The Writer

by RB Banfield

  Max hid his relief. “I guess you’re right.”

  “No, the man who visited with us was most charming and polite. My niece was staying here too at the time, from the city, and they are an item now, the two of them. Isn’t it funny, they were living so long together in the same place without ever meeting, and it takes them both to come here, for entirely different reasons, for them to meet. For them to have a conversation, so they were no longer strangers.”

  “I guess you never know where love’s going to take you.”

  Susan raised her hand in mock surrender. “Oh, you’re not going to get me into any conversation like that. I’ve long since thinking of all the trouble men have given me. And that’s one story I certainly won’t be telling someone calling themselves a writer.”

  “We’re not always to blame, you must admit? Us men, I mean?”

  “Of course, you’re right. The way men act around women, it’s entirely our fault for driving them crazy enough to do stupid things.”

  Max nodded, happy to see that he had gained her confidence.

  “Enjoy your stay here in Gendry, Mr Marshall,” she said with a smile. “But do go find for yourself better, nicer stories than murderers and strangers from the city. Gendry’s a better place than that, as I’m sure you’ll find.”

  PART TWO

  IRONWRIGHT

  Dan Ironwright’s wife Sam had been in a testy mood that morning. She had berated him for drinking his coffee in the shower again, saying something about the water not being clean, which to him was nonsense. If it wasn’t clean then why was he using it to clean himself? None of it got into his coffee anyway; at least not enough to worry about. If he felt like pushing her, as he sometimes did, then he’d claim that it added to the flavour. He said nothing this time since he didn’t feel like enduring a lecture on soap grime. Not that early in the morning. Not with a full week of work ahead of him.

  When he roughly dried himself and put on his shirt he found it was too tight. He didn’t want to mention it to anyone, especially Sam. It didn’t make any difference to him that she had a range of shirts of various sizes, all bought in advance and ready for him to wear. He just didn’t want to admit that she was right, that he was still gaining weight. The shirt was going to fit and the buttons will not break, and his work colleagues would have no reason to find amusement.

  He knew that if he had done the same for her, and provided a wide range of pants depending upon her varying weight, a world war would break out. There was a time, and with a different wife, when he would have deliberately started a fight. He no longer did such things, since he was in his second marriage, apparently his “happy” marriage, the one you have after the “starter” marriage. Towards the end of his first, when they both sensed it wasn’t working, he practised a dangerous and yet awesome game known as Urban Matador. He would actively work to wind up his wife, particularly when she was extra grumpy on a Sunday morning, to see how far she would go.

  The crowd cheers as he sidesteps each charge of accusation. They applaud as he taunts while she paws the ground, snorting. She eyes how she will gorge him, throw him in the air and trample him with examples of his inherent masculine stupidity. But each time, with deft sidesteps of subject change, and a few flourishes of sarcasm, he emerges victorious. And divorced.

  For this marriage he hung up his matador cape, retired from the arena of wife baiting, but there were times he thought of coming out of retirement. Only a week ago he responded to her question from the bedroom with, “Yes, you always do.” She then rushed at him with a horrified look.

  “I always look fat?”

  “What?” he asked, with no idea why she was asking that. “You always look fabulous, I said.”

  “I asked you,” she said like she was the professional investigator and not him, “if I looked fat in this.”

  Knowing that he had misheard her, he knew that the last thing he should do next was to start laughing. The absurdity of the situation made it nearly impossible to hold back. “I thought you said,” he said with his voice quivering as he held back giggles, “you said you look fabulous.”

  The matador was well and truly retired.

  She studied him, checking for any signs that he was mocking her, and then came to her conclusion. “You think I’m fat.”

  “Fabulous,” he said with a stronger voice, not appreciating the accusation. “I think you look fabulous.” Now his tone suggested that he no longer thought she was “fabulous”.

  “Don’t lie. You think I’m fat,” she said as she went to find something else to wear. That was the end of the conversation and he was relieved for it. He could have gone on and told her that it wasn’t the pants that made her look fat. She looked fat in everything, because she was fat. But so was he, and he was okay with that. All women, he had found, were not interested in logic when it came to their weight. Men who were fat knew they were fat, and while they didn’t like it very much, they knew that that was how they looked and different clothes weren’t going to change it. A few, Dan noticed, liked to wear their shirts untucked to hide their bulky bellies, and then claim it was the fashion to wear it that way.

  Dan liked to have his shirt tucked in and didn’t care at all who noticed. There was only one person he feared to hear a comment from, and that was his doctor. A German woman whom he liked to call “The General”, she would look upon his large belly as a non human entity. Perhaps to her it was some sort of alien life form that has landed on him and was seeking someone to introduce to their leader. Her eyes would become glued to his belly and her lip would turn up, and Dan would fight back his jokes that perhaps he was hiding a troop of alien clowns. She was not someone to bait with such comments. The last time he had seen her she prescribed a very detailed diet after a lecture that lasted so long that Dan lost track of time.

  He was the one who should be cranky, not Sam. Not only was food his favourite pastime, anything else came in a distant second place. The General was not someone to say no to, and he was seriously considering looking for a new doctor, but he had given her his promise that he would try to lose some weight and he felt obligated to that. He would give it three months which, with good behaviour, might become six weeks.

  Now down to four slices of toast for breakfast, he helped them down with grilled tomatoes and a dab of cream cheese and only half as much salt and pepper as he wanted. Keeping the promise to cut down on his coffee was more of a problem to solve, and by “solve” he meant not letting either doctor or wife know exactly how many cups he was having. He also had several strawberry rolls concealed under the driver’s seat of his car, for emergencies. Then he remembered that he finished them off last night when he snuck out to the garage. He realised that he would have to take that familiar detour to the bakery on his way in to work.

  A pleasant woman on the radio told him that the dreary rainy weather had finally passed and the forecast for the next month was for warm weather and light winds. That was the day’s first good news but it wasn’t enough to change Dan’s mood. He didn’t care for sunny weather since it meant being stuck in traffic with the sun on him making him sweat so much that it would soak through his clothes and drain into his shoes.

  Dan would sweat a lot in his job and he knew how to use it to his advantage. He would lean in close when interrogating suspects, letting them get a good whiff of his armpit, and even feel a few drops courtesy of his forehead. Some tried to complain about police brutality, which would only be answered with an innocent shrug and a comment along the lines of he can’t help his glands. He could always take his shirt off, he would suggest, but then they would complain about his flabby chest and stomach, and no one wanted to see that.

  He thought that he deserved to be in a good mood, since his last case went to court and looked a sure-thing. His last three before that had all resulted in convictions and Dan knew that he was on a roll. At the back of his mind he knew that various factions within the office were working on undermining his streak, but he tried to ig
nore those thoughts. When his boss Dun Moore casually told him to take another look at Dale Gant’s Gendry case, Dan fought to keep thinking those good thoughts. Dale was on leave, he was told, and it’s a case with no motives or suspects. Oh yeah, the boss added like it wasn’t too important, and there’s evidence. And it’s up in Gendry too, where the local police hardly did anything to help with the investigation. Try that one, Dan.

  “Got someone coming in with a new angle on it,” the boss said.

  “A new angle that’s going to convict?” Dan asked, but his boss just walked away. If Dan didn’t know better, he thought he heard sniggering.

  Paul Evans had no known connection to the Gendry case, and what he was saying didn’t make an awful amount of sense. Dan was meant to sit him down in a quiet room to see what his problem was. When Dan looked over the few basic notes taken by a disinterested desk-worker, probably over the phone, he suspected that this might be some kind of elaborate set-up to kill his streak. Such things had been done before.

  He left Paul seated at his desk and then walked casually into Dun’s small office and asked, in a roundabout way, if this guy was for real. Not only was he real, Dun assured him, he had connections to some important police chiefs and had been causing them headaches for the past few weeks. Dan nodded and went to find some more coffee, knowing that this one was just a matter of going through the motions to keep everyone happy. Police work was like that most the time.

  “Ok, so you think there’s been a murder?” Dan asked Paul as he ushered him into one of their interrogation rooms. He explained that Paul was not meant to read anything into the fact that this was the room where they hammered away at suspects for hours on end. It was more the fact that it was private, so he could relax and speak his mind. It was all confidential, he was told, and Dan was not someone who liked to go around telling people anything at all. A quiet and reserved man, he was.

  “I even hate saying hello to people in the morning,” he added.

  Paul was more than happy to be given his chance to say what he knew, and it didn’t matter where it was. He was more disgruntled over the fact that the two cups of coffee that Dan carried were both meant for Dan and weren’t shared.

  “I don’t care who you tell,” said Paul. “Or that I told you.”

  “Go on,” said Dan, not liking the sound of any of that since it was exactly how crazy people talk. They can’t wait to tell the world their private revelations. People who have the truth tend to be a little more careful with it.

  “It took a while to put the pieces together.”

  “Pieces?” Dan asked, trying to appear interested, while he was more focused on his coffee and how fast he can get rid of this guy. He did go to the trouble of placing his notebook on the table and holding his pen like he was ready to write something down. That tended to help people say what they wanted to say and leave out the small talk.

  “Together, yeah.”

  “How so?”

  “I know a guy, Max Marshall, and he’s writing something, a novel or something, whatever. Don’t really care about it, and don’t care about him that much. My wife’s friends of his wife, and I get dragged into talking to him. You know how that goes. What are you going to do, ignore him while the women get locked into conversation? You have to say something, right? I’m the one who always has to get the conversation going, every time, and I always try to talk about sport and whatever, what most people are interested in, to pass the time. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever had a real, genuine conversation with the man.”

  “And the pieces?” Dan asked, not minding that he sounded impatient.

  “There was a murder, up in Gendry, some postal worker, and no one knew who did it. It took me a while to put it together. But now I think about it, it should have been obvious.”

  Dan tapped his pen on the table, waiting for more.

  “So, this guy I know,” continued Paul, “Max Marshall, he’s talking about this book he’s doing. We were all laughing at him, telling him how to write it, giving him a hurry-up, in a friendly manner, but he went all defensive over it, like our criticism was some sort of personal attack on him. What about that? It wasn’t like any of us actually cared what he was writing. We all knew none of us would ever read it, and probably no one else either. He hardly wanted to say anything about it to us, so how was he meant to share it with the world?”

  Dan stopped tapping and leaned back in his chair. “The pieces fitting together,” he said, not really asking now.

  “The what?”

  Dan tried to be patient. “You said the pieces came together for you. Wish to share?”

  “The murder, I mean. He was writing about the murder.”

  “Saw it in the news.”

  “This was weeks before the murder.”

  Dan leaned forward and he felt his shirt tighten. “He told you about the murder weeks before it happened?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Not exactly,” Dan repeated.

  “He wrote about Gendry. The people and all that.”

  “Then he didn’t tell you about the murder weeks before it happened?”

  “That’s the thing. When we told him his story lacked interest, to us, to anyone as far as we could tell, he said something that stuck with me. He said he should add in a murder.”

  “Was he specific about this murder?”

  “Not really.”

  Dan was doing his best to remain patient, but now he just started thinking about how he could take an early lunch. “What, if anything, was he specific about?”

  “Gendry, the people there, that sort of thing.”

  “Longbottom?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The victim, Longbottom, was he specific about him? Did he write his name or talk about him? Did he say anything about him at all?”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t think so.”

  “Thanks for coming in.”

  “No, you need to check him out. Read what he wrote. Something’s not right with him. I know it, from talking to him. You get a feeling for people, you know?”

  Dan placed a friendly hand on Paul’s back and walked him out from the interrogation room and to the main door, being polite and agreeable.

  “Do you have any other leads?” Paul asked as he was guided through the main door. “I heard the case wasn’t solved.”

  Dan smiled and firmly shook his hand. “Thanks for coming in.”

  Duncan Moore was a good boss, one of the guys, and as long as they kept producing good results he continued to be their best buddy. He would slap everyone on the back and continue where they had left off with their last conversation, no matter how long ago it was. His memory was uncanny and he never forgot the name of any of his worker’s relations and significant anniversary dates. He was the sort of boss he wasn’t really a boss. Unless he got a little bit angry. No one liked to see his bad side, the raging Irish monster he could become at the drop of a hat. He disliked his first name and preferred “Dun”, but that made him hate his nickname even more. As with any nickname, the more it’s protested the more people will enjoy using it. They knew not to call him “Could’ve” to his face while on the job. At the local bar it was a different story, and once he was loosened up with two or sixteen beers, everyone enjoyed giving it to him, from the lowest street cop to his own bosses. He would dissolve into a mass of laughter and the next day feel like he should be angry and not remember why. That was the only time his memory would let him down.

  “This is nothing,” Dan said after he invited himself into Dun’s office. He moved a few old newspapers off the chair by the desk so he could sit. “Guy thinks he heard something suspicious in the midst of jovial dinner conversation. Public finds out we’re open for discussion on that, we’d be swamped. The facts stand; Dale Gant didn’t find anything suspicious, but you already knew that. Anyway, Gendry’s not part of our jurisdiction.”

  “Check it out,” said Dun, not looking up from his computer screen. He was busy
typing an email and he hated both things equally. After years of practice he averaged ten words a minute with his rigid two-finger technique and he was proud of it. After he kept knocking his fruit juice on the keyboard, the G and H were particularly sticky and sometimes filled the whole screen up with the one letter. Whenever that happened Dun knew of no other solution to stop it other than turning the computer off at the wall.

  “There’s nothing to this one,” Dan protested. “What do you want from me, rabbits springing from hats? There was no new lead. Just misguided gossip. Dale did all that could be done up there. It’s a no-brainer.”

  “Just to do your job.”

  “How is this my job? Dale’s had this case and there’s nothing there.”

  “Dale’s not here right now, is he. But you are. See how luck works? What was his name, Paul Evans? He knows someone who knows someone else. And both of them aren’t trying to make my life easier.”

  “So you’re putting that on me?”

  “That’s right. Look, Dan, just check it out, get quotes, something in writing, you’re good at that, and it’ll all go away.”

  “And I get to personally go up to Gendry for this? You’ll owe me,” was Dan’s way of agreeing.

  “Think of it as an expenses-paid holiday.”

  “But all that way? For that?”

  “If you want to do your job and make your boss a happy man, you will.”

  “You’re sending me all the way to Gendry for what now, I’ve forgotten?”

  Dun sat back in his chair, a brief look of relief that he was taking a break from that horrible machine. He gave Dan a short glare that said that the Irish monster was lurking at the door. “To see what Dale missed, what their excuse-for-police missed. To see if Paul Evans—was it? To see if Paul Evans had anything. And most important, to make me happy. Can you do that for me, pretty please? For your bossy-wossy? Can you?”

  Dan knew that was a sign he should leave. “Now you put it that way …” he said sarcastically, wondering if there was anything else he could do to get off the case.