pleased with the oddity of the thing, watching him with slightly narrowed eyes.
He read: “Someone is trying to murder me, as they murdered the lady across the street from our house in Evanston. I enclose a clipping that will tell you the story. It was a man, some stranger I never saw before.” Something tingled in Craine’s mind—déjà vu—but he couldn’t get hold of it. “I saw him running away, and he must know this, because he’s now here in Carbondale. He’s the psychopathic murderer of those women, I have reason to believe. I’ve seen him, in fact—same jacket, same crew-cut hair. Possibly those murders are intended to obscure the one he’s really concerned about—myself. So I desperately need your female operative’s help. I say female operative because, besides the known superiority of female intelligence, the murderer was a male, and studies have shown that male detectives are sympathetic to male criminals, especially in sex-related crimes. Although I would like to employ a female operative, I know better, however, than to come to your office in person and be sold a bill of goods about how a male operative is what I really need. I know your kind, believe me! Rather than be subjugated to such undignified treatment—all too common in this world (notice how the media have virtually suppressed the very fact of these horrible murders!)—I suggest the following. If you agree to my conditions and will not go against my human rights and will issue me a female operative (if in fact you have one!), no questions asked, then walk to your window and nod. I’ll be watching, though of course you won’t see me. If you do not agree, please return my check in the enclosed self-addressed envelope. I also enclose a retainer, which I hope is enough.” The letter was signed, “Sincerely, E. Glass.”
Again Craine looked up, and Hannah placed on the desk before him a newspaper clipping and a cashier’s check, drawn by an Elaine Glass on the Carbondale First National Bank, for five hundred dollars. No self-addressed envelope, Hannah said, had been enclosed.
“Jesus’ Peter,” Craine muttered.
“The check’s legitimate,” Hannah said. “I talked to Mr. Renfro. Tried to get a description of the woman’s brought it, but the teller that sold it to her didn’t come in today. Sick with the ’flu.” From the way she said ’flu, eyes wide and skeptical, it seemed that she suspected the teller of malingering, or suspected some more wicked, more ancient evil, of which Charles Renfro at the bank had dared not speak. “I got his phone number at home,” she said. Craine looked at her blankly. She stood with her head tipped, ready to pick up the receiver on the phone, and the present clicked back.
Craine dramatically waved his pipe and ducked his head, dismissing the suggestion. He was in a calm panic, like the eye of a tornado. He was feeling … He winced as if trying to get it clear and ran one wrinkled, leathery hand through his flat, dead, dyed-black hair. Far wearier than usual, he concluded.
“What do you think?” Hannah asked.
Meakins was still looking mournfully out at the parking lot, probably trying to locate those spying eyes. Royce, with his left hand tightly closed on his right wrist, was aiming his pistol at some speck on the gray-green wall. Craine closed his eyes for a moment, sighed, then drew the clipping toward him, sliding it in across the desk blotter, and bent forward to read it. The print was slightly blurry, but even for Craine’s weak eyes manageable. The usual tale: old woman living alone opens door to killer; neighbors chatter, say nothing. There was, of course, no mention of Ms. Elaine Glass. He looked at the check again. It told him nothing. Dated three days ago, drearily official. So the urgency was fake. He’d assumed it was, of course. Yet how odd, he thought—how Goddamned tiresomely incompetent—to claim there was someone hunting you like a rabbit and back up the claim with a five-hundred-dollar check, and then, lured on by irrepressible hatred, blow the whole story with this news of having tailed him, this palpitating red neon sign of raw she-wolf rage.
But laugh as he might—though he felt crowded, too, no denying it—the check was real: she was in earnest. What could she be after, except, at very least, to humble him a little? For advertising female operatives, maybe, and hiring only men. Probably worse. It was a lot of money. Here in Little Egypt you could hire a man murdered for forty-five dollars. Craine had read what women had to say about men these days—stories, novels about lecherous uncles, malevolent employers. However ridiculous the thing she held against him—her father, her brother, Uncle Fred in the garage—and whatever her stupidity and incompetence, she might just get lucky and shoot a hole in him. Unless, on the other hand, the rant against males was a clever trick and it was the “female operative” she had some reason to be down on. She? he thought, frowning—denying, for an instant, everything he knew. He looked more carefully at the handwriting on the letter. Surely it was a woman’s. Black ball-point, fine tip. (A sentimentalist, no extravert; touch of the legalist, maybe mannish as well, otherwise the
ink would be blue or green.) Slanted writing, small but loopy, with meticulous little flourishes and oversized caps. (A careful writer, secretive, but an egoist, slyly flashy; capable of acting like a crazy; impulsive.) He got a nightmare image—just a flicker—of huge, pale breasts, filed teeth, a scent of blood. He pushed the letter and the clipping away.
“See anything, Meakins?” he asked without turning, opening his pipe knife and attacking the stone-hard dottle in his pipe.
“Nothing suspicious,” Meakins said. “It would be easy to watch us from one of the hospital windows, behind the blinds, or from somewhere down the street, with binoculars.”
Craine banged his pipe on the ashtray cork and poked the knife in again, hands meaninglessly shaking. He was dehydrated, as always; so dry that if he spit he’d spit dust. “She’s not that smart,” he said. “She’d screw it up.”
“Fuck ’er,” Royce said. “Cash the fucking check and the fuck with ’er.”
Craine gave him a look. Royce shrugged.
