by Marco Ocram
“I hadn't thought of that.”
Herbert was a bit of a dinosaur where social media were concerned. I prodded him to the third topic we needed to discuss.
“Who might have a motive to frame you for Lola’s gruesome death, Herbert?”
“Frame me? I’ve no idea, Marco. What sort of person would want to frame me? What have I ever done to aggrieve anyone?”
I gave him some suggestions.
“A love rival? A rejected lover, perhaps? An author whose work you have criticized?”
“Ah, I see what you mean, Marco. It could be any of thousands of people.”
That was a big help. I changed tack.
“Tell me then, Herbert—what happened on the day of the murder?”
“On the day of the murder, what happened was…”
But before Herbert could tell me what happened on the day of the murder, a bell drowned his words, a door opened, and a heavily armed warder entered.
“Time’s up, Bud. Back to the guest suite.”
Without giving Herbert a chance to thank me in broken words for rushing to his aid, the heavily armed warder dragged him out.
I wondered why prison warders were always heavily armed. Perhaps it was manhandling so many prisoners that built their muscles up.
LESSON EIGHT
‘Herbert, what is Talking Heads Syndrome?’
‘It is the tendency of the incompetent author to write passages of unrelieved dialogue, Marco.’
‘What do you mean by unrelieved, Herbert?’
‘I mean passages consisting only of spoken sentences, Marco, without descriptions of movements, gestures, settings or other factors that might illuminate the context.’
‘Ha! A writer would have to be especially awful to do that, Herbert.’
‘Indeed, Marco.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
In which Marco struggles with his Talking Heads Syndrome and imagines a character from a future book.
I parked my black Range Rover by Kelly's diner and edged my way through the crowd of revelers within. Within the diner, I mean, not the Range Rover. The atmosphere was tense and aggressive. Fights broke out sporadically between drunk men wielding pool cues, and drunker women chalking their tips. I found a dark and cozy nook where Jacqueline was waiting. She was dressed to kill. I asked her why.
“I have just finished a shift in the family abattoir. I came over without having time to change. I hope my attire does not make you uneasy.”
“No, no,” I reassured her, “not in the least.”
But my reassurances satisfied her more than me—a woman who cut up carcasses was ideally qualified to dismember Lola Kellogg. Instantly I was on the alert. All of a clichéd sudden, the fighting crowd had withdrawn to the periphery of my mind—my absolute focus was now on the blood-spattered waitress.
“Tell me what you know about the affair between Herbert and your sister,” I typed, preparing the reader for several huge dollops of unrelieved expositional dialogue.
“Herbert, as you know, was a bestselling novelist, so he commanded an instant overwhelming sexual attraction over all women. My sister was no stronger than the rest of us, and instantly succumbed to his charms. He took her to a province of northern India, where, he said, he wished to revisit a guru who was a master of the Preveesh yoga Herbert had practiced in his youth. According to Herbert, the guru had a needle passing all the way through his skull. He had achieved the extraordinary insertion through minutely small increments over tens of years, so the cells of his brain were able to accommodate it naturally.”
“Unbelievable,” I said, in what was probably the first accurate utterance in the book. “Did the guru not suffer any complications?”
“Only at the barbershop. When Marcia and Herbert arrived at the province, Herbert booked them into a luxurious hotel at the foot of the mountains; there they feasted on the exquisite cuisine, on the culture, and on each other's bodies. She told me she had never experienced such intense and profound sexual satisfaction before.”
I nodded—Herbert was a bestselling author, after all.
“But even while they were there together, Herbert became infatuated with one of the village girls whose mother served at the hotel. Herbert made a pretext of wishing to be shown an ancient temple deep in the woods, to which, he claimed, the girl was one of few who knew the route. He was gone for three days, and upon his return all his libido was spent. It was clear to my sister that Herbert had seduced the young female. From then on Herbert found every excuse to be away from my sister, and eventually left the hotel altogether, leaving only a ticket for my sister's flight home and a hundred dollars for her incidental expenses.”
“What happened when Marcia returned to Clarkesville?”
“When Marcia returned to Clarkesville, she was in a highly scorned state. I remember the night she got back. She drank a huge amount of whiskey and told me she would see Herbert Quarry rot in hell.”
“What happened the next morning?”
“The next morning, people saw ‘Herbert Quarry is a pedophile’ daubed in huge letters on the side of City Hall. It attracted the interest of the media locally and nationally, and Herbert was obliged to make various statements denying the accusation. After a supposed tipoff, which I imagine came from Herbert himself, the police arrested Marcia. They soon found she had no alibi; the paint daubed on City Hall matched a half-empty pot in her garage; discarded bristles in the dry paint matched those of a recently used brush in her garage; and her fingernails bore traces of the exact same paint. She was charged with defacing a public building; and it wasn’t long before Herbert added a civil charge of libel. But before those charges came to trial, Herbert’s lawyers made a motion to have my sister committed to an institution for nine years on grounds of insanity. Although the family fought it, we were outgunned by Herbert’s expensive attorneys.”
“What happened on the night they took her away?”
“I can never forget the night they took her away. Her anguished and full-throated screams echoed down the street. Again and again I heard her scream she would kill Herbert Quarry, until the threats were drowned by the sirens of the ambulance into which she had been constrained and taken away.”
“When was this?”
“Exactly ten years before the day Herbert was found with the dismembered corpse.”
Another coincidence—my investigation was becoming plagued with them. I glanced over our discussion thus far—almost two pages of pure dialogue. To avoid accusations of Talking Heads Syndrome, I made Jaqueline sigh, nudge her hair, sip a drink, wipe a tear from her eye at the recollection of her sister’s suffering, wince at a Village People song being played for the third time running on the jukebox, smooth a napkin on her knee, and stick pins into a Herbert Quarry voodoo doll, before I asked my next question.
“Did your sister receive any psychiatric treatment when she was incarcerated in the lunatic asylum?”
“Yes. She developed a strange habit which attracted the interest of a researcher into the psychotic traits of the insane. He became virtually a daily visitor, such was his interest in the case.”
“Interesting. Can you tell me his name?”
“Yes, if you are sure you want me to.”
“Why shouldn't I?”
“Well, if I didn't remember his name, you would have an excuse for a couple of pages of padding in which you discover it through other means.”
“Don't worry, there will be plenty of time for padding later. Tell me his name.”
“It was Professor Sushing.”
LESSON NINE
‘How would a truly great author create names for their characters, Herbert?’
‘They would not, Marco. Fiction is littered with the creations of profligate authors who imagine they are being clever by inventing new characters. Single-use characters are a wanton indulgence. The truly great author recycles characters.’
‘But, Herbert, what if a characte
r dies—how can you recycle them?’
‘You are confusing fiction with reality, Marco. Realism in fiction is for the foolish and the reactionary. You must not allow your mind to be trammeled by a concept as petty as reality.’
CHAPTER NINE
In which Marco indulges in international travel.
“Professor Sushing!!!”
I’d once read that you should never, ever, ever end a sentence with more than one exclamation mark, so I wasn’t sure why I’d typed three—perhaps some primal instinct was telling me that the name Sushing was to have a profound influence on my career as a writer. To cover the extreme nature of my punctuation, I invented a story about the Professor being the last person one might expect to take an interest in the case of a waitress’s sister from Clarkesville…
“But Professor Sushing is a well-known billionaire with business interests all over the globe. He’s the last person to take an interest in the case of a waitress’s sister from Clarkesville.”
“That’s exactly what we thought too,” said Jacqueline, helpfully going along with the nonsense I’d just typed. “We put it down to a philanthropic streak in the Professor’s nature.”
Unlikely. If you’re a billionaire with a philanthropic streak, you try to cure cancer, or help the third world. However, who was I to argue? Jacqueline had been there, so she should know.
“Does the Professor live near Clarkesville?”
“No. He rented a property near Barton Hills while he was investigating my sister’s psychosis, but he lives in Nassau.”
Hmmmm—probably for some tax-dodge purposes. I thanked Jacqueline for her time and explanation, leaving her to socialize with her friends. She was cutting a dash on the dancefloor in her abattoir overalls by the time I’d visited the toilet on my way out.
I needed to hear what the Professor had to say about Marcia Delgado, the woman with a psychotic hatred of Herbert. Pausing, therefore, only to look up flight times, to text Como to say I would be busy for a spell, and to do something hilariously funny I can’t quite remember, I headed to the Clarkesville County International Airport.
As I headed into Terminal Eight—the one reserved for TV personalities and the like—I wondered whether Herbert’s arrest was still under wraps. I didn’t have to wonder for long. On a giant TV in the first-class lounge, a presenter was spouting about news just in from Clarkesville.
I watched to see what spin they would put on it.
They started with footage of Herbert the playboy—clips showing him with a series of A-list beauties on his arm in the following situations:
The London premier of the film of Herbert’s best seller, The X and Y Coordinates of Evil.
The post-awards party in Hollywood on the night he gained his best-screenplay Oscar.
A top nightclub in New York—the one that wouldn’t let me in because of my anorak and corduroys.
A restaurant in St Moritz.
A water taxi in Venice.
They then struck a less glamorous note, with an image of Marcia’s accusation daubed on the side of Clarkesville City Hall, old footage of Herbert—surrounded by reporters—denying it, and a photo of Lola, obviously chosen to exaggerate her youth and Herbert’s culpability.
Finally, there was a clip of Chief McGee, sporting a straightened tie and his best police chief face, who said that thanks to the efficient law enforcement skills of his department, there was one less sick predator on the streets.
Ha! What happened to the presumption of innocence? Had Herbert already been condemned, without trial, in the unjust court of public opinion, or was it just the media turned against him? Surely the average person on the street would reserve judgment and…
My speculations about the fair-minded treatment Herbert might receive from the average person on the street were interrupted by the strains of Que Sera Sera. I answered the call before I realized it was my Bronx mom.
“Markie, Markie, where are you?”
“I’m down in Clarkesville, Mom.”
“Clarkesville!” She couldn’t have sounded more shocked if I’d said downtown Sodom-upon-Gomorrah. “Clarkesville! You’re not with that sick pedo Quarry? Tell me you’re not with that sick pedo Quarry.”
“Mom! He’s not a sick pedo,” I shouted, putting my hands over my mouth belatedly in response to the looks from those nearby.
“But he is, Markie, he is. It’s on TV. He’s killed that poor girl, Markie, and she only looks ten or eleven. And to think he sat in my house. The shame, Markie, the shame, the shame, the shame.”
“Mom! It’s not true. That’s just what the TV people say. He’s been framed.”
“Framed! Who’d do a thing like that to frame someone?” It was a good question. “They caught him red-handed, Markie. How can he be framed? What am I going to say in the salon tomorrow, Markie? Mrs. Silverman is in at nine. She’s seen him in my house. What’s she going to be telling everyone—that your mom had a sick pedo murderer in her house. Oh, Markie, Markie, how’s your poor mom going to find you a nice girl to give her grandkids if you’re hanging out with a pedo?”
“Mom! Herbert’s not a pedo, and he hasn’t killed anyone. He’s been framed by the local police.”
“The local police!”
“They set him up, Mom, and now he’s in jail.”
“In jail! Is he eating right, Markie?”
I saw an opportunity to give my mom something to think about other than Herbert’s alleged crimes.
“I don’t think so, Mom. He was looking very thin. Really thin.”
I remained silent, allowing the injected drug to suffuse through her neural system.
“Thin! Is no one cooking for him, Markie?”
“I don’t think so, Mom. I think he’s starving. I think he needs someone to send him some cookies and cakes.” I could almost hear my Bronx mom looking around her kitchen. “Shall I send you the address of the prison?”
“Later, Markie, later. Not now. Your mom needs to be baking. What are you holding your mommy up for, Markie? Keeping her on the phone when she needs to be baking.”
“Sorry, Mom. Speak later.”
I listened for the line to go dead, then killed my end of the call. Phew! To my Bronx mom, baking is an overpowering instinctive urge, rather as swimming is to a salmon.
I went quickly to the toilet, just in time to be called to board flight 1021 to Nassau. On the plane, I signed the cabin crew’s copies of The Tau Muon, then settled into my luxurious seat. I put all thoughts of writing out of my mind—not that there’d been many there in the first place. I would use the time on the plane to prepare myself subconsciously for my looming encounter with Professor Sushing. I asked the steward to bring the drinks list. Things were looking up—they had both of my all-time favorite wines. Red and white.
LESSON TEN
‘What attributes do publishers seek in an author, Herbert?’
‘There is only one important attribute, Marco—productivity.’
‘Why should that be, Herbert?’
‘It is expensive to market a writer. If the writer subsequently produces only one or two works, the publisher gets little return on their investment.’
‘I see.’
‘If the writer can churn out book after book, they generate a highly lucrative revenue stream.’
‘I see.’
‘Do you have any other questions, Marco?’
‘Not just now.’
CHAPTER TEN
In which Marco anticipates his next lesson.
On the flight to the Bahamas, I’d thought of a hilarious twist in which I would jump into a cab at Nassau airport, ask to be taken to the Professor’s address, be told by the driver no such address existed, get into a big argument with him, Google the address to show him what a dumbass he was being, and find the Professor actually lived in Nassau in Delaware, so it was I who was the dumbass after all. But when it came to it, I wasn’t sure the readers would find it believable
, me being the dumbass. Besides, it wouldn’t have been in keeping with my plan to break the mold of literature if I were to write about ideas I’d already had.
Instead, therefore, I jumped into a cab at Nassau airport, asked to be taken to the Professor’s address, and found myself driven up the lanes of Nassau’s most exclusive residential district, Thornton Heights. The Professor lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright house nestled in immature gardens with a spectacular view over the bay, all surrounded by a razor wire fence. I was patted down by rough-looking henchmen before presenting my card—the four of clubs—and being shown shown to his study.
“Doctor Ocram. This is an unexpected pleasure.”
It was for me too—I hadn’t expected to be a doctor. We shook hands, and he showed me to a seat with a spectacular view over the bay.
“What brings you to Nassau, Doctor Ocram?”
The Professor combined the most sinister characteristics of all eleven villains from the original James Bond novels. Wondering if that might include Rosa Klebb’s curare-tipped brogues, I kept my eyes on his feet as I answered his question.
“I understand you were a daily visitor to Marcia Delgado when she was held in the insane asylum in Clarkesville. Can you tell me why?”
“From the day she entered the asylum until the day she left, she exhibited the most startling pattern of behavior I have ever experienced in more than thirty years' expert study of the insane.”
I was intrigued by his words—I hadn’t expected to type anything like them.
“You intrigue me,” I admitted. “Can you describe her unusual behavior?”
“Having never in her life shown any aptitude for art, she unfailingly produced, each day, an exquisite painting or sketch. The graphic creations varied considerably in format, materials and style. Some were in charcoal, others in oil, gouache, acrylic, crayon, rudimentary herbal dyes or earthen pigments of her own manufacture. Some were on canvas, others on white cartridge paper of the finest quality, some on the walls of her cell. Regardless of the format, she produced exactly one artwork each day. The works represented an unparalleled collection of artistic primitives, as if every great artist of the last five millennia had been for a day her cellmate.”
