Do the Weird Crime, Serve the Weird Time

by Don Webb

  At first my fellow writers weren’t concerned. Most of them apologized to me. We talked a little about contacting the other victims, but mainly we were embarrassed. Most of us had had friends that had warned us that the whole thing smelled like a scam, and we were embarrassed. But Belinda changed all that. She set up a mailing list for us all and she wrote a really impassioned letter about how I had been screwed over. She told them that I had paid for her books, and that I had bought all the copies, and that I had taken all their abuse (including hers), and that I had let them know what had happened. She was really mad at Greenslau, and when people realized that I was out over six thousand dollars, they got mad to.

  I think it was Dr. Ellison, the dentist, who suggested that we should get our revenge. We agreed early on but we didn’t know how.

  Belinda began researching the place that had printed all the books it was in Polk City, Iowa. Other than printing Mystery Classics, they did Bibles in Spanish and menus. Their equipment was old, and the CM line kept them going. They were very friendly, and were glad to give her a list of cities that had had CMs made up. We looked it over. Greenslau had neglected New Orleans. We couldn’t guess why, maybe he thought the bunco squad there was too good. So we got a local ISP and we made a group Crescent City Crime Writers. We got us a webpage, we took out some ads in the New Orleans Picayune, and we mentioned our name on a few mystery news groups. We had people that wanted to join of course, but we told them that we had already filled our meeting space—some unspecified loft on Canal Street and that it would be a while before we were taking members, but they were free to chat. We adopted pseudonyms, we chatted, and we even learned some things about the city of New Orleans and its rich mystery tradition. Eventually someone made the observation that it is sure to easy to get published if you already are published. His name was Reds law. Mr.Redslaw went on to tell us that the reasons dead guys are reprinted is that they sell and you don’t have to pay them.

  Therefore, I went on-line as Mr. Phineas Thibodaux, an honest but poor man of the parishes with a great marketing strategy....

  Mr. Redslaw thought my notion of an anthology of half classic and half virgin talent was nothing short of genius. He said he could get a has-been writer, a Mr. D. B. Bowen, author of The Cellophane Trilogy, would write an introduction.

  Here is where we made our move. We said that we wanted to meet him, Mr. Bowen, of course. We had figured out that much.

  At first there was reluctance. Redslaw told us that Bowen was reclusive, alcoholic, etc. We stuck to our guns, and Belinda had a brilliant idea. She researched Bowen. He had written five avant-garde novels in the eighties. The CTT had been marginally successful. He had been on the list of several critics as the young writer to watch. He had speaking tours, was a minor TV celeb, but each novel got stranger and the readership declined. He even tried vanity publishing with—you guessed it—the Menu House in Polk City.

  So in addition to our wanting to see him, we began to say good things about his work.

  There isn’t the writer alive that doesn’t believe flattery. The entire strange cursed race thinks that someday their scribblings will have a place in god’s eternal bookshelf.

  Our plan was a little vague. We thought that we get him in a hotel room and then just confront him and in some magical way he would pay us back the money he had sucked away.

  We choose an older hotel in the French Quarter called the Roosevelt. We rented the big penthouse that had looked over Mardi-gras for almost a hundred years. It was bleak December. We told him to meet us at eight on a Wednesday night. We dressed well, and those of us who had concealed weapons permits from Texas were packing. We had no intention of killing him, just scaring him into the straight and narrow.

  Belinda had a tape recorder so we could catch any confessions that might boil to the surface.

  He was fifteen minutes late. We were sweating and uncomfortable. We heard the old elevator make its way to our floor. Belinda and a woman named Chandra Lee escorted him to our suite. He was older and thinner than we had thought. We had our chairs arranged in a circle, his was in the middle. He laughed when he saw it. We guessed he wouldn’t be laughing soon.

  After he had set down, we all reached under our chairs and pulled out a copy of Mystery Classics, except for me I pulled our five copies—one of each of the editions I had bought. We were expecting fear or guilt.

  We were disappointed.

  He just asked, “So which group are you? Shreveport? Dallas? No I guess it’s too long for it to be Dallas.”

  I said, “We’re Austin and we want our money back.”

  “Oh that’s original,” he said, relaxing in his chair, “About as original as your fiction.” Then he laughed.

  “Look Bowen, we’re not fooling around.” Said Dr. Ellison.

  “Of course you are,” said Bowen, “That’s all you’ve ever done. You’re jerk-offs. What do you want from me? You said you wanted to be published. Well you got your book. It’s big, it’s fat. I bought all of you have discovered the great utility it has for propping things up. You should be as happy as a pig in slop. But no, what you wanted wasn’t to pay three thousand dollars so that your useless names would be printed along side people that would sneer at your ineptitude. But you wanted more. You are disappointed that I am not Satan. You wanted to sell your souls for fame. Well, you don’t have soul, or you could have written something worthwhile. You don’t got shit.”

  “No Bowen,” I said, “We’ve got you.”

  “You think your first the group that has pieced this together. You’re not, and you’re not the last. But everything I did was legal. I knew this was a confrontation when I walked down here. Night meeting in an old hotel in the French Quarter, the same old clichéd stuff that keep your fiction from selling. I just wanted to see your pathetic faces, look at you, all dressed up, all proper; does it make you feel powerful? Your little chairs all in a circle. Well I’m going now, and you can go back to your lives and tiny dreams.”

  “Do you think you are a good writer, Bowen?”

  “I’m no Rex Hull, but I’m OK. I’m third-rate, but my ambition is too great. So I look for eighteenth-rate scum to support me.”

  He rose.

  “No.” said Dr. Ellison, “We are not done with you.”

  “Why what are you going to do kill me?”

  “Yes.” Dr. Ellison said, “We are. Just because you aren’t expecting it. It is a sign of the triumph of our poor imaginations.

  We were on him in a minute. Eleven people can over power a man in his sixties easily. Killing him is easier still.

  Taking a corpse through the French Quarter is not a difficult matter when he is small. You simply stand on either side of him and tell on-lookers that he has too much to drink. In fact as we took him to my car, we passed another fellow in the same straights. Perhaps he too was dead.

  We took him to my cousin’s restaurant. We sat outside until closing time. My cousin and I had an agreement. He did not ask about things that he didn’t want to hear the answer to, and I treated his life the same way.

  We made Mr. D. B. Bowen into jambalaya. The other men butchered him, while I prolapsed the rice and sauce as per the recipe in my story. He was ready at dawn, and we filled up our containers with him and took him to our homes in Austin. Just before we took off, Belinda said, “Well he’s toast now.” I most emphatically denied that he was toast, and took offences at the slighting of my culinary creation. “OK,” she said, “He is not toast.”

  We were prepared to be each other’s alibis when the law came by.

  It never came.

  Bowen did live alone. He was the alcoholic recluse he claimed to be. Eventually the residence hotel he lived in Washington must have noticed that their tenant had not returned.

  The others had swore off writing, but I turned out a few tales afterward—some of which sold. I felt my fiction getting better, and attributed it to some endorphin released after revenge.

  About six months later, B
elinda was listening to Bowen’s speech in the Roosevelt Penthouse. She called me and said that it was very dramatic. The whole thing would make a lovely crime novel. So we broke it into eleven chapters. Each of us did our best. And unlike most of our scribbling before and after, our best was finally good enough. Sure the novel sold as something of a curiosity like Naked Came the Spy, but it did sell. We had a few minutes of fame—woefully short of the fifteen minutes that a man named Andy Warhol had promised our parent’s generation.

  The success of the book, plus my modest sales before its publication inspired everyone to try writing again. We had all felt the writing we did on WINT had been smooth and beautiful. We were all able to get agents on the strengths of WINT’s sales, and we were busy turning out novel proposals. But something was wrong.

  The quality left our writing. At first we hid this each from the other. All right at first we hid it form ourselves, a writer cannot bear to acknowledge that his best days may be gone—especially if his best days were about a month in length. However, by the time the movie of WINT came out, our writing was as bad as it had been in Mystery Classics; we didn’t know what had happened. Had the crime been enough to stimulate our moribund muses?

  Dr. Ellison suggested a different explanation. Over half a century before, certain experiments on planaria learning had suggested that cannibalism lead to the exchange of knowledge. The planaria, a type of flatworm, were tested with a maze and their times recorded. Then the planaria were ground up and fed to a new generation, who could solve the maze in less time than their predecessors. It was speculated that their was a transference of knowledge—probably in the messenger RNA strands of the planaria The experiment was later discredited, as some researched believed that the mazes were contaminated by the smell of the flatworm’s passage and that was the guiding force. However, certain people believed that the experiments were discredited to keep universities form turning into professor-hamburger stands.

  Hoc est corpus meum.

  Maybe we had eaten Bowen’s talent. Unlike him we were not jaded nor overcome by a desire to be known in a limited genre—we were just people with a burning desire to write, but perhaps nothing to say. Our desire plus his RNA got one more novel out of him. It was sad that he never got the fame, which he like us, had craved. The RNA material must have peaked in us about nine months after the deed and receded nine months afterward.

  Our reaction to Dr. Ellison’s theory varied. Some of us were glad at our one shot at fame and parlayed into little victories like my cookbook. Others drank themselves to death like Belinda, who could face the fact she had no talent. Of course the best known case—the one you’ve been reading this interview to see if I would mention—see I still have a few mystery writer tricks even if I am eighteenth-rate—was Dr. Ellison. One of the good dentist’s clients was Vernon Ghosh, a well-know writer of techno-thrillers. Ellison gassed him when he was in for his yearly dental visit and then cut up his body with an eye to making lasagna from it. The unfortunate visit of a young mad with a chipped tooth exposed Ellison’s attempt at cannibalism.

  Ironically it lead to new interest in our work and a re-release of WINT, which has remained in print since. We all denied any understanding of his actions, and if in our black hearts we had been thinking of a similar deed, we abandoned such evils schemes.

  Although not quite the youngest of our little group of wannabes I am the last to draw breath, and I will not do so for much longer. I enjoyed sharing our story for Has-Beens on Parade.

  DIARY FOUND IN AN ABANDONED STUDIO

  I couldn’t paint when I took the medicine.

  If I laid off for a few days the images would come and I could finish a canvas, but there was always the danger that I would forget who was doing the painting, or maybe even right and wrong. So I started this diary. I’ll read it every day and write in it every day and that way I won’t get in trouble like that other time. Yesterday I prepared a canvas. Today I put my medicine aside. Tomorrow I’ll start my sketches.

  Day 2. My name is Tyrone Watson. I am thirty-eight. I live in Austin, Texas. There that seems pretty sane. I don’t think it’s a good idea to kill one’s critics. Violence has no special beauty. If I want to get people, I’ll just caricature them. I work for Roberta Sais.

  I started today on The Market of Values, which will be a study in blues and grays of people at some sort of carnival buying and selling things of no value. Maybe I’ll work in miniatures of Bessie Vollman’s paintings.

  Day 3. Ideas are getting really slippery today. It feels great. My sketchbook is filling up and Markets coming along. Oh I forgot to do my focusing mantra.

  My name is Tyrone Watson, MFA. I have had two one-man exhibitions. The last was five years ago.

  There that’s in control. In fact the only control problem I have is wanting to spend all my time up here painting instead of down in the shop, but that’s normal. Artists want to do art. It’s a pity that business hours coincide with the light being good.

  Day 4. Depressed today.

  Day 5. Depressed today. Did nothing. Got mad.

  Day 6. My name is Tyrone Watson. I am thirty-eight. I live in Austin. I had a great day. A Mr. Simon Pound had a lot to ask me about my art. Maybe I’m in for a comeback. I started to take him upstairs and show him my work in progress, but a little voice told me not to. I don’t mean a little voice like before, I just mean a hunch, that feeling of not letting people in on it until you’re ready. I got a lot done today. Market should be finished tomorrow.

  Day 7. Finished Market. Not as good as I had hoped, but still that’s the essence of the artistic personality. Always dissatisfied. Like Faust. I’m starting something more free form, a response to those people who caused me so much trouble. I’m going to call it Exposed Heart. I’m not sure how to start. Well an idea suggests itself, but not a good one. My name is Tyrone Watson. I’m thirty something a painter on the go.

  Day 8. Busy.

  Day 9. Spent several hours with my model.

  Day 10. Mr. Pound came by today. I was disappointed to learn he wasn’t an art critic. He is a retired cop. His life story seemed pretty interesting. Maybe I’ll do him after Exposed Heart which is coming along nicely thank you. It’s a little bit more gory than anything I’ve done in years.

  Day 11. My name is Tyrone Watson. Today Mr. Pound came by and we discussed our life stories, which were amazingly similar. I want to get to know him because I’m going to do a picture of him called The Multidimensional Blue Lines .

  He became a cop in the ’70s. His big ambition from the first was to make detective. He studied every text on criminology, took every possible course and dedicated his ife to that particular transformation, but various political forces downtown saw to it that he didn’t make the grade.

  I told him how critics had ruined my two shows, particularly the second show when Bessie Vollman’s competing exhibition won such lavish praise. She had been the more “politically correct” artist. So her career took off and I managed a used bookstore for minimum wage and free studio space.

  He asked if he could see my work in progress, and I told him no. I hate anyone to see something before I’m done with it. But I told him that I was interested in painting him. At first he seemed surprised, then readily agreed.

  He asked me if I knew anything about the death of two art critics five years ago.

  I asked him if he was still a cop.

  He said that he quit the force a couple of years ago. He’d arrested too many criminals who got off on technicalities. So he quit. He was near enough retirement anyway and he had a few investments that had paid off well. He liked to keep his hand in. The police, he assured me, at least the good cops—the real force—still called him for advice.

  I asked him how long he’d been interested in art. He said that every good cop is interested in art. The artistic mind and the criminal mind are very, very similar. Most criminals, he reasoned, were failed artists.

  But criminals don’t have critics, I told him. />
  “Of course they do,” he said. “Cops, they catch inept criminals. The great criminals go free.”

  I had never thought of a cop as a critic for a criminal’s art.

  Day 12. Terrible dreams last night. I was too depressed to open the store.

  Day 13. It’s been almost two weeks and I’m doing fine. Maybe I’m over my trouble. My name is Tyrone Watson. Elementary, my dear Watson. Someone broke into the shop last night, they didn’t take anything but I think they may have been through my studio. Both the outside door and the studio door were open. Despite this I can’t tell you how GREAT I feel. I started two different paintings this morning. I started to call the owner and tell her the shop had been broken into, but realized that would screw up my process. I painted like Picasso. I’ll stay here at night. Maybe I’ll catch my burglar and paint him. I’m ready. I’m ready for anything. I feel GREAT!

  Day 14. I painted well into the night and finished my first painting; a riotous and much spangled study in purple and green called The Water People Are Talking to Me. I went out for a walk about 3:00 AM. I needed inspiration for the second piece—a study in chrome yellow called Voltman Discharges. Oh what a wonderful great buzzy great picture! Zip zzp, I say, zip zap.

  Day 15. Mr. Pound came by with the news about Bessie Vollman. I felt really, really bad for a moment as though it had something to do with me. I suppose that shows I have a great soul that I can feel sorry for a rival. I asked to see the obituary notice since he was carrying the paper. Sure enough although I was Bessie’s greatest rival I wasn’t mentioned. Maybe I should send a wreath or something, after all I would be remembered a hundred years hence and she will be forgotten. Maybe I should go to the funeral to do a second painting of her.