by James, Terry
“Yes,” she replied without hesitation.
I gave her conviction due pause, then said:
“There’s no real delicate way to put this, Mrs. Morris. Isn’t it more probable that Walter killed himself? You told me yourself he had no enemies.”
“And you, Mr. King, said that some of these men you associate with are killers.”
Finally sensing an opening, I said, “Then you admit the correlation between the novels and actual facts?”
“I never disputed it. It’s your accusation that Walter stole from you that I don’t accept.” She looked at her watch, a delicate silver thing on her left wrist. “It’s after six. I must be starting dinner.”
I reached for my hat.
“Walter was very punctilious in his habits,” she explained. “I could set the clock by him. Every day at noon precisely the door to his study would open and down he would come to have his lunch. The same with dinner. He had to eat at exactly six o’clock. I’m more spontaneous, or used to be at any rate. If you live with someone long enough, you can’t help but acquire their habits.”
I was about to stand up and wish her a good evening when, out of the blue, she said, “Would you care to join me?”
I pretended to give it some consideration.
“Thank you, but I should be on my way.”
If the crestfallen look on her face was any indication, she wasn’t simply asking out of politeness.
“I wish you would stay.” She reached out and gave my hand an affectionate squeeze. “It has done me a world of good talking to you.” She looked into my eyes and smiled. “You can have a look at the rough drafts while I prepare dinner.”
That was a proposition I couldn’t refuse.
13
TWO MASSIVE ACORN finials, or perhaps they were timeworn artichokes, marked the entrance to the dark stairwell at the back of the living room. I followed her up, each stair protesting our steps as we ascended, hers a little less vociferously than mine.
We emerged to a spacious hallway, roomy enough for an ornate waiting chair with a beveled mirror in its high back, a tall umbrella stand with ingenious tin drip trays in its base, various tables and whatnots cluttered with the requisite porcelain and glass bric-a-brac. Sunlight was seeping from several scattered doorways and from a window at the far end of the hall. I immediately felt the intrusion of my presence in this intimate space, coupled with the desire to absorb every detail of it: the scents of private life embedded in the crimson and emerald convolutions of the carpet, in the stained oak doorframes, the aged ivory and vine wallpaper. A pair of men’s slippers, dark brown suede, open-heeled, lay poignantly empty one atop the other on the bare wood margin of the floor.
As we passed one of the little tables I noticed a framed studio photograph of Mrs. Morris and a man whom I assumed was Walter Morris. It was the first image of him I had seen, since none of the novels carried his picture on the back cover. He looked vaguely familiar, as men with no distinguishing features do. He was bald back to his crown, with a round face that suggested he had been a good thirty or forty pounds overweight at the time the photograph was taken, at least ten years ago judging by the changes Mrs. Morris’s face and hair had undergone in the interim. The thick, black-framed glasses he was wearing gave him the air of an accountant or an engineer. From his contented, almost smug expression, I surmised that he considered himself lucky to be wed to the woman beside him.
Mrs. Morris opened a closet door halfway down the hall and removed a wooden rod about three feet long with a small hook screwed to the end of it. Raising the rod to the ceiling, she hooked a latch there and pulled on it. Down dropped a hatchdoor, revealing an aluminum ladder resting at the edge of the opening to the attic. She handed me the rod and asked me to pull down the ladder. It telescoped steeply down to the floor.
“You go on,” she said. “There’s a string overhead.”
I started up the ladder.
“They’re in boxes to your left, I think,” she said when I was halfway up. “I’d suggest you bring some of them down and look at them in the study. It’s too cold up there, and the light’s bad.”
At the top of the ladder I groped around for the string and, finding it, ignited a bare bulb above me. You could have played a match of doubles tennis in that attic, barring lobs. The longer walls sloped to a point overhead, low enough that I had to stoop as I neared them. At either end, small dormer windows did little more than blind me with searing squares of sunlight. Naturally it was chock full of clutter, everything gray with dust.
“Oh, while I’m thinking of it,” Mrs. Morris called up, “could you do me a favor while you’re up there and fetch me down my sewing machine?”
This little favor turned out to be a half-hour saga that left me with an aching back and a sweat-soaked shirt. I thought I was looking for a compact electric model until she yelled up something about a tabletop. It was, of course, an ancient treadle machine, cast iron and solid oak. She meant me to earn the privilege of looking through her husband’s rough drafts. I groaned at the sight of it, wary of doing anything to aggravate my foot. It must have weighed seventy-five pounds. The width of the cabinet and the depth of the bulky drawers rendered it nearly impossible for one man to pick up, let alone carry down a ladder at an eighty-degree slant. But in my experience whenever you find yourself lacking the necessary tool, look hard enough and you’ll always find a suitable substitute near at hand. In this case it turned out to be a plank of plywood siding and a heavy-duty extension cord.
“Oh, I’m so thrilled,” Mrs. Morris exclaimed as I carefully slid the machine down the plank. “I’ve been wanting this down for years. It was my mother’s.”
When it had safely touched bottom, she stepped forward to stabilize it. I pulled the plank back up and made my way down the ladder to untie the extension cord.
“Where do you want it?”
I followed her down the hall to her bedroom, wheeling the squeaky old contraption behind her. Two things stood out from that quick glimpse: the canopy bed and the birdcage. The bed was a queen-sized Rococo affair of solid mahogany, with voluted pillars and an elaborate japanned cornice from which dove-colored curtains with a lining of green silk hung in elegant festoons, presently drawn back to the headboard, against which a mountain of brocaded pillows was piled. I couldn’t help but think that sleeping in a bed like that would drive any heterosexual man to suicide. The birdcage, in keeping with the baroque or Victorian or whatever period, if any, that everything in the house seemed to belong to, was a tall, bronze, domed wire affair about three feet high, resting on a small marble-topped table that wouldn’t have gone amiss in the back corner of a Parisian cafe. Inside the cage were two strawberry finches who chirped sweetly at the sight of their mistress.
I rolled the sewing machine against a wall out of the way. Before heading back down the stairs to make dinner, Mrs. Morris showed me to the study, where I pretended to be seeing it for the first time.
Back in the attic, I turned my attention to the manuscript boxes. The name of each novel was written in black marker on one side of each box. Brimming with nervous anticipation, I pulled the boxes of the last four novels and carried them one at a time down the ladder to the study and set myself up at the desk.
I began with King’s Gambit, the last novel. That was the Shannard case, still fresh in my memory. Howard Shannard, son of millionaire Diedrich Shannard, had come to me about two years ago with a request that I investigate what his father had been up to during a recent bout of amnesia. The trail led to what seemed to be a love triangle with Howard’s stepmother, the beautiful young Sally from the wrong side of the freeway. A series of small and unusual crimes, seemingly committed by the father during his amnesiac blackouts, revealed a bizarre pattern. But it was only after the murder of one Shannard and the suicide of another that I solved the true mystery and brought the crime home to the criminal.
The box consisted of a typed manuscript with editorial commentary in red pencil on nearly e
very page: spelling corrections, questions about motivation and probability, word choice suggestions, etc. Flawless manuscripts? I thought. Also in the box were five 80-page, unlined notebooks, every page covered in tiny, black, left-handed cursive. Apparently the man was incapable of writing a straight line. The farther from the top of the page, the steeper the downward slope of his lines, which, upon reaching the bottom, culminated in an empty triangle in the lower left-hand corner. The text itself was virtually impossible to read. Not because his handwriting was particularly illegible but because scarcely a single complete sentence was to be found anywhere on the page. Rather, he seemed to have developed a kind of private shorthand. It wasn’t only repetitive words and names that he abbreviated or dispensed with altogether, but entire passages, which he replaced with “desc.” or “dia.” or “fight,” which presumably he intended to fill in at some later stage. When he did attempt to write a scene in its entirety, it was hopelessly littered with a single nonsense word—“flogo”—which appeared to serve as a placeholder for words he didn’t know or couldn’t remember. At first I thought it was some kind of invented police acronym or crime-world jargon, though I had no recollection of coming across it in the published novels. It soon became apparent what its true function was. An excerpt from one of the King’s Gambit notebooks:
K stepped up counter askd flogo flogo. Flogo, jammed w/ dust and flogo. Desc. What’s your order, Mac? She wearing flogo flogo, w/ flogo flogo flogo. Broad hips, painted fingernails, blonde. Beach deserted. Nice day, K said, flogo flogo …
I read two or three pages of this gibberish, trying without success to locate myself either somewhere in the finished novel, in the events that inspired it, or both. Not only did I have to battle against the tiny, slanted, left-handed scrawl, the missing words, the abbreviations, and the sea of flogos, but I was soon snared in a bewildering web of revisions—lines radiating in every direction, connecting crossed-out words or groups of words to whatever white space he could find on the page, wherein was set down, often vertically, some equally unintelligible phrase full of flogos, apparently meant to replace the flogo-encumbered original.
I soon gave up any hope of deciphering this secret code. I perused the manuscripts and notebooks of the other three novels, but it was the same hopeless tangle of nonsense as King’s Gambit. I searched the boxes for supplementary materials—newspaper clippings, copies of my files, notes from interviews, outlines, etc.—to no avail, then went back up to the attic and retrieved more boxes.
I was pleased to discover that the hieroglyphics diminished as I worked my way back in time, so that by the time I reached the Guttersnipe notebooks it was possible to read entire pages of proper English, entirely flogo-free. In the end this too proved about as illuminating as a window against a brick wall.
I did find among the manuscript boxes a box of publishing-related correspondence. There I found letters from Howard Stapleton. I skimmed through as much as I could bear, but there was little of interest to me: contracts, royalty payments, tax-related issues, publication schedules, etc. The only thing that gave me pause was the yearly sales figures. At the peak of his popularity (Blood City, the sixth installment), Conway was selling over 50,000 copies in a single year. The sales of the last two books (Fair Market Murder and King’s Gambit) were dismal in comparison (12,300 and 8,900 respectively). Most of the books were in the thirty thousand range. So how was it possible, given the sheer quantity of these novels out there in the world, that I had never heard of them, that no one I knew had ever heard of them, and that apparently no one else depicted in the books had ever heard of them?
One possible answer resided in the box of fan mail. All of his fans seemed to be from small-town middle-America and foreign backwaters: places like Hagarville, Arkansas, Voda, Kansas, and Germfask, Michigan. Even one from Athlone, Ireland. There wasn’t a single letter from a real city. All the fans in these letters expressed in one form or another their love of the Eddie King novels. One recurring theme was their appreciation for how true to life his stories and characters always seemed! Most of their admiration was reserved for Eddie King himself, whom many of them spoke of as if he were a real person, some going so far as to say he had changed their lives.
Morris’s longest running correspondent appeared to be a fan named Kathy Jerrell, from Roswell, New Mexico. There were over fifty letters from her, spanning a ten-year period. Clearly they had struck up a long-distance friendship, one in which each of them felt comfortable enough to disclose the trifles of their private lives. She was the wife of a Presbyterian preacher. At the time of her first letter, in response to Guttersnipe, she had had one boy, named Benjamin, and over the course of the correspondence she had had five more children, boys and girls alike. She wrote of her day-to-day life as a housewife and mother, her special obligations as the wife of a man of God, the struggles she faced raising her kids in a sinful world, her own periodic bouts of religious doubt, the family vacations, her love of crime stories, especially Conway’s novels. She always looked forward to the next installment of Eddie King’s urban adventures. She wanted to know what it was like living in a big city, what he had done before he was a writer, where he got his ideas from. Unfortunately, nothing in her subsequent letters hinted at his answers. At some point in their correspondence he must have given her his real name because most of her letters were addressed “Dear Walter.” Most of them were insufferable. Dull, sycophantic, naive beyond belief.
I did find something interesting in one of her earlier letters, however. She had just finished reading Due Diligence (the third book) and was so excited that she had to write to Walter at once, babies crying be damned, to tell him how much she had loved it. The interesting bit was in the penultimate paragraph. I quote it in its entirety:
Sorry to hear you’ve been blue. I understand. It happens to the best of us. Sometimes God doesn’t seem to be listening, huh? We do the best we can, I guess. You did what you needed to. I know it must seem hard right now, but once you face it you’ll be grateful. You’ll regret it if you don’t. I think it would be good for you to meet him. Tell him everything. It’ll be such a weight off your chest. That’s my ten cents.
I reread the letter several times, each time more convinced that there was no other interpretation to the paragraph. It was the first damning piece of evidence I had found. I folded it back up, slid it into its envelope, and put it in my jacket pocket.
Just then Mrs. Morris called me down to dinner.
14
SHE HAD SET out two places at the table in the dining room—bone china plates, a full complement of silver cutlery, linen napkins, wine and water glasses. The scent at this proximity of whatever she had made was overwhelming. Mingled with the aromas of pungent herbs, it seemed the richest, savouriest, juiciest meat I had ever smelled.
Presently she backed through the swinging door to the kitchen holding a heavy silver platter upon which, as she turned to set it on the table, was revealed a magnificent golden brown fowl.
“Turkey?” I ventured.
“Goose,” was her reply as she placed the tines of the roasting fork and the blade of a bone-handled carving knife against the edge of the platter. “Now go into the kitchen and wash up.”
The kitchen, about twice the size of my apartment, was in a cruder state than the rest of the house. The floor, judging by the furrows in its wide gray planks, must have been the original. The capacious cupboards, cabinets and drawers bore the plain, sturdy aspect of an era before nail guns and power saws. An open door revealed a well-stocked pantry bigger than my kitchen. But the pièce de résistance was a massive old cast iron stove, six cookers broad, with bulging doors, ornate knobs and fancy scrollwork, its fat stovepipe ascending through two in-built shelves to the ceiling and beyond. The only modern appliance in evidence was the refrigerator, and that stumpy white relic with its buckle-style handle hardly qualified as state of the art.
While I was washing my hands, Mrs. Morris returned from the dining room to dish up the a
ccompaniments.
“Quite a spread,” I remarked. An arsenal of culinary matériel, still hot from battle, lay strewn across the counters and work tables.
“Here, take this,” she handed me a tureen of steaming gravy.
I carried it out to the table and set it beside the goose. She appeared a few moments later with a serving bowl of mushrooms in cream and a wicker basket of coarse brown bread thickly sliced.
She directed me to the end seat as she set down the dishes and relocated the tureen to the other side of the goose. Another trip to the kitchen produced a dish of something I couldn’t identify and a beautiful etched decanter containing a golden liquid.
I pulled her chair out for her. Settling in with a sigh of pleasant fatigue, she turned to me and said: “Now, would you be so kind as to carve the goose, Mr. King.”
I had to smile, not so much at one of the oddest strings of words to have entered my ears in recent times as her assumption that a) I was perfectly at ease performing this quintessentially paternal ritual, b) that I possessed the requisite skills, and c) that I actually considered it my God-given right as a man to carve the bird.
“I can’t guarantee the results,” I warned her, taking the fork and knife into my hands.
To my pleasant surprise I did a magnificent job, slicing into the juicy breast with smooth, controlled precision, stopping short of the bottom of the bird, and, with a single, deft lateral incision, cutting across the common termini of the slices so the smooth sheets of tender white breast cascaded over the back of the fork like so many pages of an open book fanning in a gentle breeze, down to the steaming bed of baked carrots and potatoes. It was as though I had done it a million times, when in fact I couldn’t recall a single instance in my life when I had been called upon to carve the bird, be it one of the turkeys of the holiday season or the more prosaic Sunday broiler.
