Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  “Sure,” I said.

  “That’s what makes you a strange fellow. I didn’t mention it.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “There’s too much going on.”

  “You wouldn’t be the fellow who placed that call, would you?”

  “I would not,” I said.

  “But the subject is of interest to you.”

  “I can’t deny that,” I said, feeling my way through the minefield Robert had laid.

  “At approximately nine o’clock P.M., you visited my office for the purpose of informing me that you suspected Earl Sawyer of being the man once known as Edward Rinehart.” He raised his eyebrows, as if for corroboration. I nodded. “That would make two people who wanted to talk to me about Earl Sawyer. I don’t believe in coincidence, Mr. Dunstan.”

  “I thought the police got anonymous tips all the time.”

  “Be nice if we did. This old man wouldn’t have to work so hard. All right, forget the call. Correct me if I’m wrong here. When we went to St. Ann’s, didn’t you refer to Clothard Spelvin? Clothhead?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with your memory,” I said. “I don’t suppose there ever has been.”

  “At Headquarters, you said your mother had given you Rinehart’s name.”

  His smile still looked like a map of the tundra, but he did not seem hostile. In a series of careful steps, Mullan was working up to something, and he had sent away Rowley and Treuhaft because it had to be kept between us. I had no idea what Robert had said to Mullan, and I could not afford to make a mistake. Nor did I have a hint of where Mullan was going.

  “Not long before she died,” I said.

  Mullan stretched out his legs and put his hands behind his head. “Let’s see if I have this straight. You got word that your mother had returned to Edgerton in ill health. How did that happen? Did one of her aunts call you in New York?”

  “Yes, but I was already on my way,” I said. “I had some vacation time, so I thought I’d hitchhike across the country. I know that sounds crazy, but the idea appealed to me. I was going to work my way to Illinois, visit my aunts, and fly back. Two days before my mother died, while the truck driver you talked to, Bob Mims, was taking me across Ohio, I…. I don’t know how this is going to sound to you.”

  Mullan said, “Give it a try.”

  “I had a strong feeling that she was having serious health problems, and that I had to get here in a hurry.”

  “Although your mother was not a resident of Edgerton.”

  “I knew she’d come home if she thought she was dying.”

  “You were driving across Ohio with Bob Mims. You got the strong feeling that your mother had come home because she thought she was dying.”

  “It sounds funny, but that’s what happened.”

  “Then what?”

  “Mims went off his route to drop me in front of the Motel Comfort, where I met Ashleigh Ashton, and she agreed to give me a ride here the next morning.”

  “When you reached Edgerton the following morning, you requested Assistant District Attorney Ashton to drop you at St. Ann’s Community. Not on Cherry Street. You must have had another strong feeling.”

  “You could put it that way. Captain Mullan, why are we talking about this?”

  “For a couple of reasons. Okay. You go to the ICU. You learn that your mother had a stroke. Her heart’s in bad shape. Deep down, you know she’s dying, but at least you got there in time to see her, talk to her. Communication isn’t easy. Every word costs her tremendous effort, and you have to strain to make them out. All these factors make everything she says extremely significant. Am I right?”

  Mullan was still gazing across the room with his legs out before him and his hands laced behind his head.

  “It sounds like you were there.”

  “I have been there,” Mullan said. He took another step toward his mysterious destination. “Under these conditions, your mother does something unexpected. She grabs your hand and says, ‘Edward Rinehart.’ And she manages to give you some information about this unknown gentleman.”

  Captain Mullan had fed me precisely enough to let me off the hook. Anything affirmative I said would be right. Mullan wanted to see if I knew that Rinehart was my father. He knew, and at a mere agreement that Star had indeed given me information about the unknown gentleman, he would tell me in a way that implied I had known, too. Mullan was leading me through a maze. He had pulled the rug from under my feet, but even more, I thought, he had yanked it from beneath Robert’s. For reasons of his own, he wanted to find out how deeply into the maze I had already penetrated.

  “She said Rinehart was my father.”

  “You must have wanted to see what you could learn about the man. You thought Toby Kraft might be able to help you.”

  “Toby was the first person I asked,” I said.

  “Did he help you? Indirectly, I mean? For example, did you and Mrs. Hatch go to the V.A. Hospital in Mount Vernon on Toby’s recommendation?”

  Mullan had been doing his homework. “He suggested I talk to a man named Max Edison, and Mrs. Hatch offered to take me there.”

  Mullan turned his head to me without altering his posture in any other way. “I don’t suppose you know about Edison. It never made the papers.”

  I could already see the corpse lying across the bloody bed, the severed throat.

  “It was a lot like Toby Kraft, except there was a knife next to him. Same night. Suicide, is the general opinion. Which is fine with me. The guy has maybe three, four months to live, and he decides to get out while he can still make decisions for himself. But here’s an interesting thing. A clerk out there says a private detective named Leroy Pratchett turned up to see Edison the day before. A scrawny guy in a black leather jacket. He had a goatee.”

  “Frenchy,” I said.

  “You have a suspicious mind,” Mullan said. “How did you connect Rinehart with Earl Sawyer?”

  I told him about Buxton Place and Hugh Coventry’s recognizing the owners’ names. I described meeting Earl Sawyer, being let into the cottages, seeing the books by Rinehart and Lovecraft and finding Sawyer’s name in “The Dunwich Horror.”

  Mullan tugged his chair closer to the table and did his best to look as though he believed what I was saying. “Did you pay a second visit to Buxton Place at a time when Sawyer was not present?”

  I shook my head.

  “You were not responsible for the destruction of those books?”

  I realized what he was telling me. “You went to Buxton Place.”

  “Mr. Dunstan, I have spent the evening going wherever I thought I might find Earl Sawyer.” He stretched his arms and yawned. “Excuse me. I’m too old for this crap. Fairly soon, or so I hope, Edward Rinehart’s coffin at Greenhaven penitentiary will be disinterred. Maybe we’ll find out who is buried in the damn thing. It sure as hell isn’t Rinehart.”

  “I don’t suppose it can be,” I said.

  “What do you call that, understatement?” Mullan asked me. “On your feet, Mr. Dunstan. You and I are going for a walk.”

  125

  Mullan gestured to the far end of the reception desk and the steps down to the back door. “This way.” The clerk came through the office door and spun around to inspect the junk mail on a shelf behind him.

  I followed Mullan down the stairs and over the concrete floor to the exit. Moving faster than I had expected, the captain banged the door open and marched out. I caught the door on the backswing and went into a narrow brick trench that had to be Horsehair. The gray blur of Mullan’s suit and a smudge of white hair were vanishing into the obscurity to my left.

  I thought I recognized Lavender’s double doors and listing buildings as we rushed across into the continuation of Horsehair. Mullan stopped moving, and the pale blur of his Irish face revolved toward me. “Let’s talk about your suspicious mind. This so-called Pratchett turns up at the V.A. Hospital. Suppose he was Frenchy. What does that mean? Prentiss, he’s already dead. The next night,
bang, like ducks, all in a row, Edison, Toby Kraft, Cassandra Little, and La Chapelle. Between you and me, is it possible that you have some hypothetical sort of explanation?”

  “Speaking hypothetically, I guess I do,” I said. “Helen Janette told me Frenchy grew up in these lanes. Maybe Rinehart—Earl Sawyer—had scared him, one way or another, since he was a kid.” I told him Sawyer’s story about “Charles Ward” having a boy named Nolly Wheadle deliver his weekly salary and Nolly’s account of a figure he called Black Death.

  “Maybe Rinehart, Sawyer, whatever you want to call him, sent Frenchy to the V.A. Hospital to find out if I had been there asking questions. Some of the staff told him that two people had been talking to Max Edison, and maybe Edison said these two people got his name from Toby.”

  “In all our many conversations, Mr. Dunstan, you never said a word about Edison or Edward Rinehart.”

  “Captain, as entertaining as our get-togethers were, they didn’t seem to have anything to do with my father.”

  “Was Edison the person who told you about Clothhead Spelvin?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I liked Max Edison. He deserved better than being slaughtered in his bed.” I remembered that we were supposed to be speaking hypothetically. “If that’s what happened.”

  “If that’s what happened, tell me the rest.”

  “Sawyer took care of Max and Toby, and after that he had to get rid of Frenchy. He thought Frenchy probably said more than he should have to his girlfriend, so he killed her, too. Clyde Prentiss, I don’t know.” I remembered seeing Frenchy and Cassie Little in the ICU. “You know, maybe it was a kind of down payment. Prentiss could have saved himself some jail time by naming Frenchy.”

  Mullan bristled. “Earl Sawyer killed four people because he didn’t want you to know he was your father, is that what you’re saying?”

  “He felt betrayed,” I said.

  “Do you want to add anything to that?”

  “Do you want to tell me what you’re doing? Why did you think I might be working for the Louisville D.A.’s office or some federal agency?”

  “Let’s say I feel betrayed.” Another glacial smile appeared and disappeared on what I could make out of his face. “You may be able to do your bit for civic order, Mr. Dunstan.” Mullan plunged ahead.

  The odor I associated with Joy’s house again filtered out from the bricks; after another twenty paces, Mullan wheeled into Raspberry. In the darkness, the cobbles descended into a sunken vale where two policemen leaned against the walls on either side of a door sealed with yellow tape. They pushed themselves upright when they saw Mullan.

  “This should interest you.”

  By the time we reached the door, the two cops looked like sentries guarding Buckingham Palace. “Take off,” Mullan said.

  They gave me that indifferent cop scrutiny and sauntered up the lane.

  Mullan pulled away strands of tape. “Earl’s phone is still listed under Annie Engstad, the person who lived here before him, but Hatch’s security chief had the address on file. I had to bust the lock to get in. If you’re worried about Mr. Sawyer’s rights, Judge Gram, one of the guys I play golf with every Saturday, signed a search warrant.”

  He opened the door, and the river-bottom stench moved out at us like an invisible wall. Mullan went inside and switched on a light. I heard rats scrambling for cover.

  I said, “Good God.”

  The door opened into a low-ceilinged room about twelve feet square that looked as though a bomb had gone off inside it. It was the ultimate residence of Cordwainer Hatch. Heaps of refuse, some waist-high, undulated over the floor. Newspapers crisped against the walls like dried sea foam. Against the wall to the left, a jumble of filthy shirts, socks, sweatshirts, and sweatpants lay over a narrow bed; against the opposite wall, geological deposits of junk flowed over the edge of a table to meet junk rising in layers from the floor. The enormity of the disorder made me feel dizzy. Rags, pizza boxes, glasses, crumpled magazines, paperback books without covers, plastic cups: the frieze of rubble lapped beneath and around a chair and washed into the room beyond, here and there parting to allow for passage.

  “Earl’s living room and bedroom,” Mullan said. “This is going to sound funny, but don’t touch anything unless I give you permission. Some of this material is going to be used as evidence.” He pointed at the back room. “That was his kitchen and work room, I guess you’d call it. It’s even worse. Before we go in there, look at the closet.”

  He waded through debris and tugged open a door. The shirt and trousers of Sawyer’s uniform hung beside a tan windbreaker and a pair of khaki pants. One wire hanger was empty. The uniform cap faced visor-out from the shelf alongside his Kangol cap, a long, black flashlight, a billy club, and the rounded ends of objects I could not immediately identify. The yellow eyes of a scrappy-looking rat stared up from a jumble of shoes on the closet’s floor.

  Mullan yelled, “Scram!” and stamped a foot on the rubble. The rat whisked through an opening in the wall about as wide as a dime. “Look next to the baton.”

  I stepped over spongy detritus, went up onto the balls of my feet, and saw a row of knives—kitchen knives, knives with stag handles and wooden handles, knives that folded into black metal handgrips, and knives with blades that flicked out of molded steel cases.

  “Look closer,” Mullan said.

  I leaned forward and saw rusty stains and dried palm prints.

  “Earl liked knives,” Mullan said. “But he didn’t care about cleaning his tools any more than he did about cleaning anything else, as long as he kept his uniform and a few other things presentable enough to wear outside.”

  I slogged behind him to a fan-shaped stain in the far right corner of the room, where he unearthed a half-buried cardboard box. “Fortunately, Earl kept souvenirs.” Mullan picked up a bent metal rod that had once been part of an umbrella and pried open the flaps on top of the carton.

  I peered in at a jumble of wristwatches, bracelets, mismatched earrings, a couple of key rings, and old wallets scattered with small, white bones and the curving fragment of a human skull to which adhered a nugget of gristle.

  Mullan tapped the fragment with the umbrella rod. “I wouldn’t be astonished if this used to be part of a gentleman named Minor Keyes. Remember him?”

  “How could I forget?” I said. “It was the first time I was ever accused of murder.”

  “See these little bones? My guess is, they’re what’s left of the hands cut off a newborn baby we found on top of a Dumpster about four years ago. We brought in the mother the next day. Sixteen years old. Charleen Toomey, a nice Irish girl. She confessed that she had placed her infant daughter on top of the Dumpster, but swore it was breathing at the time. According to Charleen, she hoped some good Samaritan would come along and give her baby a home.”

  “And according to you?”

  “According to me, she was going to toss it in, but she chickened out at the last minute.” He poked one of the wallets. “Property of a drunk named Pipey Leake, who was beaten to death in the service alley alongside Merchants Hotel in 1975. This one came from a kid named Phil Doria, hung around the Buffalo Hill area at night and mugged older guys. In 1979, someone stabbed him to death. This bracelet probably belonged to a runaway smack addict who peddled her tail along Chester Street under the name Sidewalk Molly.”

  “Shouldn’t this stuff be taken to Headquarters?”

  “It will be,” Mullan said. “Shortly after that, Earl Sawyer-Edward Rinehart is going to become public property. And you are, too, Mr. Dunstan. Right now, we still have a chance to decide what kind of story it’s going to be, and how much attention you come in for.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Mullan tossed the rod onto a mound of refuse. He no longer looked anything at all like a bartender. “Certain aspects of the way your friend Stewart Hatch likes to operate are probably bringing my department under investigation. I’d like to keep the scandal down to a dull roar. It’ll be bad
enough without dragging in Jack the Ripper.”

  “You want to cover this up?” I was—only one word will do—aghast.

  “Even if I was stupid enough to want to, I couldn’t. You can’t cover up a story like this. Even Rowley can see that he might pocket some more of Hatch’s money by pushing you into the spotlight. It wouldn’t do that much good, but it sure as hell would draw attention away from Stewart.”

  “Pushing me into the spotlight,” I said.

  “About two hours ago, Grenville Milton packed a bag and drove across the river to a motel outside Cape Girardeau. He booked two first-class tickets to Mexico City on a seven-thirty A.M. flight tomorrow from St. Louis. He had a hundred and thirty thousand dollars and a Ruger .45 with him. I don’t know what it is about Rugers. Guys like Milton, they want a weapon, that’s what they buy.”

  “Two tickets,” I said. “First class.”

  “Then he called a woman named Ming-Hwa Sullivan. Ming-Hwa is a piece of work. She refused to come to the motel, and she laughed at the idea of meeting him at the airport. He said he’d kill himself, and she said, ‘Grenville, if you were a grown-up, you’d understand how little I have to do with that decision.’ Her words. When she got off the phone, she called us, and we talked to Cape Girardeau. They had two units out on a gunfire report. Fifteen minutes later, the captain there called back. Milton fired the Ruger four times. He killed the telephone in his room. He killed his TV set. He opened his window and killed the neon sign in front of the motel. Then he sat down on the floor, stuck the barrel in his mouth, and blew off the top of his head.”

  “Does Hatch know about this?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re doing,” I said.

  Mullan stepped carefully around me. “Come into the kitchen.”

  126

  More rats, along with several cockroach nations, scuttled into hiding when he switched on the overhead bulb. In the back half of the room, ecstatic flies congregated over coalesced, shining foothills of green jelly divided by trails leading to the bathroom, the sink, and the back door. The bathroom door stood open far enough to let me know that I never wanted to see it when the light was on.