Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  Mullan was completely unhurried. “I remember that name.”

  “Mr. Dunstan heard a filthy lie from Toby Kraft. I call it a filthy lie because that’s what it was, and Toby Kraft knows it.” She shivered. “The way people carried on, you’d think I was a criminal, instead of someone who helped little babies find good homes.”

  Mullan gave me a weary look. “Can you help me out here?”

  “My mother thought Hazel Jansky abducted one of her children. Even if I thought she was right, I wouldn’t have done this.”

  Mullan closed his eyes, opened the rear door, and waved me in. He and Treuhaft got in the front seat. “Merchants Hotel,” Mullan said. “Dunstan, why don’t you save yourself travel time and move into the place?”

  “I like the Brazen Head.”

  “You should know a few things about the night clerk,” Mullan said. Treuhaft gave an evil chuckle.

  When we pulled up in front of the hotel, Mullan told Treuhaft to ask the desk clerk if he had seen a man of my description leaving the hotel at any time past 1:00 A.M., and if so, to give an approximate time. “I’m sick of waking up Assistant District Attorney Ashton with inquiries about Mr. Dunstan’s whereabouts. If the clerk didn’t see him leave, we’ll take it from there.”

  Mullan rested the back of his head on the seat. “I don’t suppose you started that fire after all?”

  “It was going before I left Ashleigh’s room,” I said. “The man who lived across the hall from me used to fall asleep smoking in his chair. Last night, he almost burned the place down.”

  “This fire was no accident,” Mullan said. “Our first call said there was a broken basement window in back of the house. Someone crawled in and poured an inflammatory over everything in sight. Then he crawled back out and torched the place. We have to wait for the investigators’ report, but that’s what it’s going to say.”

  “Joe Staggers?”

  “I’ll check on him, but Staggers wants to deal with you in person. Have you seen any other characters hanging around the building?”

  “Well,” I said, “after the break-in at the Cobden Building, Frenchy La Chapelle looked like he was following me back to the house.”

  Treuhaft let himself into the driver’s seat, and the car sagged under his weight. “The desk man says Mr. Dunstan left the hotel around one forty-five.”

  Mullan nodded. “How does a recent visitor to our city become acquainted with Frenchy La Chapelle?”

  Treuhaft swung his head toward Captain Mullan.

  “My Uncle Clark pointed him out when he and Cassie Little visited Clyde Prentiss at St. Ann’s. All I’m saying is that he watched me go up Chester Street to the rooming house.”

  “Frenchy followed you home from Merchants Park?”

  “It looked like it,” I said.

  “Can you think of any reason why one of our favorite dirtbags should take an interest in you, Mr. Dunstan?”

  “None at all.”

  Mullan’s face stretched into a yawn. “Officer Treuhaft, Mr. Dunstan and I are going to step out for a private word.”

  Mullan strolled past the hotel’s entrance and wagged his head toward the polished stone, and I leaned back against the facade. A thick smell of smoke drifted toward us. Mullan sighed and buttoned his suit jacket. He thrust his hands into his pockets and looked down at his shoes. He sighed again.

  “You have something on your mind,” I said.

  Mullan turned halfway around and looked across Commercial Avenue. A solid column of smoke darkened the air above Chester Street. “I have been very good to you, Mr. Dunstan. You keep popping up at crime scenes, you are accused of one thing after another, but I have not let the system run over you.”

  “I know,” I said. “And I’m grateful.”

  “Do you have any kind of professional relationship with Assistant District Attorney Ashton?”

  “I do not.”

  “Are you an employee of any federal agency?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have a professional association with any law enforcement body?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “Do you work as a private detective?”

  “I write software programs for a company called Vision, Inc. I’m not in the CIA, the FBI, the Treasury Department, or any other outfit that might be interested in Stewart Hatch.”

  “I assume you’d have no objections to my checking you for a wire.”

  I told him to go ahead. He patted my chest and back and knelt to run his hands down my legs. “Open your jacket.” I held my jacket away from my sides, and Mullan felt under my arms and around the back of my collar.

  “All right,” he said. “Maybe you are a civilian who happened to meet an assistant D.A. from Kentucky on the way to Edgerton. And maybe you stumbled into a friendship with Hatch’s wife. I guess that’s almost possible. But no matter what the hell you are, I want to say a few things, and I want you to listen to them. I don’t like Lieutenant Rowley. Cops like Rowley give us all a bad name. What did he do, hit you?”

  “He caught me off guard and punched me in the stomach,” I said. “Then he knocked me down and kicked me. He wanted me to get a bus out of town, and I didn’t cooperate. After that, he stole a hundred bucks from the money I turned in at headquarters.”

  “You didn’t file a complaint.”

  “I didn’t think a complaint would turn out too well.”

  “You could have come to me, Mr. Dunstan. But so be it. This morning, you implied that Lieutenant Rowley has an arrangement with Stewart Hatch. Most likely, he does. When I was a patrolman, the captain of detectives and the chief of police lived in houses Cobden Hatch paid for. I bought my own house, Mr. Dunstan. The only money I get comes in salary checks from the City of Edgerton, but I do live here, and if you’re not what you claim to be, you’ll crawl on your hands and knees over a mile of broken glass before you squirm your way into another job.”

  “My mother’s funeral is on Wednesday,” I said. “The day after that is my birthday. On Friday, I’ll go back to New York. You’ll never see me again.”

  Mullan spun away and went back to the police car.

  77

  The remaining firefighters aimed their hoses at the smoldering mound beneath the rows of concrete blocks. A corner post jutted up into the smoke like a used kitchen match. Somewhere down there, whatever was left of Otto Bremen waited to be unearthed. A photographer set off a heartless flash of light that exposed the remains of a shattered wall, a picture frame, a twisted metal lamp. Side by side in front of a fire engine, Helen Janette and Mr. Tite numbly watched flames poke out of the wreckage.

  At the sight of me, Helen Janette quivered and stepped back. Mr. Tite moved between us. “What are we supposed to do now? Got an answer for that?”

  “Someone will find you a place to stay,” I said. “You’re not the first people to be burned out of their house.”

  Enraged, Helen Janette moved beside him. “You should be in jail, you lunatic! Burn me out of house and home.”

  “I’m not the person who burned you out of house and home, Mrs. Janette.” She muttered something I could not hear. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “If you think you have to know. I woke up and smelled smoke. I went out of my room. There was fire all over the floor and fire running up the stairs. You could hardly see for the smoke. I banged on Mr. Tite’s door, and we ran down the hall to help Miss Carpenter, Miss Burgess, and Mrs. Feldman out the back door. Mrs. Feldman almost got me killed looking for her fur coat, which is the last time I do a favor for that woman. The girls climbed out through their window, and we all came around and tried to wake up Mr. Bremen. One of the neighbors must have called the Fire Department, because the trucks came about two minutes later. By then the whole house was burning.”

  “It started in the basement,” I said.

  “You know where it started,” she said. “What I want to know is, where am I going to stay? All my cash is down in that hole, along with
my credit cards and my checkbook.”

  “Some money recently came to me,” I said. “Four hundred and eighty dollars. I’ll split it with you. You and Mr. Tite can get a room for the night and buy some clothes in the morning.”

  “You’re joking.”

  I reached for my wallet and counted out $240.

  “We don’t take blood money,” said Mr. Tite.

  “Speak for yourself, Frank.” She held out her hand, and I put the bills onto her palm. “I’m not too proud to accept charity.”

  “I’m glad I can help,” I said. “And I’d be grateful for whatever you can tell me about the night I was born.”

  She thought about it for a couple of seconds. “For an even three hundred. Clothes cost money.”

  I counted out another three twenties. “You were supposed to bring out a baby that night. But everything went crazy during the storm, and the baby died.”

  “That baby was born dead.”

  “I know. But then my mother unexpectedly delivered twins, and the second one came out so easily it might as well have been the placenta.”

  “Came out with the placenta. It was so dark, I didn’t know what was going on until I caught it in my hands. I’m going to give you a good home, I said to myself.”

  “Through Toby Kraft. Who set you up in the rooming-house business after you served your time.”

  “What the hell are you people talking about?” Mr. Tite said. “There was no other baby, the night of the storm.”

  “You don’t know,” she said. “I never told you, but now I can say what I like. I served my time.” She looked back at me, her eyes dark with anger. “We had a system. Our system rescued innocent babies from terrible homes. The judge admitted that.”

  “It was for the good of the children,” said Mr. Tite. I almost laughed out loud.

  “You took the second baby from the delivery room in the middle of the storm. Where did you put him?”

  “Same place I put you. Down the hall, in the nursery.”

  “Only that didn’t happen,” said Mr. Tite.

  Helen Janette whirled on him. “What jail did they put you in, Frank? I forget the name.” She turned back to me. “I cleaned him up in the dark, same as you. In the nursery, there was a cradle marked Dunstan, and I found it with my flashlight, and I picked you up and put him in it. Then I brought you back to your mother. ‘I had twins,’ she said, ‘where’s the other one?’ I told her it was only the placenta, and then the lights went back on. I made my report to the doctor. I told him what your mother said, so he wouldn’t be surprised later. Then I went back to the nursery. Nearly died of a heart attack. The Dunstan cradle was empty. I thought I put it in the wrong cradle by mistake, but the ones on either side were empty, too.”

  “Someone else grabbed the kid?” said Mr. Tite.

  “It didn’t get up and walk out by itself. I think it was that Mrs. Landon, the one who had the stillbirth. I think she snuck out to the nursery, picked up the baby, and hid it in her bedclothes. She checked out of the hospital as soon as the storm was over. I didn’t realize it was probably her until the next day. Her records said her address was the Hotel Paris, but she checked out of there the same morning she left the hospital.”

  “You tried to find her,” I said.

  “I was thinking about the health of that baby.”

  She had been thinking about the health of her wallet. And then I thought: Maybe Robert did get out of the cradle and leave by himself.

  “If you burned down my house to get back at me, it was all for nothing.”

  She tugged at the sleeve of Mr. Tite’s robe and led him to a policeman seated at the wheel of a squad car. After a few words, the officer let them in, turned on his lights, and drove down the street toward me. Helen Janette was looking straight ahead. I followed their tail lights as far as Word Street.

  A minute or two after entering the first of the lanes, I got the same prickly feeling I’d had before seeing Frenchy La Chapelle’s imitation of an innocent pedestrian. I glanced over my shoulder at an empty lane and shuttered buildings. I began walking faster as I turned into Leather. Either one of Captain Mullan’s dirtbags had taken an interest in me, or recent events had made me unreasonably jumpy. The latter sounded closer to reality.

  On the other hand, Frenchy had trailed me to the rooming house. Maybe he had set the fire and discovered that he had killed the wrong person. Where Fish crossed Mutton, I came to a halt beside a burned-out street lamp and looked back at a dark, dimensionless well that could have hidden a dozen men. A few cars swished along Word Street. In a nearby lane, a man hawked up sputum. I heard no other sounds, but the back of my neck still prickled.

  Fish Lane intersected Raspberry and Button before meeting the fifty feet of Wax leading to Veal Yard. On an ordinary night, this distance would have been no more than a short, not uninteresting walk; with the specter of Frenchy La Chapelle lurking behind me, it felt like a wasteland. I quickened my step and moved into the next length of the narrow lane.

  A nearly inaudible sound like a footfall came from behind me. If I had been walking along Commercial Avenue in daylight, I don’t think I would have heard it. In the confines of Fish Lane, the little sound made me spin around. I could see only empty buildings and the dull reflection of starlight on the cobbles. Joe Staggers had not stopped looking for me, I remembered.

  I ran the rest of the way to Raspberry, darted across the intersection of the lanes, and raced toward the hovering gray haze marking the crossing of Fish and Button. Although I could not hear footsteps at my back, I felt the approach of a pursuing figure. I shot across Button and heard another delicate footfall. My heart nearly burst. I raced up the lane and glanced over my shoulder a second before I swung into Wax.

  I don’t know what I saw. The image vanished too quickly for me to be certain I had seen anything at all. I thought I saw the tails of a dark overcoat whisking into an unseen passage. At the time, I could think only that the old adversary I called Mr. X had just slipped out of sight. My blood turned to glue. When I could move again, I sprinted down the fifty feet of Wax Lane, clattered into Veal Yard, and burst through the front door of the Brazen Head. A bald night clerk with a hatchet tattooed above his right ear looked up from a paperback.

  I tried to imitate a person in a normal state of mind as I walked across the lobby. The night man kept his eyes on me until I started up the stairs. I came to the second floor, pulled out my key, and opened the door to room 215. A lamp I had not switched on shed a yellow nimbus over the end of the bed and the worn green carpet. Seated beside the round table with his ankles crossed before him, Robert closed the covers of From Beyond and smiled at me.

  78

  “Old Dad was a pretty lousy writer, wasn’t he? Don’t you get the feeling he believed all this stuff?”

  “I hope you didn’t set that fire.”

  “Why would I?” Robert said. “Any fatalities?”

  “One. An old man named Otto Bremen.”

  “I don’t suppose anyone is going to miss him very much.”

  “I was supposed to die in that fire, and you know it.”

  Robert cocked an ankle on his knee, dropped his chin into his hand, and gazed at me with an expression of absolute innocence.

  “You knew the building was going to burn down. You said it was a good thing I moved out.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  “Couldn’t you have told me what was going to happen? You let a man die.”

  “I wish I had twenty-twenty foresight, but it isn’t that specific. I knew you’d be better off out of there, and that’s as far as it went.”

  I sat on the other side of the table. Irritatingly, Robert adjusted his chair and resumed the chin-on-hand, elbow-on-table posture. “You set me up to meet Ashleigh.”

  “The sweetie must have been thrilled by those documents.”

  “Yes,” I said. “When you want to put them back, they’ll be in Toby Kraft’s office safe.”

  “You don’t
want me to call on our little friend?” Robert was grinning. “Hatch won’t check his hiding place for a couple of days. He’s too secure to get worried.”

  “Why should you give a damn if Stewart Hatch goes to jail?”

  “Brother dear,” he said, “do you suspect me of manipulation?”

  Because right and left had not been reversed, the face across from me was as strange as it was familiar, and the strangeness contained a kind of rawness I thought other people had always seen in me.

  “I suspect you of manipulation, yes,” I said. “And I resent it. Enormously.”

  Robert took his hand from his chin and uncrossed his legs in an elaborate display of concern that suggested that I had missed the point. He placed his forearms on the table, knitted his hands together, and sent me a glance agleam with irony, as if to say that he and I had no need for such games.

  “Can you honestly say you’re not enormously attracted to Laurie Hatch? Haven’t you had fantasies about marrying her?”

  “You make me sick.”

  “Even someone like me would appreciate occasional access to a fortune.”

  “Laurie doesn’t get any money if her husband goes to jail. You should have done your homework.”

  Robert straightened up and took his arms off the table. “Let’s examine what happens if Stewart is convicted. Approximately twenty million dollars fall into the hands of little Cobden Carpenter Hatch. His mother has discretion over the entire sum. I know this goes against your puritanical instincts, but if you follow your own desires and marry Laurie, the rest of your life will be extraordinary.”

  “Unfortunately, it already is,” I said.

  “Doesn’t perfect freedom appeal to you?”

  “Marrying for money doesn’t sound like freedom to me. Just the opposite, in fact.”

  “Then forget the money and marry for love. You even like her son. In fact, you love him, too. It’s perfect.”

  “How do you come into this arrangement?”

  “You would agree to one condition.”

  “Which is?”

  Robert leaned back and spread his arms. “To share it with me. Once every couple of months, you go out on an errand, and I come back in your place. Eight hours later, twelve hours later, we do the same thing in reverse. No one would ever know, Laurie and Cobbie least of all.”