by John Dunning
On paper he could do that. He could sit Rigby down and make him listen. He could turn whores into saints and make the dark-haired god bow at the devil’s feet.
“There are a couple of lines crossed out,” she said, “as if he had changed his mind about something and took off in another direction.”
“He wanted to take his brother’s name out. You can still read it, though: all he did was draw a squiggly line through it.”
She read aloud.
Rigby was a fresh young boy when he arrived like
Fauntleroy
And took his bashful place beyond the shadows of
the Grayson door;
Little did he know that Grayson had a legendary
place in
Bedrooms: everywhere he’d hasten, wives and
daughters to explore.
Grayson had them everywhere; on the stair and on
the floor,
Grayson lusted, evermore.
“Why take that out?” she said.
“It’s too blunt. He wanted it to flow differently, he wanted that godlike flavor. He felt he could do that better by keeping himself and his brother nameless.”
The telephone rang. She picked it up and said a few words, scribbled a few notes, asked a few questions about when, where, and how. “That’s great, friend,” she said. “Yeah, do send me copies of those clips, and listen, that’s one I owe you if you ever need a Seattle angle.”
She hung up and looked at me. She didn’t say anything and I didn’t need to ask. She looked down at the poem and said, “I think you’re right, if it matters. Richard had a well-honed sense of bitter satire. A frontal attack was never as much fun as a hit-and-run.”
“The title was blatant enough.”
“‘The Craven.’ What an insult that would’ve been to a man like Darryl Grayson.”
“It belittles his genius. It reduces Grayson’s life to the level of his own. And yet it has moments of real…what?”
“Love.”
“Read it again.”
She read aloud from the top: the world according to Richard, first revised version.
One night sitting with dear Gaston, as the night
fell deep and vast in
All its blackened glory: such a night to chill him
to the very core;
A colder wind I blew upon him, one I thought
would shake and stun him
And might even break and run him far away from
sorrow’s door.
But the child remained undaunted: all his faith
again he swore
Was in his god forevermore.
“I don’t believe this,” she said. “It doesn’t square with what I know about Richard or Rigby.”
“You can’t take it literally, you’ll end up doubting it all. I admit it strikes a false note at the top. We know Rigby wouldn’t sit still for what comes later, but that doesn’t mean other parts of it aren’t true.”
She read two flashback stanzas telling of the gods’ humble origins.
“I had it right,” she said. “If anything, I underwrote it.”
The father was a mean drunk and drunk much of the time. The mother was dead and unforgiven. If she wanted understanding, she’d have to find it in the next world because the son she’d left on earth had none to give her.
Lines in the middle of the third stanza made short work of these two and the sorry life they’d given their sons.
Brute and whore together spawned ‘em; then
forsook ‘em; tossed and pawned ‘em
To the devil who upon them did his vile and
wicked powers pour…
I joined her reading, quoting from memory.
One would join Old Scratch the devil, while he
watched the other revel
In himself, and gaze with level eyes upon the
predator…
“I don’t see that in here.”
“He squiggled it out. But it’s there, off to the side of the verse he kept. You can read it through the squiggle.”
“Yeah, I see it now.”
Up to this point Richard had worshiped his brother blindly, much as Rigby would do a generation later. “At that time, he was buying his own god scenario,” I said. “Grayson was his protector, the only real constant in his life.”
“Then it all changes. The god proves false.”
“He has his first serious romance, and Richard rankles with fear and jealousy.”
“Cecile Thomas,” Trish said. “I talked to her. She had gone to grammar school with the Graysons, then her parents moved away to North Carolina and came back to Atlanta when she was a teenager. A classic coming-of-age romance. Grayson thought of her as a brat when they were kids. Then suddenly there she was again, eighteen and lovely.”
“There’s a squiggled-out verse, just partly finished, when Richard was still trying to do it in a half-modern idiom, with names and all.”
She read it.
Grayson had with him a harlot, who had come to
him from Charlotte,
Though Atlanta, Georgia, was her domicile of
yore…
“There’s another line I can’t read,” she said.
“It says, Who, you ask me, could this pig be, who so got the goat of Rigby . If you look at it under a glass, you can make it out.”
“He’s doing it again, mixing his own role with Rigby’s.”
“But he catches it before the stanza’s done and squiggles it out.”
Her telephone rang.
She took back-to-back calls, from Phoenix and Baltimore. She made her notes with a poker face, as if she were working a rewrite desk assembling facts for a weather report.
She looked up from the phone without a word, pushed her notes off to one side, and again took up Richard’s poem.
“You can see the words changing as it goes along. The tone gets darker, angrier.”
‘’He was a clingy kid,“ I said. ”He was what?…thirteen, fourteen years old. His brother was four years older, the difference between a boy and a young man. Richard counted on his brother to be there when things in his life went wrong.“
“Then it got to be too much.” She flipped a page. “We can only guess how Darryl felt, when all we’ve got is Richard’s side to go by.”
“My guess is the same as yours. He was being suffocated by his father on one side and by Richard on the other. So he ran away with his girlfriend to the coast, only his friend Moon knew where.”
“And Moon wasn’t telling.”
“And Richard settled into a cold rage. He had already lost his mother, and now the unthinkable was happening, he was losing his brother. To a kid that age, the feeling of abandonment was probably enormous.”
“He hated Moon for obvious reasons.”
“Moon was everything he could never be. Strong, independent…the kind of man Grayson would want for a brother.”
“In South Carolina, Grayson found that sense of purpose that would carry him through life. He’d fought Old Scratch and won.”
She read it.
And when the young god chose to fight, he waged
a battle that was mighty;
Purpose kept his honor far away from Satan’s
harsh and blust’ry roar.
This was how he rose above it: did his work and
learned to love it,
And his skills made others covet everything he
made and more.
‘Tis some deity, they marveled, living there
beyond that door:
He’d joined the gods, forevermore.
For three stanzas the god walked on water, could do no wrong. All he touched was blessed: he was on a spiral ever upward.
Then came The Raven .
And when it seemed that none could daunt him,
A sepulchre rose up to haunt him
Stuck in there as if to taunt him, all the more to
underscore
That he
who’d walked among the gods
Had tumbled down to hell’s back door,
A-burning there, forevermore.
“The misspelled word,” she said. “But it’s all out of sequence. He’s giving his brother all that success before The Raven , when it really didn’t happen till five or six years later.”
“Creative license again. He thought it worked better dramatically. But the real question is, what is this business of the misspelled word? What the cop in St. Louis told you, that Hockman had just gotten a new book with a misspelled word…that’s damned interesting.”
“And not just any word. The same word.”
“How could Grayson make that mistake again?”
“If we knew that, we’d know something, wouldn’t we?”
“Whatever happened, it was disastrous.”
“The god begins to fail. He starts doubting himself, becomes obsessed by a vision of his failure. He tries to put it right, but he can never do it well enough.”
“Nothing he does can satisfy him now.”
“It can never be good enough.”
“He sinks into despair.”
“And takes refuge in alcohol and sex.”
And Rigby heard in disbelief the Craven’s method
and motif
Of luring maidens into wretchedness behind his
bedroom door.
One poor fool she filled herself with fantasy, then
killed herself,
Unable to instill herself into his craven heart
before
She turned up high the unlit gas and died upon
her father’s floor:
To irk the Craven nevermore.
“God, there was a girl who killed herself,” Trish said. “I kissed her off with a paragraph. I didn’t think it had that much to do with Grayson, it was months after their affair and she seemed despondent over everything, not just him.”
She looked at me, riddled with doubt.
“Who knows what it had to do with,” I said. “Maybe it’s just Richard again, trying to blame some circumstantial tragedy on his brother.”
“What about Laura Warner?”
“You did what you could with her. You chased her pretty hard.”
“Not hard enough.”
“Then that’s what revised editions are for.”
We were in the last lines now. The dark-haired god idolized in the early verse had suddenly been reduced to ridicule.
The time had come to resurrect the ancient failure
that infected
Every facet of his life…
She looked at me and I gave her the next line from memory.
But his second task was tougher; it was Poe who
made him suffer…
“Poe defeated him,” she said. “He never did get it right.”
“Then where’d the book come from?”
She shook her head.
“And the ashes…”
“I don’t know.”
“If Grayson was such a failure at the end of his life,” I pressed, “why is his book still causing so damned much trouble?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
We didn’t speak again till the phone rang. The late man at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans.
She talked for a while and hung up.
“He burned her house,” she said flatly. “Killed her, then set fire to her house.”
“Laura Warner.”
She nodded. “They’re all dead. St. Louis, Phoenix, Idaho…all dead. All but a blind, crazy woman in the Maryland case.”
BOOK III
THE RAVEN
44
It was raining again. I heard two things, the steady drumming of the rain and the click of my bedroom door as Trish came in. I lay still for a moment, listening to her footsteps as she approached my bed. I had been in a deep sleep for all of ninety minutes: the digits on the clock beside the bed told me it was now 4:52. I blinked my eyes and gradually came awake, aware of her presence a foot or two away. She stood for a long minute, then leaned over and touched my shoulder, shaking me gently.
“It’s time,” she said.
“Yeah, I’m awake.”
“We gotta get going.”
She went away and I lay there for another minute, thinking about what we had discovered in the night. I thought about five old murder cases in five different cities, and about the blind woman the killer had left alive in Maryland.
I hit the shower. Thought about it some more as I stood in the steam.
I smelled bacon as I came downstairs. She stood in the half-dark kitchen, cooking by the light from the smoke hood over the range.
“Didn’t we just eat?” I asked in a surprised tone of voice.
“Such as it was.”
But my appetite is always good in the morning and I was hungry again. I sat at her kitchen table and let her pamper me.
“Scofield and Kenney are due in at six-thirty, more or less, according to the flight plan they filed in L.A.,” she said. “We should play it safe and be there with time to spare.”
I agreed with that. We were probably safe if we could leave in another ten minutes. We were already slightly south of town, and that would give us a full hour to make the few miles to Sea-Tac before the rush hour began.
I asked if she’d gotten any sleep. “Didn’t even try,” she said, handing me a plate of food. She sat across from me with her own plate and said, “I can’t sleep with stuff like this going on.”
She had been thinking about the sequence of those five old murder cases and had come up with a point of logic that had escaped us at midnight. “The cases all followed the Grayson lettering sequence, in precise order. A came before B , then came C, D , and E , all within days of each other. Think about that a minute. Picture a map of the United States and ask yourself, if you were going to kill people in five different parts of the country, how would you go about it? I’d do the two in the West first because I’m out here already and it’s closer. Do Idaho first, then fly to Phoenix. Then go east and do the others, St. Louis, then New Orleans and Baltimore, in either order. What the killer did, though, was St. Louis first… A . Then he went to Phoenix, B; then he flew clear back across the country to C , Baltimore. Then back across the country again to Idaho. Then back again to New Orleans. Does this make sense? Not unless you’ve got Grayson’s list and can see the connections.”
“It’s like he couldn’t see anything beyond the list.”
“Just get there, do it, and move on the next one.”
“Whatever it was, the urgency was so great he didn’t even think about geography.”
She shivered. “This is a real crazy one we’ve got here.”
“And he’s still out there doing it.”
Forty minutes later we were sitting in a maintenance truck at the end of a concourse where the smallest airline carriers and various private flights were routed. Our driver was a cheerful fellow named Mickey Bowman, who ran the airport’s public relations office and didn’t seem to mind being roused from bed when Trish had called him at three-thirty. I knew a little about the odd relationships that sometimes develop between PR people and the press—the Denver cops had a public affairs specialist with the rank of division chief, and depending on who held the job, you could sometimes see the good and bad of what he did on the front pages of the Denver newspapers. If he stonewalls, they dig out the facts anyway, only they write them in such a way as to make his boss look stupid, silly, or devious. A good PR guy knows when to promote and when to back off and do the gal a favor. He is always in when the press calls: he never gives her the feeling that, all things considered, he’d rather be in Philadelphia than sitting in a maintenance truck at six o’clock on a rainy morning talking to her. He is an expert at damage control, and if the story is going to be critical, he sometimes earns his pay more for what’s left out of a piece than what’s put in.
Bowman had been a reporter himself in a previous life and he knew the ro
utine. He knew what her deadlines were, just as he knew that she seldom did stories of that nature. “We’d like to meet a guy at the airport, Mickey,” she had said, “and we’re not sure yet whether we’ll want to announce ourselves after he gets here.” Bowman’s dad had been in the Seabees in the big war, she told me later: he had passed along that can-do mentality to his son. Bowman was waiting when we arrived. He got us through security, verified when and where Scofield’s plane would be coming in, and now we sat with Trish wedged tight in the seat between us, the airport VISITOR tags clipped to our lapels.
I sat quietly splitting my concentration. One side of my brain listened to the shoptalk between Aandahl and Bowman while I thought about our killer with the other half. I thought about a blind woman in Baltimore who had been left alive in the middle of a nine-day rampage, who had later gone mad and been committed. Trish was telling Mickey Bowman about a great public-relations man she knew by phone but had never met. The guy worked for United Airlines in Miami, and he had all but written her first big story for her on deadline. A plane had been hijacked: FBI sharpshooters had gotten under the aircraft without the hijacker’s knowledge, and one was trying to crawl up the plane’s nose assembly before the gunman figured out where they were. The United man had an office window that looked down on the scene. Trish sat at a desk across town, her phone rigged through a headset, taking verbatim descriptions as the United guy talked the story out to her. “They killed the hijacker,” she said, “but I’ve never forgotten that PR man. You’re pretty good yourself, Mick.”
This was high praise from someone who never dealt in bullshit, and Bowman knew it. “Mickey used to be a bureau chief for the AP in Indianapolis,” Trish said for my benefit. I joined the small talk and learned a few things about wire-service reporters. But I was still thinking about the blind woman in Maryland.
At six-thirty sharp a burst of noise came through Bowman’s radio. “Your bird’s on the ground,” he said. At almost the same instant a car materialized, a black Cadillac that came slowly up the runway and stopped, idling about thirty yards to our right. The two men sitting in the car would be Scofield bodyguards, I guessed. Bowman started his engine and cleared away the steam from our windows with his air blower. I had to hand it to him: he must be curious as hell about the story we were doing, but he never asked.
