The Crime Writer

by Jill Dawson

  ‘Could it have been Stanley? I mean the actual one?’ Sam asked. And, strangely, on that I was certain. After all, I had letters from Stanley. I had his handwriting (his letters were never typed like these), his phrasing, his syntax, his style, to compare. Even his choice of stationery. No. The one person I could rule out was Stanley, my stepfather.

  I turn back to my writing, the ghost story I’d started yesterday: ‘The Yuma Baby’.

  And then here’s Mrs Ingham. ‘Minna,’ she says. Can you believe it? Her first name is Minna, and she insists I call her that.

  ‘Yoo-hoo! Miss Highsmith! I saw the bobbies – for heaven’s sake. What did they say?’

  She’s knocking on the back door, having shuffled down the steps on the path from her house to mine in a curious pant suit in dark green and some yellow fluffy slippers, which are now stained and darkened by the wet grass. She looks down at them, following my eyes, and we stand in the kitchen together. I have hastily hidden the liquor bottle in the cupboard. I’m brewing coffee, matter of fact, the gas is sizzling and the kitchen steamy, so there’s no chance of not offering her a cup. I go to the cold-store to fetch the milk and hide my expression.

  ‘I’m sorry, I hope I’m not interrupting your work,’ Mrs Ingham says, settling herself into my kitchen chair. I wince at the ghastly noise as she scrapes it across the brick floor. The door is open between kitchen and living room and my typewriter looks bereft, to me, slightly nettled at being abandoned.

  ‘No.’ I pour milk into two cups and the bottle shakes in my hand, splashing a little onto the wooden kitchen table. I make to fetch the dishcloth to mop the milky pools, then remember that it’s gone. Gerald. The back of his head.

  ‘Did the police say anything useful? Find anything? It wasn’t about Bunnikins and the fox, was it? Has there been – you know – any other nuisance?’

  ‘They . . .’

  I offer her the coffee and, after a pause, sit down opposite her. I don’t want the old snooper in the living room, possibly noticing that the rug has gone and the floor looks strangely bare where I haven’t yet replaced it.

  ‘Or was it about Saturday night? A couple of weekends ago. Thought it might be the fox again. I didn’t want to say anything – you know, make a fuss, knock on your door. But I heard strange noises again. Thumping sounds. I even thought I heard a man’s voice,’ Mrs Ingham is saying.

  ‘No, no, they weren’t here about that.’

  This is one of those occasions when too much talking looks suspicious. Let her come up with the answers herself. I sip my coffee. I’d rather drink it black; the milk is a concession to Sam telling me I’m fading away and wanting to feed me up. This thought is saddening, because just lately Sam has had no such interest in my thinness or much else.

  Mrs Ingham glances up at my calendar, as if needing confirmation of what day it is. Three little kittens in tartan collars, supplied by the Framlingham dairy, gaze down at her.

  ‘My Reggie is going deaf. I could definitely have relied on him, once upon a time,’ she says.

  And thank God for that, I think, taking a large slug of coffee. Another dash of whisky would be good. Thinking fast, I’ve decided that the best lies are ones that contain the truth.

  ‘I’m awful sorry about this. Matter of fact, I probably should have mentioned it. I did have a prowler, a sort of crazed fan, when I was living in Paris, used to send me letters. It went on for a few years. He might have followed me places, too. I never had proof, just the feeling sometimes . . . the kinds of things he knew. How’d he know I’d been wearing a new coat that day? Lucky guess? Or did some seedy young bum see me leave the house in it? That sort of thing. I guess a kind of paranoia developed. In the end, doctors put me on medication. And I moved here, and the letters stopped.’

  ‘But now you think he’s found you?’ Mrs Ingham glances at the mailbox as if he might materialise in front of our eyes. Her mouth is a small perfect O. Have I gone too far? She will want to see the letter, and I don’t care to show her it.

  ‘No – that is, I have had a letter, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh, my goodness. What did it say?’

  ‘Nothing much. I gave it to the police. He doesn’t do anything, you understand. Just letters. He signs himself Brother Death or sometimes “Stanley”. Stanley is the name of my stepfather. Of course I asked my stepfather, first, but it’s not his writing and – the letters from Paris were locally franked. Stanley is in New York, these days, or Texas with my mother.’

  ‘How jolly awful for you. Death threats, that sort of thing?’

  ‘No, no. He sends fan mail and cut-out pieces from reviews. He’s not unpleasant – or not always. And sometimes little snippets of information that tell me he knows where I am, where I’m staying.’

  ‘You’ve never seen him?’

  She hasn’t touched her coffee, I notice. The milk is forming a scum on top. She gives a little shiver, though whether from fear or excitement, it’s hard to tell.

  ‘No. The cops said it’s a hazard of the profession. Crime-writing, you know. Draws the crazies out of the woodwork.’

  A huge concession there, though she didn’t notice it. I called myself a crime writer. But it does make a better explanation and I know she’d see that, too. Writing about crazy guys lures them to you. I glance up at the kitchen window where a huge spider is bouncing in its web, like a badly wound ball of black cotton.

  ‘Couldn’t you, you know, have the handwriting analysed? I’ve heard—’

  ‘They’re typed letters. That sort of thing only happens in pocket-book novels. Ordinary folks don’t get that much police time or attention. You know. Writing letters, even a lot of them, without signatures, is not a crime.’

  ‘Well. Really. I do hope he hasn’t found you here.’ Now she’s tugging at the lapels on the green jacket of her pants suit, as if she needs to cover up, as if she herself might be under attack next. I see that the story has enthralled her, that it will do the trick. (So useful that my narrative skills are never fully otiose.) This story fits beautifully with her idea of a writer and the strange trouble they carry around them, like a bad smell.

  We drink our coffee, and she makes small-talk about her chickens; would I like some eggs, she’ll drop me off a half-dozen, did I know the mobile fishmonger calls every other Friday, very good haddock it is, too.

  I manage by a sort of twitchiness and a glance into the living room to indicate that I need to get on with some writing, and finally she leaves. I wave to her from the window as I wash up in the sink, in tepid water, moving my fingers inside the cups in the absence of a cloth. She wobbles up her steps to her own front door in the silly yellow slippers, while I think: If only she could slip on the concrete and crack her head open, like one of her eggs. And then: Do other people have these thoughts, or am I, as Mother often said, wicked through and through?

  Before that, I’d been in the garden. Pretending, in case Mrs Ingham, the damn fool Minna, is watching, to be checking the place for footprints, for signs of the prowler. In fact, I’m merely striding in my brogues among soggy wet leaves, and hard, persistent fungi, staring down at the little brown stream moving as slow as gravy, and thinking about Sam. Is she seriously going to continue with that weekly analysis – paid for by Gerald? From what she’s said the woman shrink talks of inverts with such revulsion and excitement – why can’t Sam see this? – that any sane person would assume her to be struggling with the same persuasion. And the shrink had not had the wit to tell her to leave Gerald, only that when Sam gave up her ‘tastes’, the marriage might stand a chance. And what if Sam now felt the desire to confess? Were shrinks like priests? Were they allowed to keep schtum?

  Something is unravelling between us and I have to knit it back. It’s not just about Gerald: it was there before. It’s Sam, it’s her . . . conflict, her desire to live the life of a conventional wife and mother, be acceptable, accepted.

  That time, that first weekend together in Paris, the happiest ever. After making
love, she said to me:

  ‘Your novel. The thing that pleased me most was that on my copy the cover says, “a million copies sold”. All those women . . .’

  Sam was one of those strange women who’d partly believed she was the devil itself, and entirely alone in her secrets.

  Not me. About the age of twelve, I had this picture-postcard, ‘Mabel Strickland: The Lovely Lady of Rodeo’. Dan, my cousin, the only one sorry for me, the only one noticing my loneliness, that terrible year said: ‘Mabel Strickland’s in town. You want to go to the fat-stock show and the rodeo with me and see her?’

  ‘Were you always so sure, Patsy, or are you retelling it how you wish it were?’

  So I told her about the flame-haired little girl, Rachel Barber, maybe six or seven, and the rubber Felix-the-cat toy we used to bat around between us, over in Barber’s bookstore, among all the pocketbook novels and the dusty mysteries and the love notes I stuck inside books – risky! – for Rachel to find. And that was innocent enough but, yes, it did feel right, because in my secret heart I imagined Rachel felt it too. Rachel opened my letters and giggled; she ran away, but she came back, she read the notes, she didn’t turn me over to the adults.

  Mabel Strickland, the lovely lady of Rodeo, was a less innocent feeling and I wondered if Dan knew it. 1933: I was twelve by then. I’d read endlessly about Mabel and others like her – Tad Lucas, another favourite – in comics like Ranch Romances. Later I saw her in a movie with Bing Crosby, Rhythm of the Range, but not that year: that year I hadn’t seen her in the flesh, only dreamed of her. I dressed like a boy, like Jackie Coogan in The Kid, with a huge cap pulled to one side and a pudding-bowl haircut, and neither Dan nor Granny Mae ever said a thing about it, although I knew Mother would make a stink when she saw.

  That day Dan bought me corn-dogs and sweet lemonade and a box of crackerjack, and we sat hollering at the trick roping and the calf wrestling, the air filled with tobacco and the smell of cattle urine, while Dan necked Buffalo Trace bourbon from a bottle and asked me not to tell Granny Mae. By then Dan was already a rodeo rider and radio announcer but that day he kept me company in the stalls, and we watched, mesmerised, hearts hammering, as the little clods of red earth flew up under the horse’s heels, waiting for the star of the show. Dan loved Mabel, too, and gave a great holler as she tore out there, black hair shining, her famous white boots with the playing-card shapes cut into the leather, the white tassels on her leather waistcoat streaming out behind her.

  My eyes welled with tears. My heart seemed to be trying to climb out of my body. The crowd was roaring and Mabel with the violet eyes was performing at breakneck speed – hippodrome stands, vaults, and then, heart-stoppingly, even slipping under the belly of her horse. Sweat had begun to spring everywhere on me: what on earth was happening to my body? And as the horse – a dark bay with a blaze on its face – thundered past, the tiny white girl with the knockout smile clinging to it, so did a train out on the prairie and that long, powerful, gathering sound moaning and picking up speed as it raced away made me flush through with heat, and I realised I was shaking, thundering too, that something had hold of me and was tossing my body in its grip, and it was Mabel Strickland. I knew then. Dan looked at me strangely. I could have used some air, but I didn’t care to say so. No one had to tell me what I was experiencing. This was love, mature love, which men spoke of everywhere, which the poets wrote about, which all my reading had prepared me for. Love for a girl: so what? They were all in love with a girl.

  When I told Sam this, she giggled. ‘A cowgirl? Well, I guess you did live in Texas. She was the only cheesecake available to you, poor darling.’

  ‘Ah, Mabel, you couldn’t call her cheesecake! She threw a steer to the ground in a perfect bust, breaking the world record – twenty-four seconds!’

  I was still loyal to Mabel after thirty years.

  For Sam, it was so much more complicated and delayed. She’d met a young woman when she was at a bar, alone, after she’d married Gerald, a kind of prostitute, as it happened, from a different class than her own, and this naughty girl had kissed her briefly on the mouth and gazed up at her with big brown eyes, letting her know at once such a world existed and that she, Sam, belonged in it.

  Later, Sam said this occasion was a mistake, a confusion. She had gone back with Steffie, but they had only sat together and talked; Sam was scared to do more. The girl had been troubled, and desperate, and ‘not really my dish’, Sam said. The feelings, Sam said, were probably only pity for the girl or an awakening of a maternal instinct. ‘Bullshit,’ was my reply. After that there were others, too, mentioned by Sam, never fully fleshed out, never fully admitted to. Most of our conversations were about Gerald. Once I knew of his violence, her fear of him, most of her energy went into figuring how to survive, how to keep him sweet.

  And now I need to talk to Sam, and see her, and make a new assessment of The Problem and where we are with it all. Everything has changed, and instead of being relieved, or thrilled, I feel some other miserable thing, a weight, an impossibility, an overwhelming bleakness about the future, about the point of anything. Didn’t I always say – didn’t I say to Smythson-Balby, in fact? – how extraordinary this feeling would be? Of exclusion, of fear, of aloneness – not guilt, not that exactly, only terror that, having done this thing, you can never, all your life, again feel free. Because you never know when – or how – you will be undone. How many guys are walking around with that secret in their hearts?

  The only person I can share this with is Sam, of course. And yet. We’ve hardly spoken. She mentioned last time that her dreams were vile: snakes and strange green textures that had no proper form but drove her screaming from her bed. Minty is back at school, and despite her claiming that it was only ever Gerald who sent the girl away, I notice she’s made no effort to change her boarding status, to have her at home with her.

  I feel impatient with her. Why do people fool themselves, say one thing, so often, and do another? I hate it when Sam behaves as Mother did, pretending an affection that her actions belie. I immediately want to suppress this criticism as unworthy. It’s surely the first time I’ve had such a disloyal thought about Sam; I don’t like the way my thinking is going. We’re in this together! I must telephone her and assure her of this at once!

  A chilly wind suddenly snatches up a few strands of my bangs and ruffles my thin shirt. It’s been weeks since the funeral and surely enough time has passed for a friend to visit a grieving recently widowed woman friend? I turn back towards the house, and as I do, I hear a ghastly crunching underfoot. Lifting my foot in its wet and shiny brogue as if it’s mired in glue, I hardly dare turn the sole over to look.

  Another snail shell, hideously crushed. A scattering of pieces of brown shell and jelly: the poor little thing quite dead; quite without any hope of rescue. Tears slide down my nose as I pick the darling object from my shoe, despair once again rushing up at me, for all the pointless, senseless deaths of all the most tiny, beautiful and deserving of creatures. Crushed underfoot or eaten by birds! Doing no harm! The little face of that terrapin, turning to look at me one last beseeching time. I crouch at the stream to place the snail there, watch it sink beneath the brown-grey soup with a soft little plop and bob back up again, the shell filled with air.

  No point wishing for the death of Minna Ingham, or obsessing about Smythson-Balby and what she may or may not know, or what’s in the letter, the possible or imagined reappearance of Stanley. They’re not going to be the ones, are they? There’s only Sam can really do it; there’s only Sam to fear and, as ever, as always, how could I have been so stupid? Sam is the only danger. Of course, of course.

  After Mabel Strickland my next big crush was Veronica Gedeon. New York, 1937. I was sixteen. I had a crazy true-crime addiction and was unable to walk past a newsstand without spending ten cents on one. Daring Detective, True Detective, Master Detective, American Detective, Official Detective Stories, Startling Detective, I loved them all with their gorgeo
us smell of wood pulp and their vivid covers, and sexy pictures of naked girls always cringing and shame-stricken but naked, at least, and that was what mattered and the only way you could get a hold of them. Inside, the stories were entrancing, lurid and stimulating: ‘Ghost of Killer – Widow sighted at Fayette County Gaol’; ‘Crimson Trail of San Francisco’s Gas Pipe Killers’; ‘I Am a White Slave’; ‘Pretty but Cheap’ . . .

  That day I picked up a copy of Inside Detective and, if you want the truth, it’s exactly like the French describe it – a coup de foudre. I’m thunderstruck, struck dumb, love struck immediately. There she is: Veronica Gedeon – Vonny – a delicious blonde with dark, frightened eyes, a desperate, pouting mouth, one arm thrown up protectively, shrinking in a position of shame and degradation, her flimsy dress pulled down over one breast . . . Oh, my, that girl was so peppy, that picture gave me palpitations. And the story inside was even better: the model on the front who had starred in other magazines, such as Front Page Detective and Detective Foto, had – get this – in real-life been raped and murdered! And with her mother lying under the bed, unknown to Vonny, having been dispatched an hour earlier by the same brutal killer! It couldn’t get any better. Matter of fact, it did – when photographs of Vonny, taken by amateur photographers, began appearing in all the newspapers, nearly all of them draped in a bit of voile, but easy to see all of Vonny’s charms on display: her tiny waist, her well-proportioned, well-spaced breasts, her lovely stomach – she was obviously sucking it in for the photograph, which made you love her even more. I kept them all. I cut them out and put them in a photograph album, bound with antelope skin. I couldn’t let Mother see them, of course, and this was the year before I went to Barnard so I was still living at home with her and Stanley, but I could swoon over the photographs – that was definitely the word, swoon – alone.