Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  Ernie chewed his unlit cigar. “You trying to say the Squawk Jock’s the killer?”

  “No. Well, maybe. Damn, I don’t know! The cops probably grilled the Jock, once they saw the link between the column and the murders, but he’s still running free. I don’t know what to think.”

  “Best not to think at all then.” Ernie dialed in some gospel music and hummed along with it.

  Traffic in the metro region had worsened nearly every month for the past decade. Today it crawled. Unable to pass the smelly chicken truck, they suffered with rolled-up windows and no air conditioning in the moderate late-March heat.

  Chick Morrow’s well-maintained apartment building rested between an electrical supply store and a laundry-processing plant—hardly the most elite neighborhood. But Lingenfelter knew just how little beginning writers usually earned, and he admired Chick for doing as well as he had. The place had a low redbrick wall in front of it and majestic oaks rearing in back. Lingenfelter stepped onto the sidewalk.

  “Coming with?”

  “I aint no Hardy Boy. Got a sister on the South Side who wants to see me.”

  “Okay. I need to visit some other places here, anyway. But I can get to em on the bus. See you later.”

  Ernie scribbled on a matchbook. “Here’s my sister’s number. Call me when you’re ready to head on home.” His pickup grumbled off down the street.

  Lingenfelter climbed the condo steps. The name Chick Morrow on an embossed strip identified the apartment. He mashed the button.

  A woman’s dispirited voice issued from the speaker grille: “Yes? Who is it?”

  “I’m a friend of Chick’s. Harry Lingenfelter. I just—well, I just wanted to talk to someone about Chick.”

  “Come on up.”

  The door to Chick’s apartment opened on the blotchy face of a red-haired young woman, who introduced herself as Lorna Riley. She surprised Lingenfelter by observing that Chick had often talked about him.

  “Don’t worry about defacing the ‘crime scene,’” she said, waving him in. “Once the police had finished, they put me in touch with a company that specializes in cleaning up murder scenes. Can you imagine making your living that way? I never did, before all this. Now, such a service seems a gruesome inevitability.”

  Inside the modest apartment, Lingenfelter had no idea how to proceed, or what he hoped to learn, or how he could help. He asked impulsive questions. Did Chick have any enemies that Lorna knew about? No. Was Chick despondent? No, Lorna rejoined. His first novel was about to receive a favorable review in this Sunday’s Harbinger, and his agent had already fielded a half dozen inquiries from Hollywood. He had everything to live for.

  Lingenfelter disengaged from his role as inquisitor. He had to go. He extended his hand to Lorna, who flabbergasted him by falling into his arms, her whole body slack with despair. She wept quietly as Lingenfelter patted her back. Eventually, she regained her composure, apologized for the lapse, and told him that the funeral would take place on Sunday in a church near Emory University.

  “Will you come?”

  “Of course.” He gave her both his phone number and that of Ernie’s sister, then tripped down the stairs and strolled to the nearest bus stop.

  Like many freelancers, Lingenfelter often took quick assignments for the ready cash. Among these jobs, he most enjoyed writing book reviews for the Harbinger. His editor was Heather Farris, a woman from Rhode Island with a degree in comparative lit from Brown University. He had never met her in person, but on the telephone she had a scrappy personality and a sharp-tongued sense of humor. Surely, she could introduce him to the Squawk Jock. Once he detailed his own minor complicity in feeding the beast loose in Atlanta, she had to help him, journalistic ethics be damned.

  Suppose Heather did introduce him to the Jock—what then? Did he confront the man as an accomplice to the murders? Ask him if he knew the identities of any likely serial killers? Badger him about his failure to print any of Lingenfelter’s own squawks? And if he learned something that pointed to the killer, did he call the police? Or did he put on the persona of his own Ethan Dedicos just as Bruce Wayne put on the regalia of Batman? What role should he play?

  A block from the newspaper building, Lingenfelter got off the bus and walked to its towering facade. At the security desk in the lobby, he explained that he had come to see Heather Farris, the Book Page editor. The guard spoke briefly into a headset mike and nodded him to a bank of elevators with copper-colored doors. Riding an elevator up, Lingenfelter felt like a surreal avatar of himself.

  Heather greeted him warmly. She had a mole on her left jaw on which he fixated. At some moments the olive-complexioned editor glowed like a movie star, at others she went as sallow as a jaundice sufferer—shifts that discomfited Lingenfelter as he tried to explain why he had come and what he wanted. Her mole had him hypnotized. His mission had him stuttering.

  Finally, Heather broke in: “Our so-called Squawk Jock doesn’t meet folks face to face. He wants to avoid bribery, intimidation, even outright threats on his life. Some people will try almost anything to get a squawk of theirs in print.”

  “I believe it,” Lingenfelter said. “But Chick’s strangulation—this whole series of murders—should alter things radically.”

  “It has. We’ve dropped the ‘Squawk of the Week.’ And the police already know the Jock’s identity. Your need to know, however, seems low-level, if not nonexistent.”

  Lingenfelter said that he had deduced the link between the “Squawk of the Week” and the murders early on, that Chick Morrow was a friend, and that he had a powerful sense that “The Squawk Box” channeled a current of amorphous evil in the city. The Squawk Jock’s weekly selection of a champion squawk focused this evil and put it into deadly real-world play. He, Lingenfelter, understood the mind of the typical squawker as well as, if not better than, anyone. Moreover, for the entire city’s sake, Heather had an obligation to tell him the Squawk Jock’s identity.

  “My God, Harry, you really do believe you’re Ethan Dedicos. What can you do that the police can’t?”

  “Something—something more than they’ve managed. Tell me, Heather.”

  “He’d kill me.” Heather locked her fingers and extended both hands in a tension-reducing stretch. “Oh, not literally of course.”

  “I’ll say a friend on the police force tipped me. He’ll never suspect you.”

  Review copies of books—bound galleys, photocopied typescripts, finished hardcovers—teetered on Heather’s desk in misarranged stacks. She drummed her fingers on the dust jacket of an illustrated art book titled Topographical Abstracts of the Human Body. She squinted at Lingenfelter. She exhaled and said:

  “Sylvester Jowell.”

  “The Harbinger’s art critic?” This revelation was so unexpected that Lingenfelter thought it bogus, an obvious dodge. “You’re kidding.”

  “Go see him. Check the far end of this floor.” Heather gestured, accidentally toppling a stack of books. “The next time you visit, don’t ask me to play stool pigeon.”

  Lingenfelter nodded goodbye and wandered among the reporters’ workstations toward Sylvester Jowell’s office, fearful that as soon as he had stepped out of earshot, Heather would telephone the police to confess what she had just done.

  Sylvester Jowell! Lingenfelter marveled. The man wrote hoity-toity reviews of art gallery openings, single-artist retrospectives, etc. He had two Harvard degrees, a Pulitzer Prize for art criticism, and a citywide reputation as an erudite snob. Had he really agreed to take on the proletarian task of editing “The Squawk Box”? Did his duties as art critic give him so much leisure—and so little leftover discrimination—that he gladly compiled that daily burlesque of good taste? Maybe his well-known fondness for outsider art had a literary counterpart. Atlanta’s squawks probably charmed him in the same way as did the childlike visual artifacts of Grandma Moses and Howard Finster.

  Jowell’s cubicle stood empty. A reporter dressed in satiny gray, including even his
tie, intercepted Lingenfelter. The illustrious Mr. Jowell, this reporter said, had taken himself for the umpteenth time to the High Museum for yet another encounter with a special exhibition of the horrific paintings of the late British artist Francis Bacon. If Lingenfelter hurried over there, he could find Mr. Jowell in the galleries devoted to this prestigious show.

  As Lingenfelter turned to go, the reporter asked, “Do you like Bacon?”

  “Usually only on a BLT.”

  The High Museum suggested a modernistic castle-keep made of big bone-white Lego blocks. The long-running Francis Bacon exhibit had not attracted families or young children—a parental outcry had put an end to one scheduled middle-school field trip—and its most devout fans had already seen it many times. So Lingenfelter had no trouble getting in—for ten dollars—or striding up the access ramp to the maze of rooms filled with Bacon’s unsettling images.

  Lingenfelter declined a headset providing commentary on each of the paintings. He peered about in foreign-feeling awe. The hardwood floors seemed to rise under him like concrete slabs on hidden hydraulic lifts, and the pictures, many under glass, assaulted him with bloody reds and opalescent grays. Moving slowly, he gaped at Bacon’s huge renderings of screaming popes, butchered cow carcasses, feral dogs, and distorted three-part crucifixions. The show bemused and sickened Lingenfelter, who sidled into a small room with only a water cooler and a wicker bench for furnishings. He sat on the bench, his head hanging forward.

  “Too much for you, eh?”

  Lingenfelter raised his head. Sylvester Jowell—recognizable from the photo that accompanied his art columns—stared at Lingenfelter without pity or even much interest. He modeled a burgundy jersey with its sleeves pushed up and thrust his hands deep in the pockets of pleated gray trousers.

  “I’ve never seen such ugly work on canvas before.”

  “Didn’t you read my eloquent warnings in the Harbinger? I’ve written about this show like no other.”

  Lingenfelter’s nape hair bristled. “I know who you are,” he said. “In addition to the Harbinger’s art critic, I mean.”

  “Then you have the advantage of me.”

  “You’re the Squawk Jock.”

  Sylvester Jowell winced. “I loathe that sobriquet. I loathe the feature’s title, for that matter. I lobbied for ‘Cavils and Kvetches,’ you know.”

  “I had no idea. A friend said the Squawk Jock hated highfalutin stuff, but ‘Cavils and Kvetches’ sounds pretentious as hell.”

  Jowell crossed his arms. “Perhaps I do know who you are.”

  Lingenfelter repressed an urge to scream. “Who?”

  “The psychopath using my ‘Squawk’s of the Week’ as templates for outrageously nasty murders.”

  This accusation stunned Lingenfelter. He wanted to shout it down—to jump up, wrap his fingers around Jowell’s neck, and squeeze until, flushing scarlet and wheezing, Jowell recanted the insult. Of course, those very actions would fulfill Jowell’s every vile expectation of him. As Lingenfelter shook with rage and self-disgust, Jowell took two or three steps back, his body limned against the folds of the pearl-hued drapes cloaking the opposite wall. He glimmered before these drapes like an object in a cheap special-effects shot of a matter-transmission field.

  “Don’t abandon me here,” Lingenfelter said. “You know I’m not the killer.”

  “How do I know that?”

  “Because you’re either doing the killings yourself or artfully directing them.”

  “Ah.” Jowell smiled. “Rest assured that I have no intention of abandoning you here, Mr. Lingenfelter.”

  His image—as shiny as a tinfoil cutout—steadied before the headache-inducing dazzle of the curtain.

  At that moment, three figures—like three-dimensional projections of the images in some of Francis Bacon’s paintings—walked through the chamber in single file. The first was an airline clerk wearing a bloody cap and a bloody bandage over the stub at the end of his right arm. The second was a portly man in a chalk-striped Italian business suit carrying his own swollen, shocked-looking head in his handless arms. These grotesque persons passed through the chamber without speaking. The third figure—a fit-looking priest in a black cassock and a jaunty black biretta—halted directly in front of Sylvester Jowell. He turned to look at Lingenfelter, who prepared to avert his gaze.

  “Excuse me,” the interloper said in an odd nasal voice. “Do you know in which room I can find Study after Velazquez, Number One?”

  Lingenfelter experienced profound relief that the shade of Chick Morrow, bearing the signs of his strangulation, had not posed this question. “No, sir, I’m afraid I don’t,” he said belatedly.

  The priest consulted a photocopied list. “Then how about a painting called Blood on the Floor?”

  “I’m wandering lost in this place, Father. But, to my eye, every painting here seems to celebrate lostness.”

  “Do you think so?” the priest said. Then he recited, “‘If all art is but an imitation of nature, then this Francis Bacon character must have really liked imitating its nastiest processes.’”

  “That sounds like a squawk,” Lingenfelter said.

  “Sadly, an unpublished one.” The priest either smiled or scowled. “Forgive my intrusion.” When he walked from the chamber into the next room, the air in his cassock’s wake actually crackled.

  Sylvester Jowell touched a finger to his face, which shone like a life mask lit from behind by a candle. Overlapping taped commentaries buzzed in the headsets of people in other rooms, a faint out-of-sync chorus.

  “What did you want of me?” Jowell asked Lingenfelter.

  “A telephone number. An e-mail address. A name. The identity of the ‘Squawk of the Week’ killer.”

  “What if I admitted my sole culpability?”

  “I’d turn you in to the police as a prime suspect. I’d also fight to haul you into the stationhouse to sign such a confession.”

  “‘Prime’?” Jowell said. “Provocative word.” He shimmered in his slacks and jersey. His skin glimmered. The folds of the gray curtain behind him foregrounded themselves so that they resembled the bars of a cage. Jowell grabbed them with his pale hands. Then he let go and peeled back the front of his knit shirt to reveal the fatty wings of his own ribcage. Without wholly dissolving, his face melted. His mouth opened, but no sound issued from it. The curtain at his back flickered like an electric field, its folds continuing to mimic the solidity of prison bars. Jowell’s body and face phased in and out of reality, wavering between freedom and encagement.

  Elsewhere, the sounds of shuffling feet and talking headsets told Lingenfelter that he had not suffered a psychotic break. Upon entering the show, he had seen a framed black-and-white photograph of Francis Bacon, middle-aged and shirtless. Triumphant in his own frank animality, Bacon held aloft in each hand a naked flank of meat. The distorted image of Jowell with his chest split open qualified as a living take on that still photographic image.

  Lingenfelter leapt to his feet.

  Jowell vanished like early-morning fog. The isolated little room congealed around Lingenfelter like aspic. The drapes on the wall had folds again rather than bars, but the chamber held him fast. It held him until a member of museum security and two Atlanta policemen hurried in, handcuffed him, and escorted him out of the exhibit under the astonished gazes of a dozen visitors. Lingenfelter wondered where all these people had come from.

  • Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage, but tell that to somebody who can’t interpenetrate them like Superman.

  • Tomorrow my wife will receive word that I am taking the spring short course in license-plate design.

  • If the measure of a good resort is the quality of the people you meet, this one deserves a minus five stars.

  Obsessively, Lingenfelter mentally framed squawks of a confessional sort. (It looked as if he had been framed himself.) Doing so helped pass the time. He had used his one telephone call to ring up Ernie’s sister’s house. Then
he had asked Ernie to contact his lawyer, his wife, his agent, and Heather Farris at the Harbinger. Maybe she had some pull with local law enforcement. She could certainly testify to his good character, his reliability as a book reviewer, and his essential innocence, even if he did write down-and-dirty mystery thrillers.

  In the presence of his daunted attorney, Cleveland Bream, the police had grilled Lingenfelter about the squawk murders. Nan did not call. Later, the police summoned him from a fusty basement cell for a visit with Ernie Salter in their favorite interrogation room. All through this low-key talk, Lingenfelter knew that detectives were watching through a two-way mirror, eavesdropping on every word. Ernie promised to do all he could to help and then drove home. Heather Farris neither telephoned nor visited. Back downstairs, Lingenfelter wrote his private squawks.

  Eventually, a guard approached to inform him that he had another visitor. “Don’t get up,” the guard said. “This one’s coming to you—an honest-to-God Catholic priest. So don’t do anything antisocial or violent, okay?”

  “A priest?”

  The guard read from a manifest: “Diego Fahey, S. J.”

  “I’m not Catholic,” Lingenfelter protested. But the guard simply ignored him and left. Minutes later, the same spectral priest who had spoken to him in the High Museum loomed over him like a vulturine confessor.

  Lingenfelter’s hands went clammy, as if encased in latex gloves. His stomach cramped repeatedly. Did anyone ever bother to search a priest? This one’s cassock sleeves could have concealed a National Guard arsenal—or, at least, a carving knife or two, an automatic pistol, and a fold-up machete.

  “Pleased to see you again,” Father Fahey said. “Sorry it’s under these dreary circumstances.”

  “What’s the S. J. stand for?”