Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  Laurie kissed the top of his head. “You’re wonderful.”

  “Laurie?”

  “Hugh?”

  “Dinner tonight? Or a movie? How about dinner and a movie?”

  “Not tonight,” she said. “But you’re a darling.”

  45

  “That’s ridiculous. Your father can’t be a man named Donald Messmer.”

  “Hugh had a good idea,” I said. “She was pregnant when she got married. My mother was free-spirited when it came to official documents.”

  “We have to get in touch with this Messmer.” She turned the key in the ignition and nudged the accelerator. “Posy Fairbrother, Cobbie’s nanny, has a CD-ROM with addresses and telephone numbers from a million different cities. Now, where are we going?”

  I showed her the slip of paper. Toby’s slash-and-burn handwriting spelled out the name Max Edison and V.A. Hospital, Mount Vernon. “That’s a long way away, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a hike, but the expressway goes right to it. We have plenty of time, if we don’t stay long. There’s a nice place to have lunch on the other side of Marion.”

  We moved out into the traffic and headed toward the expressway.

  “How did you get this name? Did Max Edison know your father?”

  I said that I had heard about him from Toby Kraft, a pawnbroker on Lanyard Street who had been married to my grandmother, Queenie Dunstan. “After we left Le Madrigal, Toby’s the person I went to see.”

  “Ah,” Laurie said.

  “He wants to keep out of the picture. Toby only gave me this much on the condition that we never had the conversation, and the name didn’t come from him.”

  Laurie swung into the northbound on-ramp.

  “Your father’s name was Yves D’Lency, and he drove across the African veldt to shoot lions?”

  “Not really. It’s a long story. You don’t want to hear it.”

  “Try me,” I said.

  Yves D’Lency had been a glamorous daredevil born to an aristocratic family in possession of a Gascony estate and a noble art collection. At eighteen, he had escaped to immerse himself in the literary and artistic worlds of postwar Paris, where he supported himself by literary journalism and private art dealing. He learned to fly; he drove racing cars. At the end of the fifties, he moved to Los Angeles, where he already had several clients who trusted his taste in paintings. He married Laurie’s mother and bought a house in Beverly Hills. Laurie was born, and for seven years all went well. Then he died. Laurie still had two paintings from his private collection.

  “How did he die?”

  Her glance was almost ferocious. “He was flying from an airfield in the San Fernando Valley to see a friend in Carmel. He had a little Cessna. The engine crapped out north of Santa Barbara. Down they fell, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.” Her right hand lifted from the wheel and fluttered down.

  “You were seven.”

  “Ever since, the sight of a Cessna always makes me feel like puking.” I got another burning flash from her eyes. She straightened her arms and pushed herself back into the seat.

  “Tell me how you met Stewart Hatch.”

  Five years earlier, a reasonably attractive man of about forty had stationed himself beside Laurie D’Lency near midpoint of a party spilling upstairs, downstairs, and into the garden of a townhouse owned by an executive at the NBC affiliate in San Francisco. Stewart Hatch was an acquaintance of a KRON executive several rungs above the owner of the townhouse; he was neither charmless nor anything like too old; yet he did not interest her, especially when he confessed to being a businessman from an obscure city in Illinois. After three years of doing background for the news staff, Laurie knew she had a chance of beating out her competition, two other young women circulating like benevolent hurricanes through the townhouse, for an opening as an on-camera reporter. The Illinois tycoon might as well have been a black hole in a distant galaxy.

  Stewart Hatch had rematerialized at the end of the party and offered a ride home in his limousine. The friends who had driven her to the party had disappeared, and the alternative to the limousine was a cab service. She accepted.

  Thereafter, Hatch had laid siege, sending flowers, calling two or three times a day from the limousine, between meetings, from his suite at the Fairmont. He had sweaters and blouses delivered from Neiman Marcus and on his last night in San Francisco took Laurie to Il Postrio. During dinner, Stewart Hatch had astonished her with a proposal of marriage.

  “Boy, what a con job that guy did on me.”

  “You didn’t agree to marry him over dinner at Il Postrio,” I said. “Unless it was the most amazing meal you’d ever had in your life, and Stewart ordered a couple bottles of great champagne.”

  “Roederer Cristal. Which, as Stewart took pains to instruct me, is akin to the Holy Grail. Children in third-world countries fling themselves into bottomless chasms for a glimpse of a single bottle. We had two. And the food was spectacular. But I turned him down. Was Stewart discouraged? Stewart doesn’t know the meaning of the word.”

  46

  At the restaurant on the other side of Marion, an elderly waiter gave us menus taller than those at Le Madrigal and asked what we wanted to drink. “A glass of that nice Bordeaux,” Laurie said. I said I’d have the same.

  The waiter left, and I said, “I don’t usually drink at lunch. It makes me sleepy.”

  “One glass of wine isn’t really drinking,” she said. “So tell me, why was Toby Kraft so secretive about Max Edison? Were they bad boys together? Did they convey tommy guns in violin cases?”

  “Toby implied that he used to be mixed up in something, years ago.”

  “These days, there are criminals everywhere I look.” She gave me a brief, rueful smile.

  “How did Stewart persuade you to marry him?”

  “The old-fashioned way,” she said. “The rat chased me until I fell in love with him.” She described an aggressive long-distance courtship made up of telephone calls, deliveries of orchids and expensive clothes, and frequent visits. Hatch had promised her a busy, interesting life: trips to New York and Europe, civic involvement at home.

  “I thought I’d be able to join these commissions and boards and panels he was talking about. It sounded like a great life, keeping busy and doing good works.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “None of it happened. Stewart went out of town by himself. I couldn’t get on committees because I didn’t know enough about Edgerton. Besides that, Stewart wanted a son right away. Not just a baby, a son. His grandfather, Carpenter, set up this complicated family trust that keeps passing the money to a firstborn male child, like something out of the Middle Ages. Eventually, I realized that he married me to give him an heir and impress his friends, and that was that.”

  The details of the extraordinary trust were so complicated that I forgot most of them as soon as they were out of her mouth. What I retained was that Cobden Hatch, Stewart’s father, had modified its conditions so that evidence of criminal behavior eliminated the possibility of inheritance. Apparently his black-sheep brother had embarrassed the family.

  The waiter lowered our plates to the table.

  “In other words,” Laurie said, “if Stewart is convicted of embezzlement and tax fraud and whatever, Cobbie gets it all. And as if that weren’t reason enough for my darling husband to refuse me a divorce, or to demand custody if I manage to get one, his grandfather released control of the trust to whoever is the heir on January first of next year.”

  “You have no doubts that Stewart is guilty?”

  “None.”

  “I don’t get it. He was risking everything.”

  “You don’t know Stewart. Whatever he did, he did out of state, through phony companies with bank accounts in the West Indies. He’s still sure he’ll walk away free and clear.”

  “But why would he do it in the first place?”

  “He’s greedy and impatient, and he wants everything now. And I bet he l
oved the idea of rubbing his grandfather’s nose in the dirt. Stewart’s into revenge in a big way.”

  Laurie concentrated on the other side of her fish and lifted the entire fillet off the small, white armature of bone. “I wish I were like your friend Ashleigh. In ten years, she’ll be running her own law practice. As far as a career is concerned, my life is over. The only real purpose I have in life is raising Cobbie, and Stewart is going to do his damndest to take him away from me.”

  “The truth is, Ashleigh undoubtedly wishes she were more like you. When most men look at her, they think about carrying her back to the cave. When they look at you, they feel like groveling at your feet.”

  “Imagine how wonderful that must be.” Laurie grinned across the table. “Tell me about Cherry Street. Tell me about your mother.”

  During the rest of our drive, Laurie indulged me by recounting the miseries following her father’s death. Her mother married a movie producer in Bel Air, an acquaintance of D’Lency’s, and what she had hoped would represent security became an incarceration. Pathologically jealous, the producer refused to let her leave his house unless she was accompanied by one of his female assistants. Because he did not trust his domestic help, he fired them, then fired their replacements until he was left with a single housekeeper too old and embittered to be anything but his watchdog. Laurie’s mother began to drink during the day. The producer sent his stepdaughter to a Catholic girls’ school notorious for its discipline, and one day, while searching through her dresser drawers, discovered a film canister packed with marijuana.

  He dispatched her to a private residential facility. For six months, Laurie shared a room with a sixteen-year-old actress and was visited by tutors, counselors, psychiatrists, and the actress’s drug dealers. When she returned home, she found her mother ramming clothes into suitcases. The producer had begun divorce proceedings and rented them a small house on the edge of Hancock Park.

  They scraped along on the producer’s support payments. Laurie went to John Burroughs High and did her best to care for her mother, who slid pints of vodka behind the toilet, under seat cushions, and anywhere else she thought they might go undiscovered. She died the summer after Laurie’s high school graduation. Laurie put herself through Berkeley with the help of scholarships and student jobs.

  “And now my tale is done, because coming up on our left is the V.A. Hospital.”

  47

  The drive curved toward a distant hill, where a structure the size of a federal office building rose above oaks and beech trees. In the middle distance, men in shirtsleeves or bathrobes sat at picnic tables and strolled across the lawn, some of them accompanied by nurses. The stone-colored beeches sent tall shadows across the parking lot.

  Inside, the scale of the building shrank to a narrow hallway leading to an open counter, a couple of pebble-glass doors, and a set of elevators. Everything had been painted government green, and the memory of disinfectant hung in the air.

  “Where is Goya when you need him?” Laurie said.

  A clerk too old for his smear of a goatee and ponytail leaned on the counter. “You wanted?”

  I told him which patient we wanted to see.

  He thought it over. “E-D-I-S-O-N, as in light bulb?”

  “M-A-X,” I said. “As in ‘to the.’ ”

  On the fourth floor, a lanky attendant in green trousers and tunic had tilted his chair against the wall, knit his hands behind his head, and closed his eyes outside a darkened room where a dozen men were slouched in front of a television set. When Laurie Hatch and I came up to him, he dropped his hands and shot out of the chair. He was at least six-seven and skinny, almost gaunt, like many very tall men. In a backcountry accent, he said, “You lookin’ for someone, Miss, or can I he’p you in some othuh way?”

  Laurie told him we wanted to talk to Mr. Edison.

  “Max? He’s in the TEE-vee rahm heah. I’ll tell him he has comp’ny.”

  The attendant moved into the flickering darkness. Laurie whispered, “TEE-vee rahm.”

  “Like CD-ROM,” I said.

  A few seconds later, a small, compact man of about seventy with close-cropped white hair, a neat white beard, steel-rimmed spectacles, and an air of perfect composure emerged to take us in with a curious, lively attentiveness that admitted a flicker of surprise when he looked at me. He had that flawless, dark-chocolate skin that goes unwrinkled, apart from a few crow’s-feet and some lines across the forehead, until it weathers into a well-seasoned ninety. Max Edison could have been a retired doctor or a distinguished elderly jazz musician. He also could have been a great many other things. The Jolly Green Giant followed him out.

  “Mr. Edison?” I said.

  He stepped forward, examining us with the same wide-awake curiosity, then swiveled on the balls of his feet to look up at the Giant. “Jervis, I’m going to escort my visitors down the hall.”

  Edison brought us to a tiny room with a single desk and bookshelves crowded with files. “You people know who I am, but I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

  I introduced Laurie and myself, and he shook our hands without any sign of having recognized our names. His jeans had a sharp crease, his shirt was freshly pressed, and his boots gleamed. I wondered what it took to maintain standards like that in the V.A. Hospital. “I hope you came to tell me I won the lottery.”

  “No such luck,” I said. “I want to ask you about someone you might have known a long time ago.”

  “Why would that be?”

  “Let’s say it’s a family matter,” I said.

  His face relaxed, and he seemed to smile without quite smiling, as if I had confirmed whatever had been going through his mind.

  “Does the name Dunstan mean anything to you?”

  He crossed his arms over his chest, still smiling without smiling. “How did you learn I was out here?”

  “From someone who doesn’t want to be named,” I said. “When I asked him about this person you might have known, he wrote your name on a piece of paper.”

  “Water’s getting deeper and deeper,” Edison said. “I used to know a man who married a woman named Dunstan.”

  “That could be,” I said.

  “Will you stop beating around the bush?” Laurie said. “He obviously knows it was Toby Kraft.”

  Edison and I both looked at her, then at each other. We burst out laughing.

  “What?”

  “So much for that,” I said.

  “But you knew it was him.”

  “Man didn’t want to be named,” Edison said.

  “I spoiled your fun. I apologize. But I bet Mr. Edison could already tell us who we came here to talk about, and I only have about an hour before I have to drive back to town.”

  “Could you?” I asked Edison. “Do you already know?”

  “Why don’t you tell me, so I won’t have to guess?”

  “Edward Rinehart.”

  Edison looked at the door, then, with less than his usual composure, back at me. “We should grab some fresh air. It’s so pretty under those trees, you can almost forget where you are.”

  “Toby Kraft. I called him ‘Mr. Inside,’ because that’s what he was.”

  Max Edison faced the tall beeches and the long green lawn from the end of the bench across our picnic table. He had slipped dark glasses over his eyes, and his legs in their knife-creased jeans extended out to the side, crossed at the ankle. One elbow was propped on the surface of the table. He looked as though he had joined us for a moment before moving on.

  “When I got back from the war, I had a leg injury that kept me from doing heavy work, so instead of one big job I had a bunch of little ones. Swept floors and washed windows. Ran numbers. Driving jobs. After a while, some people decided I was reliable.”

  Edison turned to me. “Know what I mean?”

  “You did what you were supposed to do, and you kept your mouth shut.”

  “Toby Kraft asked me to help out in the pawnshop three days a week. I knew he was
doing more business out back than up front. I’m not accusing him of anything, understand, but when Toby gave you my name he knew I’d have to say some of this. If I’m going to talk about Mr. Edward Rinehart, he’s in there, too.”

  I nodded.

  Edison turned the dark glasses to Laurie. “You don’t have to hear any more than you want to, Mrs. Hatch.”

  She said, “At this point, Max, you’d have to drive me away with a whip.”

  He smiled, uncrossed his legs, and swung in to face us. He put his arms on the table and folded his hands together. “Every town the size of Edgerton has a Mr. Inside. He can tell you where to go if you want something, and the name of the guy who can help you get it and who to see afterward.”

  “Valuable guy,” I said.

  “Mr. Inside is like the post office. His lines go out. Back and forth down those lines moves information. Take on that role, you better keep the wheels greased. Outside you and your circle, other people are taking a steady interest.”

  “The police?”

  He shook his head. “The force gets taken care of way down the line. They don’t want you in jail, they want you out on the street where you can do some good.”

  “Then who are these other people?” Laurie said.

  Edison flattened his hands on the table and tilted his head to look up at the great beeches. “About a year after I started part-timing for Toby, a fool named Clothard Spelvin came through from the office. They called him Clothhead because his brainpower could just about hold its own against a dishtowel. Light-skinned black man, but an ugly son of a bitch. Excuse me, Mrs. Hatch.”

  “No problem.”

  “Thank you. Clothhead said, ‘Max, you don’t work here no more. A man wants to see you.’ I went in and asked Toby, ‘Who does that dumbbell work for? I’m supposed to go with him.’ Toby said, ‘You’ll be all right, it’s all set up.’ He took us through the storage room and slid open the back door. A big Cadillac was out in the alley. Dark blue. Enough wax on the chassis to shine at the stroke of midnight during an eclipse of the moon. Clothhead gave me the keys and told me, Drive north on old Highway 4. Just past the town line, he pointed at a roadhouse. The place was empty except for a goon up front at the bar and one man sitting way at the back. That man was my new boss, Mr. Edward Rinehart. For the next seven years, all hours of the day and night, I drove Mr. Rinehart wherever he wanted to go.”