by James, Terry
“Did your husband have any enemies?”
“I thought you were only interested in his books.”
“Force of habit.”
“Walter was a writer,” she said. “Writers sit in locked rooms all day making up stories. He scarcely had any friends, let alone enemies.”
I nodded and adjusted my hat. “Were you here when that man came brandishing his gun?”
“Yes.”
“Did you happen to see him?”
“No,” she said. “I was in the kitchen.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Three weeks ago.”
“Did your husband mention what he looked like, what kind of car he was driving, anything that might help identify this person?”
“I’ve already told the police everything I know about that.”
I thanked her for her time and opened the screen door.
As I was walking away, she said:
“He was dressed like Walter’s detective.”
I turned around.
“Excuse me?”
She repeated herself.
“Could you be a little more specific?”
“He was dressed like you,” she said. It was less a statement than a broadside from the safety of the doorway.
I thanked her again for her time and, reiterating my condolences, made my way across and off the porch. She closed the door behind me. I lingered in the yard for a moment, soaking up the welcome blast of heat and sunlight.
7
I SPENT THAT evening rereading Guttersnipe. The outrage was addictive. I read until about one a.m. then turned off the lamp. Half an hour later my mind was still churning over that strange woman in that strange house. It was as if she hadn’t set foot outside for so long that she had no idea what season it was. Even allowing for the disorientation of grief, there was something very peculiar about her. I could still feel her cold grip on my wrist as she tugged me inside, an urgency which upon reflection seemed less predicated on the temperature than on prying neighbors. I couldn’t shake the images of that dark, cold, oppressively antiquated living room, the fire blazing away in the hearth, my own mannered fingers tweezing the dainty handle of the china teacup. That full-throated cackle of hers after I had laid out the Griswold case kept echoing through my brain, its pitch and volume somehow incompatible with a husband fresh dead.
I turned the lamp back on and got up and dressed. I grabbed my coat and hat and left the building. Gone were the days when the freeway at that time of morning was a man’s private speedway. Nowadays the twin rivers of cars never ceased, never diminished, no matter the time, gushing like corpuscles through the city’s arteries, red in one direction, white in the other. I joined the pulse at the dark and empty coliseum. Half an hour later I exited at Sir Francis Drake. The roar of the freeway receding behind me, I rolled down my window and eased my foot off the accelerator.
At the mouth of Curzon’s cul-de-sac I pulled over and cut the engine. All the houses up the block were bathed in the spectral aura of mercury vapor streetlights. All, that is, but the Morris house, which stood shrouded in total darkness, as if the developers, powerless to wipe the house off the map, had settled for depriving it of illumination. I sat for a while looking at that incongruous silhouette, its twin gables piercing the dim yellow belly of the sky. I opened the glove box and grabbed my flashlight.
It was as quiet as the grave out there. Silently I trod the sidewalk, marveling at the persistence of the heat. If anything, the air under the suffocating blanket of suburban night felt hotter than it had during the day. Halfway up the block the chorus of crickets, spooked by my arrival, resumed their shimmering pulsations, the bravest first, then, as if shamed by example, the remaining ten million or so. In the front yards, children’s bicycles lay oblivious to the concept of theft. The cars in the driveways, most of which had been absent during the day, rested equally confident in their distance from vice, their shapeless heft speaking of smooth rides to subterranean parking garages.
When I reached the cinderblock wall separating the Morris property from the house to the right of it, I availed myself of its shadow to venture down the strip of dead grass and weeds along the side of the house.
The back yard was an irregularly-shaped clearing in what otherwise appeared to be a vast expanse of native woodland, the grasses ceding ground to dense black masses of deciduous trees. I paused at the corner of the house, amazed by the noises emanating from the darkness—frogs croaking, owls hooting, the yowling of feral cats, all in delightful syncopation with the choir of crickets. More uncanny yet, sparks appeared to be rising from the grass, swirling around before being extinguished. Only when one flitted past my head did I realize that the erratic yellow-green flickers were fireflies. It was my first encounter with these magical insects. Some abnormal pressure system must have driven them from their native domain. I stood watching them for a long time, mesmerized by their silent pulsations.
I found the ladder, as I knew I would, on the ground against the side of a shed at the back of the yard. Before returning to the porch, I stood enchanted for several more minutes, gazing into the darkness of the throbbing woods, the soft breaths of cooler air tempting me to venture into its darkest recesses, to lie in the damp mulch and sleep off the dregs of the world’s longest hangover. It seemed as though I were on the edge of some primeval forest, untouched by man, so dark and cool and wild were its earthy aromas. No doubt this was all a trick of night. I knew that if I ventured out there I would only find a wall, beyond which would be the back neighbor’s swimming pool.
I carried the ladder, an old wooden thing with rusty catches, back through the prickly grass and weeds. Leaning it against the roof of the porch, I tested my weight on the first few rungs before climbing up. The well-baked shingles crackled underfoot like charred embers. I crept as lightly as possible to the nearest window and peered through it with the edge of an eye. The reflections of the streetlights on the glass made it difficult to make out much of anything inside, though it seemed unlikely that an old woman, believing her husband to have been murdered a few nights ago, would be sleeping in a room without the curtains drawn.
Squatting before the window, I placed the flat of my palms against the pane and pressed upwards. The frame jerked up about six inches then jammed with an awful squeal. I ducked below the sill and waited, listening for half a minute. Then squatting again I got both hands under the frame and worked it up with short, controlled thrusts to a gap of about two feet. Still hearing nothing save the crickets, I pulled the flashlight from my pocket, rose up, swiveled the head and aimed it in.
By all appearances—a wall of books, a desk and office chair, a floor lamp beside an armchair—it was the study. The door was closed. I trained the beam onto the floor near the window and, seeing no obstacles, turned off the flashlight and climbed in.
The armchair was a blocky thing with stumpy wooden legs, upholstered in olive-green velour. The piebald lay of the nap, alternately flat and bristled, in broad, straight-edged swathes, indicated a recent steam-cleaning. But even by the weak light of my flashlight I could see the discoloration of the bloodstain. The brunt of the scrubbing had been done on the right half (from the sitter’s vantage), suggesting he had been left-handed. I turned the flashlight towards the wall to my left. No sign of a bullet hole. I turned it back to the chair.
Standing before that dreadful thing, lit only by the merciless beam of my flashlight, I imagined with perfect clarity the moment Walter Morris put the barrel to his head. Perhaps it was the lingering ache in my own temples that made me see it with such nauseating precision. I felt the adrenaline that must have been coursing through his veins as the cold circle of steel pressed against his skull. I felt the mist of clammy sweat oozing from his pores. I felt, without knowing the particulars of its origins, the black despair and longing for death that, after a long and seemingly productive life, had delivered him to his final moment. His eyes were open, staring straight through me, through everything,
clear to the end of the universe. He mumbled a farewell to his wife, begged her forgiveness. Then, closing his eyes, he pulled the trigger.
The floor was hardwood, weathered oak boards laid out in stairstep parquet. Judging from the scuffing near the chair, the legs had habitually rested a few inches back from its current position. I knelt down and looked under the chair. Nothing. I lifted the cushion, examining the underside, which judging by the sag and the general wear of the fabric appeared to have spent more time facing up than down. I set it aside and felt around in the gaps, retrieving a ball-point pen, a popsicle stick, a quarter, two nickels, and a penny. I pocketed the quarter and returned the rest along with the cushion.
The desk was a big gray metal thing, like something from a government office. On it stood a green glass banker’s lamp, a typewriter, two stacked metal paper trays with some papers in them, a blue felt writing blotter, a mason jar of assorted pens and pencils, and a small wind-up clock presently reading 2:16. I pulled the papers from the top tray and leafed through them. There were about fifteen pages, covered in the black scrawl of a lefty. I skimmed through it, looking for anything familiar, but it didn’t appear to be Conway stuff.
I went through the middle drawer first. Among the usual miscellany, I found a clump of Silly Putty, flattened to about a quarter of an inch, in a roughly oval shape a few inches wide and slightly longer. On one side it appeared to have been pressed to a newspaper, for in addition to half a dozen truncated lines of backwards text, it carried the faint impression of the bottom of a photograph in which not much was discernible beyond a man’s shoe and a bit of his pants cuff. On the left edge were a few thin vertical bands, perhaps a ventilation grate on the wall of a building. A host of strange feelings and recollections swept through me as I stared down at that rubbery time capsule resting on my open palm. I saw my old bedroom in the house on Baltimore Drive, where I spent many a lonely afternoon reading and rereading my comic books, yearning for the day when I would be big enough to go out and fight the bad guys myself. I saw that grimy gray carpet, the white cinderblock walls, the little bed with the tubular metal frame painted a pinkish color (my mother had painted it in the back yard from a can of house paint). That room was my bunker, my place of refuge from the battles of my mother and father. Holed up in there against the outer bombardment, I vanquished villains with a single stroke of my broadsword. I dispatched them with pistols, rifles, ray guns. I blew them up with hand grenades and atomic bombs. Sometimes I beat them to oblivion with my bare fists. Not all my fantasies were of death and destruction. I liked to draw and color as well, or take impressions from my comic books with copious wads of Silly Putty, transferring the captured pictures and words onto the pages of a notebook that I reserved especially for that operation, in this way creating from those used-up pages entirely new sequences and stories of my own invention, however faint they might have been upon arrival in their new home.
What was a grown man doing with a clump of Silly Putty in his desk drawer? I inspected the impression more closely but was unable to determine the context from the snatch of text, or if there was any correlation between the picture and the words. The text, backwards on the Putty, read as follows:
time. They rely on several privat
a vital link between the agency
f which is Ruth Brenner. A sin
“a difference in people’s liv
fact that she herself gre
t. Jerome’s, bu
By all appearances it was just a random impression, perhaps a momentary indulgence in nostalgia. I put the Silly Putty in my coat pocket.
I was about to inspect the bookshelves when a loud creak broke the silence. I flicked off the flashlight and froze. A gently rising patter of slippered footsteps sounded from the other side of the wall, growing louder as they neared. A few centuries later they reached their apex of clarity and volume, held steady for another aeon, then gradually receded to something approaching their original softness. I heard the click of a light switch, the footsteps changing timbre, the clatter and latch of a loose door handle. Then nothing save the crickets chiming through the open window, until, somewhere near the end of time, a toilet flushed. The faint drone of the running water grew abruptly louder as the slippers passed the door again. The floorboard creaked. Eventually the toilet did stop running, though the pipes somewhere else in the house went on making a moaning racket for several more minutes before grinding to a shuddering halt.
I stood motionless in the dark for a long time afterwards. Then, turning the flashlight back on, I got on my hands and knees and looked around the floor under the desk. I shined the flashlight over every beam. I stood up and aimed it through a variety of possible bullet trajectories.
The bookshelves occupied most of the right-hand wall. Plenty of pages there for a bullet to hide between. He was a surprisingly well-read man, considering the crap he wrote. In addition to a 26-volume encyclopedia and a series, twice as broad, called Great Books of the Western World, the shelves contained a wide range of titles, too numerous to catalog here. I found his own books, that is Baxter Conway’s, occupying two shelves at waist level, two or three copies of each title, some in hardback with dust jackets, most of them paperbacks with lurid covers of scantily clad women sprawled out on sofas against the backdrop of a city. Emblazoned in bold white capitals across the entire top third of every cover was my name, ten times larger than the humble “Baxter Conway” relegated to the bottom.
I pulled out ten of the paperbacks and stuffed them into every available pocket. I gave the room another quick look then turned off the flashlight, parted the curtains, and climbed out the window, carefully closing it behind me.
8
I BEGAN WITH Due Diligence, the third book in the series (I was missing Blinded by the Sun and Fair Market Murder, the second and ninth installments.) It was the Buckler case. Beautiful young Nancy Buckler had asked me to investigate a series of unusual anonymous gifts that had been received by her father, Red Buckler, half of Buckler and Steine, Wholesale Furriers. This was about ten years ago. One gift, a dead cat with a mysterious note in a silver locket around its neck, ended up giving Red Buckler a heart attack, which ultimately killed him. After that Arnold Steine (and his sultry wife Leila, who made more than one pass at me) began receiving anonymous gifts as well. My suspects were Leila’s nudist son, Robin, who was Nancy Buckler’s boyfriend, and a host of servants. The gifts included some poisoned egg salad, a petrified starfish, a burned book, and a bundle of soiled diapers, all accompanied by cryptic and ominous notes, which seemed to reference a mysterious and violent incident in the past of both Buckler and Steine. I worked out the significance of the gifts and the link that connected the notes and arranged a dramatic surprise that trapped the criminal.
It wasn’t my intention to read the entire novel, but I soon found myself sucked into it, reading it word for word. As with Guttersnipe, I read in a state of enthralled revulsion, unable to tear my eyes away. It was as much my outrage at the brazen theft as disbelief at how mercilessly he had butchered reality that made me see it through to the bitter end. When at last I looked up from the book, my apartment was flooded with morning sunlight.
Over the course of the next five days, largely while waiting for Mrs. Fletcher to emerge from places like Thrifty Nickel and Bargain Town, I read every one of those novels cover to cover. Despite already knowing the solutions to the crimes, I devoured them to the very last page, desperate to know how it would all get resolved. On the one hand I was revolted to see my cases, my name, my life put to the service of such gimcrackery. On the other hand, it was with a kind of perverse fascination that I watched that cardboard Eddie King moving through that cardboard city, tangling with vicious villains, cracking wise with cornball cops, lusting in shorthand after tacky tarts and trollops. It was a world in which one man stoically patched the cracks in the dam, single-handedly holding back the flood of mankind’s inherent vice. All these outrageous events, the corpses piling up, the blackmailing, t
he scores of encounters with shady characters, the brawls, the drunken moping, the steamy romances—this veritable maelstrom of activity was miraculously crammed into the space of three seemingly endless days and nights. No case of mine has ever been wrapped up in less than eight weeks.
The facts were there, sure, but the characters bore almost no resemblance to their real life counterparts. A perfunctory attempt at physical description, riddled with clichés like everything else in the novels, was the extent of Morris’s efforts to faithfully portray the lives of the people whose names he had pilfered. He wasn’t at all interested in what might have driven these individuals to do what they had done: the miserable childhoods, the abusive fathers, the endless series of bad breaks. In his hands they were just bad people, through and through.
His rendition of me was the hardest to swallow. In his hands Eddie King was more an absence than a presence. Less a man than a mood, a brooding, wounded cynicism, what little there was of him I found utterly preposterous. He never seemed to sleep. His diet consisted of nothing but steaks and fries. He drank about a gallon of bourbon a day and never suffered any ill effects. He was either impervious or oblivious to all the gorgeous women all but begging him to sleep with them. He could kill a man in one scene and get his shoes shined in the next. He was a man of deep (I would say pathological) principle. God knows how he paid his rent. By my calculations he couldn’t have made more than three hundred dollars over the course of the entire series.
In short, Morris’s Eddie King was nothing like me. He had steel-gray eyes (mine are brown), bristly black hair (brown again, thinning at the top), an aquiline nose (mine is almost African in width). He kept massaging his right earlobe with his thumb and middle finger, which to the best of my knowledge I have never done in my life. Most ridiculous of all, he had “the body of a linebacker—shoulders as wide as a dump truck, a chest like a bank vault.” I am five foot six and weigh a hundred and fifty-five pounds. The one thing about me Morris did get right, which made me think he must have been near enough to hear me at least once, was my “velvety voice,” to which the occasional good luck I have had with women must be attributed.
