The Crime of Our Lives

by Lawrence Block

  Not all the time, to be sure. But every now and then he would hear someone pacing the floor overhead, walking back and forth, back and forth. At first he’d thought there was in fact someone up there, but it even happened when he was on the top floor, or sitting home in an otherwise empty house. It became clear that he was hearing these footsteps, and there were no feet responsible.

  He also discovered that other people didn’t hear them. He most often heard them when he was alone, but sometimes there would be other people present, and they couldn’t hear the footsteps, not even after he’d called them to their attention.

  He spoke about this to a woman who asked him a few questions, established that Kane was a Jew and the son of a Jewish father, and that he’d never heard the footsteps until after his father’s death. “Well, the footsteps are your father,” she told him. “His soul can’t rest until someone says Kaddish for him. You haven’t done that, have you?”

  No, Kane said. He hadn’t. He didn’t believe in any of that mumbo-jumbo.

  “Fine,” she said, “You don’t have to believe in it. Just get your ass to a synagogue and say the prayer when the time comes. It’s in Hebrew—well, Aramaic, actually—but it’s transliterated, so you just read it.”

  “And if I do that?”

  “Then the footsteps will stop.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “So try it. What have you got to lose?”

  But he wouldn’t.

  His was a curious sort of obstinacy. It’s not that he didn’t believe her suggestion would work. He was the one telling the story, and it was evident to me that he figured she was right, that he could get the footsteps to stop by spending a few minutes muttering something incomprehensible in a dead language. And he did indeed want those footsteps to stop.

  But not enough to part with his own principles, whatever exactly they may have been. If he did it, and if it worked, well, then where would he be? So the elder Kane went on pacing, and Henry went on hearing him.

  Did I mention that he was a Taurus?

  Henry knew a lot of people, and traveled in sophisticated circles. While he was hardly a matchmaker, he sometimes introduced one friend to another, thinking they might enjoy each other’s company. And, of course, sometimes it worked out and sometimes it didn’t.

  He told me about a woman friend of his he’d been in touch with some years earlier. He knew she’d had a few dates with a friend of his we’ll call Gordon, and asked her how things were going between them.

  “Let me just say this,” she said. “You know how they say you can’t have too much of a good thing? Well, it just so happens they’re wrong.”

  He asked her what she meant.

  “Gordon,” she said, “is a real Frenchman, if you get my drift. But that’s the only language he speaks, and he doesn’t shut up.”

  “Oh,” said Henry.

  “Left to his own devices,” she said, “he would not stop until his partner was dead, and maybe not even then.”

  “Oh.”

  “Now this is a real sweet guy,” she said, “and good-looking, and fun to be with. A nice dresser, and good manners. And for the first twenty minutes or so in the feathers, it was clear we were sexually compatible. And then it became clear that we were not.”

  “Oh.”

  “A real sweet guy,” she said. “But not for me.”

  Henry thought that was pretty interesting, and added it to his file of sexual lore.

  Then not long after he was talking to a male friend who’d had an affair with a prominent actress we’ll call Lorraine. “Oh, that’s over,” the friend told him. “She’s a nice woman, enormously talented, and damned attractive. But it’s just no good in the sack.”

  “She doesn’t enjoy sex?”

  “Au contraire, mon frere Henri. She loves it. Can’t get enough of it.”

  “Then—”

  “She only wants one thing,” the friend confided, “and she doesn’t want it to end. She wants to be—how shall I put this?—the piece de resistance at the banquet.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not that she’s not a suitable object for that sort of veneration,” he said. “But one doesn’t want to spend hours on end kneeling in homage, as it were.”

  “Hours, eh?”

  Henry mulled this new nugget of information, and in the course of the next several days he made two phone calls. The first was to his friend Gordon.

  “There’s a woman I think you’d really enjoy,” he said. “Her name’s Lorraine. She’s a few years older than you, but I don’t see why that should be a problem. Why don’t you give her a call, see if the two of you hit it off?”

  The second call was to Lorraine, whom he didn’t know as well as he knew Gordon, but whom he’d met a few times and felt comfortable calling. “There’s a fellow I know named Gordon,” he told her, “and I think he’s going to call you for a date. I have a strong hunch the two of you would be good together, so why don’t you give it a shot and see how it goes?”

  And that, said Henry Kane to me, perhaps ten years after those phone calls, is how Gary Morton met Lucille Ball.

  I know, I know. It’s an outrageous story. And there’s no way to confirm it. Wikipedia tells us that the two met while Ball was rehearsing Wildcat prior to its Broadway opening, and that a fellow cast member introduced the two of them. And maybe that’s what happened, and maybe it’s not.

  The principals themselves are long gone—I wouldn’t dream of recounting the story otherwise—and we’re free to believe it or not, as we prefer. I figure it’s true, but maybe that’s just because I want it to be true. I’ll tell you, it adds a certain something to watching reruns of I Love Lucy.

  Toward the end of our acquaintance, Henry Kane wrote a novel with some sort of espionage element in it. A hardcover house contracted to publish it, and then Something Went Wrong. Someone from one of the intelligence agencies visited Kane’s publisher, and the book essentially disappeared.

  Now it seems to me that there was once a time when I knew the book’s title, and I may even have read it, but on this point my memory is spotty and not to be trusted. I think the book was actually published, but can’t even be certain of that. What I do recall is that Kane was desperate to know who was responsible for its suppression, and why, and so on. And he couldn’t figure out how to learn what he wanted to know.

  I suggested he ask himself what his detective, Peter Chambers, would do in such a situation. Or another character, ex-Inspector MacGregor. Figure out who they’d call, and what they’d say, and how they’d solve the puzzle, and then do just that.

  I don’t think he could see what I was getting at. The characters he wrote could operate in that world, and do so with great panache, but he couldn’t even put himself into it in his imagination. He went on railing at Fate, and never did learn who’d put the kibosh on his book, or why.

  Toward the end, Henry Kane published a series of erotic suspense novels for Lancer, with titles like The Shack Job, The Glow Job, The Escort Job, and The Tail Job. I think he ghosted at least one Ellery Queen paperback, and his last novel seems to be The Little Red Phone, published in 1982.

  It must have been sometime in the early ’80s that he died. I had lost track of him by then, and had changed agents myself, so he was long gone by the time I had word of his death. And I’ll be damned if I can find out when it was that he died.

  Henry Morrison doesn’t remember. “All I know is it was a really long time ago,” he told me recently. He added that Kane’s widow had since died, and that their daughter had moved and his attempts to contact her had been unsuccessful.

  I got in touch with a woman I’d met through Kane, an old girlfriend of his, but she too had long-since lost touch with him. She couldn’t furnish his date of death, and while she was at it she cast doubt on his official date of birth; she figured he wasn’t above taking off a few years, and that he was most likely born not in 1918 but in 1908. And she put me in touch with another old girlfriend of Henr
y’s, with whom I had a perfectly lovely conversation, but she didn’t know when he died, either.

  You’d think in this age of Google that anybody’s date of death would be instantly available, but it’ll take someone handier than I with a computer to find it.

  But it’s pretty clear that he’s gone, and I guess somebody said Kaddish for him. I haven’t heard any footsteps.

  Those Scott Meredith Days

  * * *

  So many of my columns for Mystery Scene touched on the Scott Meredith agency that I sat down and wrote about those days, and before I knew it one column had stretched to three, with the prospect of a fourth. Scott, of course, was not a writer, he was more of a writer’s nightmare—except that in fact he was a writer, had written pulp fiction under several pen names (John Van Praag and Roy Carroll are two I remember) and late in his career produced a labor of love, a lengthy biography of George S. Kaufman. (It gives one very little sense of either the man or his life, but I gather Scott was hugely proud of it.)

  Enough. Here we go:

  In the summer of 1956, after my first year at Antioch College, I went to work in the mail room at Pines Publications. One of Antioch’s chief attractions was its co-op job program, designed to furnish students with real-world experience in their careers of choice; I wanted to be a writer, so I picked a job at a publishing house.

  Pines had a paperback line, Popular Library, and a whole string of magazines and comic books. The job experience was reasonably interesting, but the chance to live on my own in Greenwich Village trumped it. I shared an apartment at 54 Barrow Street with two other Antiochians, and I hung out a lot in Washington Square and the Macdougal Street coffee houses, and one Sunday afternoon I stayed home and set up my typewriter in the kitchen and wrote a story about an amoral kid who lives by his wits, runs a mail-order scam, and like that. End of October I went back to college and took the story with me.

  Earlier, I’d read The Jungle Kids, a paperback collection of some of Evan Hunter’s short stories, packaged to capitalize on the success of The Blackboard Jungle. One thing I’d noticed was that most of the stories had appeared in a magazine called Manhunt. I’d never seen a copy, but I got the address someplace, most likely Writers Market, and I mailed in the story I’d written on Barrow Street.

  Now I’d submitted my work before, and indeed had a burgeoning collection of rejection slips taped to the wall of my dorm room. But what I got this time, along with my manuscript, was a note from one Francis X. Lewis, Manhunt’s editor, saying that the story just sort of trailed off, and needed some kind of a snapper ending. If I could come up with something suitable, I might have a sale.

  Damn!

  There was a magazine rack in the Yellow Springs drugstore, and, mirabile dictu, they carried Manhunt. I bought it and read all the stories in it, and I tacked on an O. Henry-type ending which saw the little bastard hoist on his own petard.

  Off it went and back it came, with another note from Mr. Lewis, this one rather less heartening. The ending was too pat and predictable, but thanks for trying.

  Rats.

  A week or so later I got a short note from a man named Scott Meredith, a New York-based literary agent. One of your recent magazine submissions was close, he wrote. This is to express interest in your material.

  Well, I already knew that. Close, but no cigar. The enclosed brochure went on to invite me to submit my story for Mr. Meredith’s appraisal for a mere $5.

  Yeah, right. I tossed it in the trash and forgot about it.

  In June I went home to Buffalo. I’d decided to go to Cape Cod for the summer, and find some sort of job there instead of filling any of the slots the college had on offer. Night before I drove there, I saw how to fix that story. I drove to the Cape, found an attic room above a barbershop in Hyannis, and right away wrote the story and sent it off to Manhunt. I got a job as a dishwasher at Mildred’s Chowder House, worked like a dog from four to midnight, and was told to report the following day at eight a.m. I decided against setting my alarm clock, and I never did return to Mildred’s joint. (I think I must have been afraid to go back and ask for my pay. “But you quit, you bastard! You didn’t come in at eight!” I scored high on IQ tests, but in certain respects I have to say I was a moron.)

  For two weeks I stayed in that room, and every day I pounded my typewriter. Three or four days in, I got a note from Francis X. Lewis’s assistant. Mr. Lewis was away for the next several weeks, but the assistant had read the story and was pretty sure Mr. Lewis would want to buy it on his return. It was, certainly, under serious consideration.

  Gosh . . .

  I didn’t quite turn out a story a day, but I must have finished, oh, nine stories in two weeks. I remember I aimed one of them at Boy’s Life, and there was at least one slanted toward Manhunt, but that’s all I recall about them. I stayed in that attic and lived on Maine sardines, a tin of which cost 15¢. Right before the money ran out, and before I died of sardine poisoning, I took a horrible split-shift job at a fancy resort in Osterville that had me working from 7 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., with a two-hour break in the afternoon. It’s good I’d run out of story ideas by then, because the time and energy I had left would limit me to haiku.

  Ten days of that was plenty. The summer help had a tradition of quitting the joint, and every few nights another bellhop or bus boy would tie his uniform to a tree and be gone by daybreak. I left at a more conventional hour and drove back to Buffalo, cracked up the car en route, limped home with it, and took a train to New York. I got a room at 105 East 19th Street, at what years later would briefly serve as MWA’s headquarters. And I set about looking for a job, and wished Francis X. Lewis would get back from the Catskills or the hospital, wherever he was, and buy my story.

  My father had gone to Cornell, and stayed in touch over the years with several of his fraternity brothers. One was Morton Tolleris, who became a prominent judge in New York. Morty had a younger brother named Ralph, and Ralph’s wife Beatrice worked at Time Magazine. After a few phone calls, I found myself on the phone with Mrs. Tolleris, who was able to offer me a position as a copy boy on Time. The pay was $60 a week, and because of their publishing schedule my work week would run from Wednesday through Sunday.

  I decided I didn’t want the baggage that came with any job I got through a friend of my folks. Suppose I screwed up? Suppose I wanted to quit? So I turned it down, and I’m sure Beatie Tolleris was as relieved as I was, for about the same reason.

  A few days later I followed a New York Times classified to the offices of Qualified Employment, on West 42nd Street, where I inquired about their listing: Associate Editor, Literary Agency. And there must have been something suggesting that the position was entry-level, or how would I have had the nerve to offer myself up for it?

  The chap who interviewed me seemed bemused, and his attitude only deepened as I answered his questions. I wanted to be a writer, I admitted, and had a story under consideration at a national magazine. Which magazine? Manhunt, I said. He nodded sagely. Did I like any particular Manhunt writers? Well, Evan Hunter. And, uh, Ed McBain.

  Next thing I knew I was on the eighteenth floor at 580 Fifth Avenue, where Sidney Meredith sat me down at a desk with a story to read. My task was to write a letter to its author, telling him one of three things—it was great and we’re going to market it, it needs fixing and here’s how, or it’s hopeless and here’s why.

  The story was “Rattlesnake Cave,” and the byline read Ray D. Lester, whom I subsequently learned was the science-fiction writer, Lester Del Rey. He’d deliberately written it to incorporate every structural flaw he could think of, and he’d done his work well. I sat down and read it, and wondered if anyone had ever taken this test and found the story acceptable. (Happened often, I was to learn.)

  The story had a frame device, told years after the fact, so we knew the narrator survived, so where was the suspense? It was about snakes, and lots of people, especially women, didn’t want to read anything about snakes, ever. And it turned out
there weren’t any snakes, so the plot was a paper dragon, and the reader felt like an idiot for having been all exercised over nothing. And the regional dialect was spelled phonetically. And—

  I didn’t have trouble writing a letter that spotlighted these faults. I handed it in to Sid, who looked like a cross between Jack Klugman and Louis Quinn. (Louis Quinn played Roscoe on 77 Sunset Strip. Jack Klugman you know.) He told me I’d hear from them if there was anything to hear. Yeah, right, I thought, and went back to my room on East 19th.

  The next day I got a phone call. It was the bemused fellow from Qualified Employment. I had the job.

  I went right to work, and that work consisted of doing for the genuine creations of hopeful men and women what I’d done for “Rattlesnake Cave.” Across from my desk stood a file cabinet, its top drawer jammed with file folders. Each held a story, no longer accompanied by a check. I’d pull the foremost folder and take it back to my desk.

  I’d read the story, and then I’d make a sandwich of a sheet of Scott’s letterhead, a sheet of carbon paper, and a sheet of copy paper, and roll all of that into the Remington office model typewriter on my desk. The letter I’d write would start halfway down that first page, and finish close enough to the bottom of a second page so that my subscript would just clear the bottom of the page. (The subscript read SM:lb, suggesting to the world that Scott had dictated his remarks to Lydia Baker or Linda Brown or Lorelei Benatovich, but indicating to anyone in the office that it had originated with me.)

  Scott was out of town when I was hired, on his summer vacation, and it was several weeks before he returned. The whole fee report process worked just fine without him. I wrote my reports, and Brother Sid read them and signed Scott’s name to them. And off they went.

  It generally took a new man a while to get the hang of it, but I hit the ground running, and got out eight reports the first day. I saw right away that I could do this, and it was clear I could learn an enormous amount, and I was grateful for the perverse streak that had saved me from becoming a Time copy boy.