Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  “My mother would have agreed with you. Now, here are some from the Hatch folder.” I showed her the photographs of Carpenter showing off his new car and Ellen’s graduation.

  “Who are these people? Stewart’s grandparents?”

  “Right.”

  “She was a nice-looking girl, wasn’t she? On the other hand, he looks like an excellent source of ham steaks. Look at those soon-to-be ponderous thighs.”

  I pulled out the image of bow-tied Cordwainer Hatch peering from beneath his bangs.

  Laurie bent forward. She took a swallow from her nearly empty glass and looked back at me. “Is that you? It can’t be. You weren’t even born when this was taken.”

  “This is the black sheep of the Hatch family,” I said. “Stewart’s Uncle Cordwainer.”

  “He looked like you.”

  “I look like him. Laurie, back when the first submissions were coming in, did you see any of these pictures?”

  Her lower lip tucked under her front teeth. “I honestly don’t remember.”

  “Rachel Milton did. She told me to look for them.”

  “I don’t understand.” Her eyes showed nothing but innocent confusion. “Did Rachel say that I had seen them?”

  “No. Just that you could have.”

  “Maybe I did. I wouldn’t have paid much attention. I didn’t even know you then.”

  “Stewart knew who I was the second he saw me. Cordwainer was supposed to have died before Stewart was born, and I don’t imagine he ever saw any pictures of his disgraced uncle while he was growing up, so he didn’t even know what Cordwainer looked like until he collected the family pictures for the exhibition. He couldn’t have missed the resemblance between his uncle and Howard Dunstan.”

  Laurie shook her head. Her hair sifted over her cheek, and she brushed it back. “I have to say …” She shook her head again. “I think I need another drink. How about you?”

  I propped my head against the cushion. I felt completely uncertain. A voice in my mind said: I want to be uncertain.

  Laurie circled back into the room and moved around the table rather than sliding in over my legs. She sat down about a yard away and took a swallow from her amber, ice-filled glass. “I’m trying to figure out what’s going on with all these pictures. Your aunts took Stewart’s pictures as ransom, but why would Stewart hide theirs?” She moved Cordwainer in his bangs and bow tie next to me in my striped T-shirt. “Oh. Because the black sheep uncle was your father?”

  I picked up the studio portrait of Howard Dunstan and placed it beside the other two. “Does anything else occur to you?”

  She leaned forward, looked at Howard, then at me.

  “If you want, I can show you some other pictures of Cordwainer.”

  She pushed herself back into the sofa and smiled at the nice white emptiness in front of us. “I don’t have to see any more. I guess I understand why Stewart wanted to squirrel these away.”

  “I think he gave my aunts a lot of money,” I said.

  She laughed. “Stewart isn’t exactly an egalitarian, you know. He would not be overjoyed by a blood connection between his family and the Dunstans. In fact, he’d do everything he could to hide it.” An idea moved into her eyes, and she edged toward me, radiating conviction. “Your aunts knew it right from the beginning!”

  “I guess so, but they claim they never met Edward Rinehart. Even if they did, how would they know who he was?”

  “It doesn’t matter how! They knew! Of course they could never tell Star—it was their secret. And Stewart tried to have you run out of town before you could even begin to learn anything.”

  “But why would he give my aunts a fortune for three old houses? I can’t believe he cares that much about his grandmother’s reputation.”

  “Stewart’s a snob. He likes being a high and mighty Hatch. He’d spend a fortune to protect that.”

  “I feel like I came to the end of something, only it didn’t end.”

  Laurie twisted sideways, drew up a leg, and slid her elbow over the back of the sofa. She propped her head on her hand and waited for more.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I told her, having left everything crucial unsaid.

  “Say something about Hatches coming at you with knives.”

  I swallowed watery whiskey and slivers of ice. “In all honesty, Laurie, if I told you everything, you’d think I was either lying or crazy.”

  One of her knees floated above the cushion, and her calf slanted down over the edge of the sofa. She was leaning sideways, her chin on her hand. Evenly suspended, compassionate determination shone from her face.

  “You met your father, this Edward Rinehart. Cordwainer Hatch. Am I right? And he attacked you with a knife. Was it in Buxton Place?”

  “Boy, you’re smart,” I said.

  “I pay attention. Where did it happen?”

  “A couple of places.” I smiled at her.

  “You went to a couple of places with your father. And, for reasons yet to be explained, the gentleman tried to do away with you.”

  “Laurie,” I said. “I’m really sorry, but you’re not going to get anywhere.”

  “Since you are here, he did not manage to do away with you. Should I assume that you did away with him?”

  I said as much as I could. “He did away with himself when he found out that he was Howard Dunstan’s son. That’s all I can tell you.”

  She did not move. “Somewhere in or around Edgerton is the dead body of Cordwainer Hatch. Eventually, this body will be discovered. Not long afterward, it’ll be identified.”

  “That won’t happen,” I said. “Believe me.”

  Her hand sank away from her chin; her forearm slipped down the back of the sofa; her knee moved to the edge of the cushion. In a paradoxical form of rejection, Laurie’s face came nearer to mine. “Everything you say is so vague. You want me to believe you, but you get less and less believable. Trust me enough to tell me where you went, at least.”

  Hostility I barely knew I felt made me reckless. Laurie Hatch hung before me like an untrustworthy angel, and at that moment, more than I wished to open to her the secret parts of my life, I wanted to repay her for being untrustworthy.

  “I’ll do better than that,” I said. “I’ll show you.”

  “Show me? I don’t want to go anywhere now, Ned.”

  I held out my hand, unable to stop myself from making an irrevocable mistake. “Put down the glass and take my hand.”

  Slowly, without taking her eyes from mine, Laurie placed her glass on the table. I thought that she had not been so unable to read a man’s intentions since the days with Morry Burger. By the time she moved in with Dr. and Mrs. Deering, Laurie’s peripheral vision had taken in everything on both sides and behind her, too. Ever since, she had been able to see around corners and the corners beyond those corners.

  If you want to know about me, I thought, you’d better know about this.

  Laurie Hatch grasped my hand, and with the usual sense of dropping through a sudden hole in the earth I pulled her into what I already knew she would never be able to accept. We came to rest on the corner of Commercial Avenue and Paddlewheel Road, a short distance from the future offices of C. Clayton Creech. The brownstones were still single-family houses with private access to the park, which was enclosed within a tall iron gate. Directly across the avenue, a Model T Ford and a truck with slat sidewalls stood at the curb beside a construction site.

  Scaffolding encrusted the first two floors of a structure ascending into a skeleton of girders. Men crawled along the scaffolding and disappeared into the regions behind it. At the front of the unfinished building, a man in a derby hat yelled at two workmen next to a vat of cement; directly across the gated tip of the park on our side of the avenue, two men unloaded timber from a horse-drawn wagon. A man in a boater and a seersucker suit that did not disguise his resemblance to either President Garfield or Luciano Pavarotti, depending on your frame of reference, strutted toward the frame from be
hind the parked vehicles. It was a mild, slightly overcast afternoon in what felt like mid-September.

  About ten feet from Laurie and me, the photographer who would freeze this moment watched his composition move into being from behind a tripod and a bellows camera the size of an orange crate. One arm held his flash and the other the black veil attached to his camera. He looked like a magician.

  Laurie sank to the sidewalk, pressing her free hand to her forehead. I pulled her to her feet. You wanted answers? I thought. Look around. Her face had an unhealthy shine, and her eyes were dazed. “Try not to throw up,” I said.

  “I never throw up.” She lifted her head. “Where are we?”

  “Paddlewheel Road and Commercial Avenue,” I said. “In 1929. Take a look.”

  The elements of the scene moved toward their defining moment. Garfield-Pavarotti rounded the corner and came to a halt behind the foreman, whose bellow at the men just now trundling their wheelbarrows away from the vat could barely be heard over the din from the building. The photographer ducked beneath the black veil. The sawmill hands finished unloading the wagon, got their arms under the ends of a dozen two-by-fours, and began their journey across the avenue. The cement workers bent like pit ponies to their task. The foreman crossed his arms, pushed out his chest, and spread his legs in a posture of command. The heavyweight in the seersucker suit crossed his arms, pushed out his chest, and spread his legs to keep his balance. Under the black veil, the photographer spread his legs and leaned into his viewfinder. The workmen advanced into the frame and turned their eyes to the girders. A row of flashbulbs exploded with a yellow flare and a sharp, percussive pop!

  Laurie jumped. The wheelbarrows rolled up a plank runway to the scaffold; the two-by-fours passed over the curb. The spectator in the boater navigated around the foreman, and the foreman bawled at the pit ponies. The photographer emerged from his veil and arched his back.

  “Ned, I don’t want … Ned, please,” Laurie whispered.

  The enormous room on Blueberry Lane took shape around us. Laurie reeled around the coffee table and sank to her knees a foot from the sofa. She doubled over and rested her head on the carpet, like Mr. Michael Anscombe in his last moments. I knelt beside her and stroked her back. She waved me away.

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  “No.” She crept forward, levered herself onto the sofa, and went limp. After about a minute, she sat up and flopped against the cushion. “I almost broke my golden rule and puked all over the carpet.”

  “How does your head feel?”

  “Attached.” She tilted forward, picked up her glass, then sank back and held the glass to her forehead. Her eyes closed. She stretched out the parallel lines of her legs. The glass descended to her mouth. “I want to see that picture again.”

  Laurie hitched forward and fumbled through the photographs. Her eyelids looked swollen. “Two minutes ago, we were standing right there.”

  “Any closer, we would have been in it,” I said.

  “I don’t understand this, and for sure I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t like it much, either,” I said.

  Laurie pushed herself back and straightened up. “But you did it. You took me there. That isn’t right.”

  “It isn’t right or wrong,” I said. “But you sure could say it’s irregular. Unexpected.”

  “Unexpected!” Her face blazed a smooth, bright red. “Why didn’t you tell me what you were going to do?”

  “Would you have believed me?”

  Observant insightful intelligence moved back into her eyes. She was fully present again. That she felt as though she had the flu meant nothing. She saw it all, even the anger to which I had been blind. “Do you do that a lot?”

  “I do that as seldom as possible. I’ll probably never have to do it again.”

  “Is this something you inherited from Cordwainer Hatch?”

  “From his father,” I said.

  “I can’t deal with any more of this tonight.”

  “Whatever you say.” I began pushing the photographs into their folders. My mind felt as though it had been clamped in a vise and beaten with a hammer. Laurie drew her knees under her chin and watched me leave. After I made it through her door and into the Taurus, I looked at my watch. My thirty-fifth birthday had disappeared into history. On the way back to town, I had to pull off the highway and pass out for an hour.

  124

  Officer Treuhaft monitored my progress around the dead fountain as though waiting for me to bolt.

  “Looks like I have guests,” I said.

  “Captain Mullan and Lieutenant Rowley are waiting for you, sir.”

  “What do they want to talk about?”

  Treuhaft blinked. “I believe it’s related to your visit to Headquarters this evening, sir.”

  “Makes sense to me. Have you been here long?”

  “Maybe two minutes.”

  Inside, the night clerk waved me toward the desk. He leaned on his counter and spoke almost without moving his lips. “Two cops went up to your room. If you want to split, the back door’s that way.” He extended his little finger and pointed past the desk to stairs descending to a narrow hallway.

  I gave him a five-dollar bill and put the Lovecraft book and the folders on the counter. “Would you hold these things for me?”

  The clerk shrugged, and the counter was clear.

  When I walked into my room, Lieutenant Rowley uncoiled from the side of the bed. Captain Mullan gave me a weary nod from the chair at the near end of the table. “Please be seated, Mr. Dunstan.” He gestured at the chair across from him.

  My fingers met the little calligraphic arc of P.D. 10/17/58, and I heard my mother telling me If I could sing the way that man played alto, Neddie, I’d stop time forever …

  “Describe your actions before your visit to Headquarters.”

  Robert had been busy.

  “I drove around.”

  “Drove around.” Rowley thrust his hip against the table. “Did our travels take us to Ellendale?”

  I heard Star say, At first, I wasn’t even sure I liked that group. It was a quartet from the West Coast, and I was never all that crazy about West Coast jazz. Then this alto player who looked like a stork pushed himself off the curve of the piano and stuck his horn in his mouth and started playing “These Foolish Things.” And oh, Neddie, it was like …

  “I believe they did,” I said.

  “About ten-thirty P.M., Stewart Hatch turned up in the emergency room at Lawndale Hospital,” Mullan said. “He claims that he surprised you in an intimate situation with Mrs. Hatch, and you attacked him with a knife.”

  “Are you carrying a knife?” Rowley asked.

  “Mr. Hatch further claims that during the ensuing struggle, you dislocated his shoulder and otherwise assaulted him. He wishes to bring charges.”

  … going to some new place you’d never heard about, but where you felt at home right away. He just touched that melody for a second before he lifted off and began climbing and climbing, and everything he played linked up, one step after another, like a story …

  “I don’t care what Stewart Hatch does,” I said. “It won’t work. He’s telling his story backwards.”

  “Mr. Hatch dislocated your shoulder?”

  “Let’s see the knife, Dunstan,” Rowley said.

  “I don’t have one.” I told them about going to Ellendale and tussling with a drunken Stewart Hatch. “Finally, he reached into the knife drawer and came out with a paring knife. He said something like, ‘I was looking for something a little more impressive.’ Then he rushed me, and I yanked him off his feet and dislocated his shoulder. I kicked him in the side, too, because by that point I was not in a good mood. After that, I threw him out of the house. He rammed into my rental and took off for Lawndale at about a hundred miles an hour. I’m surprised he’s so stupid. His wife saw the whole thing.”

  “His alcohol level was four times over the limit,” Mullan said. “By the way, acc
ording to the officer who took Mrs. Hatch’s statement, the word her husband used when he saw the paring knife was ‘imposing,’ not ‘impressive.’ ‘I was looking for something a little more imposing.’ That’s a nice touch.”

  “Captain,” Rowley said, “they cooked this story up between them. Mr. Hatch caught them in bed, and Dunstan pulled a knife.”

  “The officer who questioned Mrs. Hatch was shown a garbage bag loaded with broken plates. I think we can dismiss Mr. Hatch’s accusations.”

  “You went out there already?”

  “We can move pretty quick, when we want to.”

  Neddie! I heard my mother say. It was like hearing the whole world open up in front of me. It was like going to heaven.

  A chain-saw noise came from Rowley’s throat. “This guy is all over the place. Wherever we go, there he is. Nobody’s seen Joe Staggers in two days, and we know Staggers was after him. What do you think happened to Staggers?”

  “So far, no one’s filed a Missing Persons.”

  “Dunstan hands out alibis, and women back him up. Mr. Hatch’s troubles are going to blow away, and before long, Dunstan’s going to blow away, too. Then it’ll be business as usual. Who do you want in your corner, Captain?”

  Mullan clasped his hands on his belly and regarded the ceiling of my room. “All in all, Lieutenant, I think you can go home for the night. Tell Officer Treuhaft he can leave, too.”

  “Think it over, Captain.”

  “Thank you for your assistance, Lieutenant. We shall see each other tomorrow.”

  Rowley’s dead eyes moved from Mullan to me and back to Mullan. “Up to you, Captain.” He slammed the door behind him.

  Mullan regarded me with the same opaque, detached gaze he had trained on my ceiling. “You’re a strange man, Mr. Dunstan.”

  “So I’ve heard,” I said.

  Mullan’s bleak smile told me only that Robert had been unimaginably reckless. “I assumed you would be waiting to hear from me.”

  “I am.”

  Mullan did not move so much as a centimeter. Even the wintry smile stayed in place. “Do you remember my mentioning an anonymous telephone call from someone accusing Earl Sawyer of a number of homicides?”