I sat there gazing at it, wondering if it would ever be my home. It would never have lasted with Charlie. It would have turned up Merilee again. She and I were destined for each other. Or doomed, depending on how you want to look at it. And maybe it was time for this. Time to surrender what was left of New York to the Yushies. I didn’t belong there anymore. Maybe I never had, but when you’re the center of attention, you tend not to notice. Was this the ending for novel number three? Hoagy the country squire — scribbling in his chapel in the morning, shoveling manure in the afternoon? I sat there gazing at it and thinking it didn’t sound too terrible. Of course it didn’t. Daydreams seldom do.
Ferris Rush wasn’t the only one whose line between fact and fiction was awful damned fuzzy.
I started up the Jag and floored it out of there, cursing myself.
I ate the ham sandwiches and drank the Guinness and spent another night on that sour-smelling bare mattress. And another day on the porch, where I reread The Great Gatsby, and enjoyed it more than I ever had. And still one more night. And with the dawn came the reality — he wasn’t coming back to his secret place. I had gotten close, closer than anyone else had. But I’d missed him. He was gone, and this time I didn’t know where.
I had no choice now. It was time to go back to the city and get out my mukluks.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MR. ADELMAN HAD NEARLY wept when I’d shown up at his shop on Amsterdam with my hammered, ruined Olympia. It was he who had sold it to me and lovingly maintained it through the years. I’d begged him to save it. He’d said he was a typewriter man, not a magician.
He was a magician. It shone like new there now on his counter, straining for action. He shone, too, a proud craftsman of the old, old school. Before he would let me take it home, he made me swear I’d never run over it again with a Jeep, or whatever I had done to it — he didn’t want to know. I made him swear he’d never let Benetton or The Gap push him out on the street. We shook on that.
When I got home with it, I made a pot of coffee and arranged the transcripts of my interviews in piles on Ferris Rush’s writing table. I had mixed feelings about his table now. Part of me wanted to saw it in half and throw it in the street. For now, I intended to keep it. I’d earned it.
I got my mukluks out of the closet and put them on. I wore them when I wrote the first novel. I’ve worn them every single time I’ve sat down in from of my typewriter since. They’re starting to get a little ragged, but so am I. After I poured myself a cup of coffee I sat down at the table and got started. Lulu stretched out under me with her head on my foot, swallowed contentedly, and dropped off.
I am not who you think I am. I am not Cameron Sheffield Noyes. My name is Ferris Rush, and I am a murderer.
I took it from there. My opening approach was to weigh the privileged, made-up Farmington upbringing of Cam Noyes against the gritty, real Port Arthur childhood of Ferris Rush. I gave him a sardonic, slightly weary voice, the voice of his Bang storyteller. His voice. Quickly, I realized that this would be my hardest memoir to get down on paper. Unlike the other celebrities I’d written for, this one happened to be an acclaimed novelist. His prose, his observations, would have to have some kind of literary merit. The words couldn’t just come tumbling out onto the page any old way. In fact, they soon wouldn’t come tumbling at all. I got stuck in deep mud after three pages, my wheels spinning, and I couldn’t get out.
Something was wrong.
It wasn’t writer’s block. That’s a void, a fear. The stomach muscles tighten. The hairs on the back of the neck stand up. No, this was the nagging itch I get when a scene I’ve written doesn’t work. Oh, it seems fine on the surface. But deep down inside I just know something is wrong with it. Only I don’t know what it is. It’s an itch I can’t get to. Not until I’ve analyzed the scene from every possible angle, taken it apart piece by piece, turned it inside out. Eventually, if I keep at it long enough, I find the flaw. But I can never rest until I do. Because my itch is never, ever wrong.
I didn’t have the whole story. I thought I did but I didn’t. I was wrong. That’s why I was stuck. I was still missing something. Something crucial. But what?
I got up and paced from one end of the living room to the other. It’s not very far. I paced, the floor of the old brownstone creaking under me. Lulu watched me, her eyes darting back and forth, back and forth. I went over my approach. I went over everything that happened from the beginning, step by step. What was I missing? Was it something he’d said to me once, something that didn’t fit? Something somebody else had said? What?
I took Lulu for a walk in Riverside Park, a man possessed now. I turned the soil over and over as I walked, my hands shoved in my pockets, lips moving. That’s one big plus about living in New York. No one in the park paid me any attention — their lips were moving, too. I got nowhere. I stopped at a Greek coffee shop and ate a cheeseburger that tasted like flannel. I climbed back up to my apartment and made another pot of coffee and started working my way through the transcripts, line by line, searching for I didn’t know what. I read all of them. It was nearly four in the morning when I was done. I found nothing. Nothing that took care of my itch.
Lulu was fast asleep now on the love seat. I opened a Bass ale and fell into my chair and drank it. I went over my Farmington trip notes. Nothing there either.
It was only out of utter desperation that I started looking through the carton full of Charlie’s papers, the one Very had asked me to hold on to. He still hadn’t had a chance to sift through it yet — the manhunt was keeping him busy. There were sales records in there for work she’d sold. Some pretty prominent collectors involved. … Letters. One from her sister in San Francisco, who was going through a difficult pregnancy and wondering whether the baby would save her marriage. Another from a man named Alan Berger, who lived on East Sixty-third and whom she’d evidently dumped for Ferris. I set this letter aside. … Clippings — rave reviews for her work from the Times, Newsweek, Artnews. … Tax returns for the past two years. Passport. Checkbook, bank statements, canceled checks. I leafed through her checkbook. She’d evidently taken care of their domestic life in Gramercy Park — New York Telephone, Con Edison, Allstate. Each entry was in her square, careful handwriting. I yanked the rubber band off the canceled checks and rifled through them. She was organized. In the lower left-hand corner of each check she’d detailed precisely what service had been rendered. Phone service, April. Home insurance, first quarter …
And then I saw it. One particular canceled check. And a bomb went off in my head. That odd fact. Here it was. And here was the key that unlocked the door. Maybe. I glanced at grandfather’s Rolex. It was six-thirty now. What better time to catch someone in. I reached for the phone and dialed the party whose name was on that check. Someone who was rather surprised by my call, especially at this hour, but who was not at all uncooperative. We talked briefly. But plenty long enough to confirm my worst suspicions. I hung up shaking, my mouth dry.
It all made sense now. Horrible, ugly sense. Worse than I could have imagined, and I have a vivid imagination. Now I knew why I couldn’t write Ferris Rush’s story yet. I was wrong. About all of it. We were all wrong.
But I’d need Very’s help if I was going to make it right.
He was waiting for me with his bike out in front of the building on Fortieth and Lex where Skitsy’s company, Murray Hill Press, had their offices. The secretaries in their summer dresses and Reeboks were eyeballing him standing there in his tank top and spandex shorts as they went through the revolving door. He was ignoring them. He was too busy glowering at me.
“Yo, what’s this all about, dude?” he demanded coldly, muscular arms crossed in front of his chest.
“A theory I want to test out, Lieutenant,” I explained. “Can’t do it without you.”
“Seem you can do plenty without me,” he said, jaw working his gum.
“I can?”
“You purposely slipped your tail outside of the Lincoln Tunnel,
disappeared for two whole fucking days. I wanna know where.”
“Didn’t you speak to my ex-wife?”
“Sure, I spoke to her. Got my chain jerked about how sensitive an artist you are, how you require seclusion. … ”
“You didn’t believe her?”
“Show me some respect, huh!” he exploded. “I’m a person! You talk to a person! You don’t jerk chains! I want to know where you were! Was it Atlantic City?”
“No, it wasn’t.”
He waited for me to tell him more. When I didn’t, he started nodding to his own personal beat, the muscles of his neck and shoulders bunched tightly. “Okay. That’s cool. You wanna fuck around, we’ll fuck around — in a interrogation room. Let’s go.”
“Wait, Lieutenant. Hold on. All I’m asking of you is —”
“Too fucking much, dude. I’m trying to find a guy who blew away two ladies. The trail’s cold. My stomach is in involuntary spasms. You’re holding out on me. And now you expect me to play along blind with you. Uh-uh. No way. I’m coming down on you — suspicion of aiding and abetting. You are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say may be —”
“Okay, okay, Lieutenant. You win. What do you want to know?”
“Everything. Until I get it, you get nothing from me, except a cell.”
“And if I tell you, you’ll help me?”
He didn’t answer me. Just stood there glaring at me and popping his gum.
So I told him. I told him all about Ferris Rush of Port Arthur, Texas, and how he’d slammed into a busload of kids and gotten away with it, and how Skitsy Held had owned him because of it. I told him about the shack on Crescent Moon Pond, and how I’d been there, and thought he had, too. I told him all of it, because it didn’t matter anymore. All that mattered was that I get into Skitsy Held’s files upstairs, and I couldn’t do that without him.
When I finished, he closed his eyes a second and made a face and rubbed his stomach, mulling it over. “Okay … okay … and now you got some theory involving Murray Hill Press.”
“Correct.”
“What’s this theory got to do with Rush?”
“Everything and nothing.”
He frowned. “I don’t follow.”
“Do you trust me, Lieutenant?”
“No.”
“Look, just do this one thing for me and I promise I’ll make it up to you for having been so uncooperative.”
“How?”
“I’ll take you to Ferris Rush.”
His eyes widened. “Wait, you know where he is?”
I started for the revolving door.
“Stay with me, Lieutenant.”
He stayed with me.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
(TAPE #2 WITH BOYD Samuels recorded May 20 on the patio of Ferris Rush’s Gramercy Park town house. Also present are Lt. Romaine Very, Vic Early, and Samuels’s assistant, Todd Lesser.)
Hoag: Thanks for coming here like this in the middle of the workday. I know it was short notice.
Samuels: You said it was an emergency, amigo. Whatever we can do, we’ll do. To tell you the truth, I’m not exactly thrilled about the police being in on this. …
Hoag: It has to be this way. I’m sorry.
Samuels: (pause) If you say so. Go ahead.
Hoag: I wanted to talk to you about one of your scams — your biggest scam, in fact. I really have to hand it to you. You’re an artist.
Samuels: Thanks, but I’m not sure I know what the hell you’re talking about.
Hoag: Your freshman year at Columbia, Boyd, when you and Ferris were hanging out a lot at the clubs, and he was modeling, and getting bored with it. He started writing stories about your scene, and he submitted them to Tanner Marsh under his modeling name, Cameron Sheffield Noyes. Tanner told me he was really knocked out by him. His looks, breeding, personality. The kid had star written all over him, except for one small problem — his writing.
Samuels: Yeah, Tanner didn’t like the stories. So Ferris went back to work, and the novel was a whole different thing. Tanner loved the novel.
Hoag: Yes, he said it was nothing like what Ferris had shown him before. That he’d grown tremendously, blossomed. But that isn’t what really happened, is it?
Samuels: (silence) Meaning what?
Hoag: Want to tell us how it happened, Boyd? (no response) Or perhaps Todd can fill us in.
Lesser: Me?
Hoag: You. You told me at Delilah’s party that you left Columbia because of personal problems.
Lesser: Yes, I did.
Hoag: According to Ferris, your personal problem was that you were one of Boyd’s biggest cocaine customers.
Samuels: Hey, no need to get into that, amigo, especially in front of —
Very: Shut up, Samuels.
Samuels: Yessir.
Lesser: It’s true. I-I had trouble being away from home for the first time. Fitting in with new people. Couldn’t seem t-to talk to anybody. So I started spending more and more time alone in my room. And getting deeper and deeper into coke.
Hoag: How much did you owe him, Todd?
Lesser: J-Just under two thousand dollars. But I paid it back before I left school. I paid back all of it.
Hoag: I know you did. Want to tell us how? (no response) Come on, Todd. Tell us what were you doing there in your room with the door closed.
Lesser: I … I …
Hoag: You were writing a novel, weren’t you? The story of one sensitive young man’s breakdown. Your breakdown.
Lesser: Yes.
Hoag: You were desperate. No money to pay Boyd back. No money to get more coke. So when Boyd came to you with a small proposition, you listened. You had to listen. Isn’t that right, Boyd?
Samuels: I’m thinking to myself, whoa, this Marsh guy smells class and money on Ferris. Can maybe turn him into a major celebrity. I’m thinking what a shame it is we don’t have a book the fat slob can run with.
Hoag: So you bought yourself one. You erased Todd’s debt and fed him some more coke, in exchange for which he gave you his manuscript. No big deal, was it, Todd? No different from getting paid to do a term paper for somebody. You were just a college kid, a strung-out, fucked-up college kid. All you cared about was getting Boyd off your back and your nose filled. How could you possibly have known what was going to happen? How could anyone?
Very: Yo, you’re saying this guy wrote Bang.
Hoag: I’m saying Ferris Rush has never published a word in his life. Or even read a word, for that matter. He’s a front. A face. A personality. A scam. Tanner told me how strange he found him when they worked together on the manuscript. How Ferris seemed not to grasp what he had written. Of course he didn’t — he hadn’t written it. That’s the real reason why he ran away from Stony Creek. He was afraid if he spent too much time around there with all of those real writers, somebody might get wise to him. So he hid out at his shack. You met him there, didn’t you, Todd? The two of you went over Tanner’s suggestions together. Then you did the rewrites while Ferris fished. When you were done, he resurfaced with his finished manuscript. And sold it. You freaked out at this point, didn’t you, realizing that your book was actually going to get published and that someone else was going to get the credit for it. Pretty tough to handle. You couldn’t. You dropped out of school. Took off. Why did you let them get away with it, Todd? Why didn’t you speak up?
Lesser: Because I had no real proof that I wrote it. No handwritten manuscript. No contract. It was just my word against theirs, and nobody would have believed me — Boyd assured me of that. He also assured me he’d go to any length to ruin me if I fucked this thing up for them.
Samuels: Toddy and I made a legitimate business deal. He sold me the manuscript. Besides, I’ve always taken care of him. I gave him a job, didn’t I? I didn’t have to do that.
Hoag: You’ve taken care of him, all right. Because of him Ferris Rush became a world-famous literary luminary and a millionaire. In exchange for that you let T
odd get your coffee for you. You’re a gent, Boyd. A real gent. … The secret of Bang has stayed a secret. No one has ever found out. Not Tanner. Not even Skitsy, did she?
Samuels: Correct.
Hoag: Naturally, Ferris couldn’t deliver a second novel. He became more and more angry and self-destructive — partly because of the schoolbus business, but mostly because he’s been a complete fraud. He’s been able to fool other people, but not himself. You cooked up your bullshit memoir idea to keep the money flowing in. Charlie’s art was a nice bonus. And you brought me in. Why? Why not just have Todd write it? Why take the chance your secret might get out?
Samuels: To succeed it had to be prestigious. People around town had to know a name writer was involved, even if uncredited. You were the ideal candidate.
Very: Yo, if I could jump in here … ?
Hoag: Go ahead, Lieutenant.
Very: It’s not that I’m not finding this a stimulating literary discussion, but where is it taking us, y’know?
Hoag: Be patient, Lieutenant. We’ll get there.
Very: Yeah, but you told me you knew were Ferris Rush is.
Hoag: I do.
Very: So where is he?
Hoag: We’re sitting on him.
Very: (silence) We’re what?
Hoag: Ferris Rush is dead. Has been since the day Charlie died. He was murdered by the same person who stabbed her and pushed Skitsy. His body is hidden under this nice new bluestone patio the contractor laid down. Except it wasn’t the contractor who laid it — was it, Todd?
Lesser: I-I don’t know what you mean.
Samuels: Toddy?
Early: You killed that nice little girl? You!
Hoag: Sit down, Vic. Stay cool.
Samuels: Jeez … what’s the matter with him? He looks like he’s going to —
Hoag: Vic, can you hear me? Vic?
Early: (silence) Yeah … Sorry, Hoag. I’m okay. Sorry. Go ahead.
Hoag: I found something when I was going through Charlie’s canceled checks, Todd. Something that clicked. You told me that after you dropped out of Columbia you drifted around upstate for a while. Worked odd jobs. Worked construction.
The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald Page 20