by James, Terry
I wasn’t the only character given short shrift. Everyone in those novels seemed to have been plucked straight from the rack of stock characters. Men in scarlet-lapelled smoking jackets with hawklike faces and piercing black eyes. Solid men with square, rugged features the color of raw beef. Queers with slender, well-manicured hands and faintly contemptuous smiles. All those male glowerings and female gigglings, all those thoughtfully bitten underlips, all those wide and dewy and innocent eyes. The quiet sobbing, deep-drawn breaths, shudderings at recollections. The dialogues, of course, were all invented, in the most stilted language imaginable, littered with out-dated slang, wooden deliveries, long-winded expositions, language that, apart from the likes of Hicks and Stiles, I have never heard any real human being speak.
Still, I must give credit where it is due. Baxter Conway could tell a ripping yarn. He knew how to take the inchoate grist of reality and mill it into something that gave the reader an illusion of coherence, however insubstantial it might have been. What he lost in detail and veracity he gained in headlong momentum. Once you started one of those books you couldn’t put it down until it was finished. In my more generous moods I was intrigued by how Morris had transformed those strange, almost incomprehensible events into something else entirely, with its own peculiar kind of life. But mostly I was left with the indignant feeling that this wasn’t the way things were at all.
As the initial stab of violation began to recede, replaced by a more sober hunger for knowledge and justice, I tried to read more objectively, with an eye towards ferreting out the traitor(s). At first it seemed impossible to imagine a single individual possessing such thorough knowledge not only of all my cases but of my physical movements around the city, the details of my office and my apartment, etc. But upon closer inspection I realized that this at times almost terrifying omniscience was in fact an illusion. Only in Guttersnipe had Morris made any attempt at all to describe the contours and textures of my world. Having already sketched out a few details in that first novel, he must have seen no further need to do it again. Just as his readers filled in the gaps from their own imaginations, I had been filling them in from my own experience. I began to reconsider the possibility that he had acted alone, that he actually had written the novels solely from my files and whatever he could glean from the newspapers.
At various points during my reading marathon, I pulled the relevant case files from the filing cabinet and went through them again, again trying to reconstruct the events, but, as with Guttersnipe, my memories of the cases seemed to have been all but obliterated by the novel in question, replaced by a rag-bag of contrivance and cliché.
9
I WAS IN the middle of King’s Ransom, the eighth book, the day Mrs. Fletcher decided to slum it. She was driving south on 16th Street when instead of turning left on Naples Boulevard and continuing on to the coast road and home as usual, she drove on another two blocks then turned right onto Buchanan Street, which took her directly into the Silage.
If the Silage is the city’s heart of darkness, Buchanan is its clotted aorta. The storied purveyors of cutlets and tenderloins may have long since vanished, but the six-block stretch between Taft and Garfield Streets is still called Butcher’s Row. If you need someone murdered on the cheap, a stroll down Buchanan offers no shortage of competition. It was no place for Heidi Fletcher to be showing off her pearl necklace.
The car alone was enough to set the urchins scurrying like rats in every direction, shouting the news down the alleys to big brothers and gang leaders that the Queen of England was piloting Fort Knox down Butcher’s Row. I might have only been hired to follow her, to report back to her husband on the nature of her excursions, but the laws of conscience, drafted in a higher court than ours, demanded that I protect her, from her own stupidity if need be. I closed the distance to half a block, ready to intervene the moment the vultures descended.
Only when she finally got it into her head to get off of Buchanan did I begin to breathe a little easier. But no sooner had I relaxed, letting a full block drift back between us, than she turned into the underground parking garage between Hayes and Monroe, a two-dollar-a-day affair used by the small-time lawyers and bail bondsmen who populate west Bond Street, two blocks down. I pulled to the curb opposite the entrance and peered with what I can only assume was a dumbfounded expression into the darkness that had swallowed her. I waited. A few minutes later she walked out, on three-inch heels, in a stunning aqua-green, open-back silk dress. I shielded my face with my hat brim until the clacks of her heels had advanced some distance up the block, then I got out and crossed to the other side of the street.
If Morris were describing this he probably would have said something like, She walked back to Buchanan and disappeared around the corner. Factually correct but devoid of all sense of awe. It is probably safe to say that it had been more than a century since such a sight had been seen on this block of Pierce Street. Everything about her walking up that sidewalk was a negation of reality. The drab gray concrete, the iron grilles, the glaucous tubing of dead neon signs may as well have been dreary stock footage of the city in front of which this Technicolor dream goddess was gliding. Beneath the cascade of golden tresses her naked back was a virgin landscape fringed by the sharply slanted V of her dress, the valley of her lower back fluting gracefully up and fanning out into the gently palpitating ridges of her shoulder blades. Her ass was a miracle of nature, a formation of perfect rotundity, not so much enveloped by the vapory silk as of a piece with it, as the skin is to a pear. Fortunately the only people on the sidewalk at that moment were an old Chinese man and two middle-aged Filipinas. I can only assume that the hardship of their lives had blinded them to the uncanny, for though their downcast eyes did briefly lift, this heavenly apparition was clearly no match for the gravity of the daily grind.
I jogged the rest of the way to the corner and craned my head around it. A pair of predatory eyes had already locked on her. Faced with the improbability of what he was seeing, the guy froze slackjawed in his tracks for a three-count before recovering his senses.
“Goddamn!” he shouted. Another dozen pairs of eyes swiveled in their sockets. I stepped around the corner. This was enough to halt the advance. They didn’t need to know the precise nature of my business with her to gather that she wasn’t alone. Still, refusing to be cowed on their own turf, they let rip a volley of ungentlemanly expressions. Paying them no heed, either out of fear or willful deafness, Mrs. Fletcher likewise took no notice of their sudden change of heart. Had she been more observant she might have turned around, effectively ending my brief term of employment with her husband.
Instead she stepped over to the door of the Ambassador Hotel and pressed the buzzer. I turned to admire an imitation Rolex in the pawn shop window two shops down. I kept her in my peripheral vision until she was buzzed in, at which point I turned around and eyed the pack at my leisure. It eyed me back. I hung out there for a few minutes, enjoying the companionship of my revolver, then walked over and took a look through the window. A fat man with a toupee about as convincing as a dead crow was standing behind the reception counter reading the racing news. He was alone. I pressed the buzzer. He looked my way, folded his paper with a certain umbrage that suggested he had a good guess why I was there, and buzzed me in.
The lobby, for lack of a better word, had all the charm of a root canal. I approached the counter.
“The bird that just flew in here,” I said. “She ever been here before?”
“That’s privileged information, pal”
“Nothing in this pus hole is privileged.” I took out my wallet and showed him my detective’s license. He wasted a synapse or two on it.
“Private dick, eh? How’s business?”
“Slow. How about we speed it up.”
He stared at me for a good ten seconds. Things were going on behind his torpid eyes. Whether or not they deserved to be called thoughts was another matter.
“I don’t know nothin about her.”
“I’d be surprised if you did,” I said. “Has she been here before?”
“Never seen her.”
“What did she say to you?”
“Why should I tell you?”
I took a five from my wallet and set it on the counter.
“I’d appreciate it if you did.”
He studied it for a few seconds then succumbed. His fingernails looked like something a cat had given up on.
“A man came in, about half an hour ago,” he said. “Real cracker barrel.”
“What did he look like?”
“How should I know?”
I put another five on the counter.
“Save your money, pal. I ain’t any good at descriptions.”
“What do you mean ‘cracker barrel?’”
“Big cheese. Fat cat. Goose liver.”
I let it go.
“So what about this guy?”
“He asked for a room.”
“Is he still here?”
“Unless he climbed down the fire escape.”
“What’s his room number?”
“Slipped my mind.”
I scanned the key rack for missing numbers. Too many to ponder.
“Give me a room,” I said.
“How long?”
“Couple hours.”
“Ten bucks.”
I put fifteen on the counter. I could claim it as expenses. He turned and pulled a key from the rack and handed it to me.
“You oughta be comfortable in that one.”
“Treat yourself to a manicure,” I said.
Before heading up the stairs I went back out and around the corner to my car, opened the trunk and retrieved my kit. Back in the hotel I climbed the fetid stairwell to the third floor.
If the lobby was screaming for a dentist, the third floor corridor was a serious sinus infection. A chorus of snoring, wheezing, sputtering, and hacking behind closed doors accompanied me down the snot green passage. I paused at the door of 312 and listened. Hearing nothing, I carried on to 313, unlocked the door, and went in.
The room was furnished with a single bed, a chest of drawers, a wooden chair, and the stale air of loneliness. I closed the door and stood beside it for a moment, arrested by a vision of my retirement. There I was, sad old bag of bones, prostrate on the bed, watching day by day the mold spores colonize the ceiling, pondering not the great questions of life and death, for I had long since lost the stomach for mysteries, but whether or not I should bestir myself to make the journey down the hall for a shower or lie there in my own stench for another day or two.
I walked across the room to the window. It wasn’t a view you would find in a travel brochure, but the sight of sunshine on brick and iron was enough to scour my mind of such morbid thoughts.
The bed was next to the wall shared with 312. I opened my kit and removed the stethoscope. I placed the bell against my chest and listened to my heartbeat, a ritual of mine whenever I don the scope. The sound of my old friend knocking around in there always intrigues me. At that moment it was hammering away as loud as coupling boxcars, the adrenaline surge from tailing Mrs. Fletcher down Buchanan apparently still oiling the works. I stretched out on the bed and pressed the bell against the wall. All quiet save the termites. So it remained for the next few minutes.
The movement began with a single plaintive squeak of bedsprings. Then two distinct pairs of shoes, one light and crisp, the other heavy and dull, moving in different directions across the floor. A wooden chair creaked to accommodate someone’s weight. The man cleared his throat, conjuring a vague impression of ill-humored stoutness, an image which I retained for the duration of our brief aural acquaintance. A series of shufflings and stirrings followed, not unlike the fidgets of an audience before the start of an opera: the padded thuds of unshod feet, the creaking of the chair, the deafening clank of a belt buckle striking the floor. Then silence, from which there eventually arose a low, monotonous rumble, rolling out a phrase about five words long, their clipped edges rendering them unintelligible. In reply the bedsprings lightly chirped.
Over the next few minutes, a recurring pattern developed: the man murmuring something in his burnished baritone, the woman (who I couldn’t help but envision, absent all visual proof, as Mrs. Fletcher) replying with contented mewling. Her voice, however muffled and unnaturally amplified in my ears, had the sweetest tone, like the tolling of a village bell on a lazy summer’s day, barely perceived from a distant field. A tranquil voice, softly fluting some half-forgotten melody.
Suddenly the chair squawked like a startled goose. Graceless feet thumped the floor. A groan of mild exertion accompanied two bony knocks to the floorboards. Then came a long stretch of concentrated silence, a good five minutes at least, culminating in a distinctly feminine insuck of breath.
After a languorous fermata, the movement proper began with a trotting andante of squeaking bedsprings. The man tended to vocalize in heavyhearted, downward-curving phrases, often made up of alternating semitones and fifths—a zigzagging pattern that lent his delivery a doom-drunk, Wagnerian heft. At times he threw himself into the role with infectious, almost loony enthusiasm, occasionally plucking off higher notes, though on the whole he seemed to be applying the sustaining pedal to his voice, limiting his register to a haze of resonating tones with all the dynamic range of a lowing buffalo. Even Mrs. Fletcher was grounded in the same colorless key for perilously long periods. The problem, in my opinion, was less with the performers than the score, which despite countless attempts at innovation over the millennia has proven remarkably resistant to change. No doubt the conductor was also partly to blame, wielding his baton, by the sound of it, as though it were a blackjack.
With a few soft, shuddering strains, the man proclaimed that heaven was within his grasp. Mrs. Fletcher belted out seventeen high E’s. Finally, fraught B-flat minor gave way to a simpler, starker A minor, on which the rhapsody ended. A stupendous ending, the feeling of resolution immense, all the more so for what the wall and the stethoscope had left to my imagination. A touching coda followed, an adaggio rephrasing of the finale, which gave a tender coloring to the preceding frenzy.
I pulled the earpieces from my ears and lay there until I could no longer feel the beating of my heart.
10
THEY WEREN’T THE sort for long goodbyes. No farewells, my lovely. In fact they said nothing at all. I heard the man’s footsteps in the hallway. Hers didn’t follow. The door closed. I gave him ten paces.
He was of medium build, well-dressed from what I could see of the back of him. This guy was no cracker barrel. He reeked of money. The tailoring of his greenish brown twist tweed suit gave his otherwise unimpressive bearing a sense of grace and power. The trouser legs swished and swayed just so as he ambled contentedly down the corridor, his maroon cap-toes glinting even in that murky light. I might have chosen a derby or a homburg if I were the one in the wool, but the slight leftward cant of his sable gray fedora gave a certain rakishness, wholly appropriate in the present context, to his air. As if to drive the point home, he took a coin, a quarter I believe, from his right trouser pocket and flipped it into the air and deftly caught it in his open palm, returning it to his pocket without so much as a hitch in his stride.
Poor Mr. Fletcher. I didn’t relish being the messenger on this one.
He turned the corner to the stairwell and trotted down, too fast for me to get anything more than a fleeting glimpse of his left cheek. At the stairwell I leaned over and looked down only to see the top of his hat and shoulders receding before passing out of sight. I quietly followed him to the second floor then paused and listened before descending the last flight.
“Take her easy,” the hotelier said.
“Much obliged.” A gentle, almost timid voice, surprising after what I had heard across the wall.
Hearing the door buzzer and a surge of street noise, I finished my descent.
“That the guy?” I asked, making my way to the counter.
&nb
sp; He made a little circular motion with his head, almost Hindu in subtlety, which I took to mean yes. I went to the window. He was already out of sight. I opened the door and looked out. He was walking down the sidewalk to the left, the way Mrs. Fletcher and I had come. Up and down the block, heads were slowly raising in expectation of the second half of that afternoon’s double feature. I needed to get a look at the guy’s face, and soon. Any minute now Mrs. Fletcher would be coming out of the hotel, and I would need to be in position.
He rounded the corner. I hurried after him. A few paces after taking the corner myself I put a cigarette in my mouth—I always keep a few in my inside jacket pocket for such occasions—and called out to him.
“Hey, buddy,” I said. He was about ten feet in front of me. As he turned I opened my mouth to ask him for a light. The words never made it out.
The look on my face must have pleased him immensely, for that smug grin kept resurfacing during the course of the following conversation.
“Cute,” I said. “I suppose this is your idea of amusement.”
Positively beaming, Mr. Fletcher walked up to me. “Don’t be sore, King. You did well.” He patted me on the shoulder.
I wanted to slug him. I pulled the cigarette from my lips, crushed it in my hand, and dropped it to the ground.
“I don’t like being a stooge.”
“You’ve got it all wrong.”
“So educate me.”
“Not here. Let’s go somewhere we can talk.”
“This is as good a place as any.”
He glanced around us, slightly nervous.
“Look, King, it’s not what it looks like. I needed to test you.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I don’t go in for the spoiled princess type.”
“I’m not referring to my wife.”
