Foul Matter

by Martha Grimes

  So, for reasons he would prefer not to speculate on, Clive was among the anointed. He bet Mort Durban wasn’t. Heh, heh.

  “You’ll never get a table, are you kidding? They’re booked until Christmas.”

  That told Clive all he needed to know. “Sorry, sir, we’re booked solid until Christmas” (or Easter, or Doomsday) was the canned Old Hotel reply if you were on the forbidden list.

  “Oh, I’ll get us in.”

  It must’ve been killing Durban to hear this. He said, “Into the Lobby, maybe, but not up there on the rail.”

  He was referring to the bar on the first floor and the dining room on the mezzanine. It was an unusual feature for a restaurant, a balconylike upper level. But it was simply part of the architecture of the glorious house it once had been; had it not been in Manhattan, had it been in some “fiddle-dee-dee” city like Savannah, it would have been described as antebellum. A marble staircase swept up to the mezzanine. It was quite long, and the tables set by the copper fretwork of the rail that went around on four sides were choice. A table up there allowed the diner to look down at the bar area and see what lesser lights (although still a hundred watt, compared to the unanointed) were sussing things out. This meant that the viewers were on view themselves. There was always a great deal of rubber-necking.

  The Old Hotel was not quite so strict about its downstairs bar—“the Lobby”—which took up the entire first floor with its huge bar and all of its tables and admitted people it might not permit in the upstairs balcony dining room. But that didn’t mean just any old stiff could get through the door. A less demanding set of criteria operated for the downstairs, but there were still criteria. Since no one knew what the criteria were, the only way to find out was to walk in. Or try to. And there was the other rule: that one of the unanointed could get in if he or she was a guest of the anointed. So Durban could walk in if he were, so to speak, on the arm of Clive.

  Durban grumbled. “All right, what time?”

  “Whatever suits you.”

  “You mean whatever suits the Old Hotel.” He hung up.

  EIGHTEEN

  So, what do you think?” asked Candy.

  “Not much.” Karl put a toothpick in his book, saving his place. He had just hit a passage in the story he really liked and knew Candy was referring not to the book but to the bar and its customers. They were in Swill’s, observing Ned Isaly and the people around him. “Except you should take off the shades and turn that baseball cap around.”

  Candy shrugged. “I think I look like I belong.”

  “Yeah, but to what?”

  Karl was interested in Ned Isaly, and his interest grew the more he read this book, Solace. It was a strange book, not much actually happening with the two main characters—and they were nearly the only ones—leading separate lives. It was funny: they seemed to be meant to be together yet they never got together.

  Candy, now, was different. He wasn’t much of a reader, well, he wasn’t any kind of a reader except a little science fiction, and Karl kind of admired the fact Candy would take on this book of Paul Giverney’s. What excited Candy was new people, new places. It was a good job for that. They traveled a lot. Candy was all for living in Vegas. They’d had an assignment there, taking out a casino owner and his doll-faced partner. Karl really hated poofs. Guy could be black, white, red, or rainbow colored. African American, Asian American, Native American, American American, Karl didn’t give a holy damn. But poofs? No, thank you. In here, the first three guys his glance lighted on he knew were gay. That’s why he said, “Not much,” in answer to Candy’s question. Not to mention dykes. There was one over there leaning against the bar with slicked-back dark hair, a stubby figure, stubby fingers firmly closed around a bottle of Bud. That’s not enough, she was smoking a cigar. She was talking to a tall guy with long, unwashed hair.

  Swill’s was crowded; Karl thought at first this was an after-work office crowd stopping in for a drink. The men and women who formed chic little cliques looked as if they bought their suits and briefcases from the same place. Swill’s must have been one of the last places in the city that paid little attention to the city’s edicts about smoking.

  The suits Karl had noticed first. But most of the other customers in here looked as if they hadn’t done an honest day’s work in their lives. What was it these days that had so many unemployed, ones who were obviously fit to work? They were all fucked-up, lazy kids expecting to be taken care of. Christ, he himself had worked his way, all of his way, through a small college in upstate New York, had come that close to graduating, then done a fine-tuned job on one of the college deans behind the Sigma Kappa fraternity house. It sure wasn’t his fault if things had gotten out of hand. There was no way he could have known two of the dean’s sycophants—the chair of the phys ed department and the dean of students—would be packing heat, for God’s sakes. Of course the fraternity took it all as a reason to party. They were all drunk; that’s what they did. Their parents paid for all of this and the kids got stoned and shot birds off telephone poles.

  And because of the whole fracas, he himself had had to get out of town just a month before graduation. His class in the contemporary novel hadn’t finished, so he’d gotten an incomplete; well, that’s the way it went. But he didn’t flaunt his college education; that could be taken wrong by some people who might claim he was overeducated for this kind of work.

  “Maybe,” said Candy, “we should be going after this prick.” He flicked his thumbnail against the jacket photo of Paul Giverney.

  It amused Karl that the present contract was put out on a writer, someone in the literary scene, something Karl thought he knew a little about. It was a milieu with which he wasn’t totally unfamiliar. There’d been places like Swill’s at college; he’d had many an argument about Hemingway standing at the bar in Loser’s—Hemingway and Ayn Rand (talk about your butch writers!).

  Karl had paired up with Candy for a host of reasons that went beyond Candy’s wanting to operate independently of the Fabriconi family (for whom he’d worked for several years). He, too, didn’t like being told to take out this guy or that guy, no questions asked or answered, just do it.

  “Shit,” Candy had said back then. “It’s like the guy’s already walking around dead meat and don’t know it. I mean I’d know more about his stupid Irish setter than I would about Conrad Gravely.”

  Karl raised his eyebrows. “That was your hit?”

  Candy nodded.

  “That was classy, that was an A job, man. You picked that poor bastard off without so much as touching a hair on the guys with him. I always wondered who did that hit.”

  Modestly, Candy rocked his hand in a comme ci, comme ça gesture. “But then they find out the vic—Connie Gravely—wasn’t the one turned on them after all. It was some other guy.” Candy blew on his coffee. “What a bummer.”

  “Not your fault. You shouldn’t take the heat for that. You were doing what you got paid to do, that’s all.”

  “So when that happened, I walked into Gio’s office (this was Giovanni Fabriconi) and told him I was finished, to get another button man.”

  Karl laughed. “I bet he liked that.”

  “Oh, yeah, only not enough to let me live. More than one goon came after me.”

  “You reduced his staff considerably’s what I’m thinking.”

  Candy snorted. “Considerably’s right. Thing is, if they’d let me follow Gravely around for a few days—hell, even twenty-four hours—I’d’ve known. I got this instinct, see.”

  And this instinct, see was the other reason Karl had teamed up with him: Candy had an uncanny ability to intuit whether the mark had done what he was accused of or, on a broader spectrum, whether he deserved to die, accusations aside.

  “But these guys, the ones like Gio, all they see is getting theirs back. They ain’t really too particular about the truth, you know?”

  Karl knew. And it was the only time he’d ever heard anyone else voice his own concern. Once he h
ad questioned the guilt of the guy he was supposed to relieve of his life, and said so, and got no thanks for his concern.

  “Fuck you care?” one of the other guys had said, in real nervous agitation, shoving the slide back on his own .9 mm.

  Truth. That was a pretty heady word for a couple of hit men to be tossing around. So those were the reasons, aside from Karl’s just plain liking Candy. Karl knew he was good at sizing up a man, but in a more superficial way, like fitting him for a suit. It could be all that education he’d had (whereas Candy hadn’t made it past the first year of high school) that had muddied the waters of his perception. Too much Hemingway. Everybody was guilty to Hemingway.

  Now in Swill’s, Karl knew that Candy was only half serious about going after Giverney. They weren’t interested in pro bono work. And, of course, they knew nothing about Paul Giverney other than his being a sensationally popular writer.

  Karl answered, “Yeah, well, we don’t know what Ned ever did to Giverney. Maybe he screwed around with his wife.”

  Candy turned to the back flap copy. “His wife’s name is Molly.”

  “What? You think you’ll find it in the bio? Her telling Giverney Ned Isaly tried to screw her?” Karl reached over and turned the book around. “I still think it’s a shitty jacket.”

  Candy’s forehead creased in deep perplexity, as if being called upon to authenticate a painting at the Met. “You know, it kind of fits the book, though.”

  “How come? Is it gray and rainy and everybody’s sunk in anomie?”

  “In fucking what?”

  “Anomie. I like that word.”

  “Ho, ho, well, fuck your college education. Remember, you never graduated, same as me.” Candy snatched back the book and pretended to read.

  Karl could have pointed out where they never graduated from, but he didn’t. “So what’s it about?”

  “I’ve only got around fifty pages read. It’s way out weird. It sounds like science fiction.”

  “Philip K. Dick?” Karl asked. This was the one writer Candy knew about. For some reason he was crazy about Philip K. Dick.

  “No, no, no. It ain’t nothin’ like his stuff. No, in Giverney’s book it’s like everything around this person, this woman, has sort of collapsed. Everything we see around her has changed.”

  “Anomie.” Sunk in anomie. He should get a medal.

  “Whatever. Near the beginning she goes into this drugstore—well, that’s not the right word for it now because it’s all changed. Now it’s one of them old-fashioned pharmacies. She parks her car and when she gets out she sees the other cars in line are old models. So she’s got this new Lexus and the others look like they’re straight from the 1940s and ’50s, like a two-toned Chevy Belair. When she goes inside what used to be this familiar drugstore—”

  At this point a scrawny girl—or woman—holding two beer bottles by their necks paused at their table and looked at Candy’s turned-around baseball cap and shades. “That is so yesterday.” She walked on, swinging the beers.

  Karl laughed. “Told you.”

  Candy looked back and forth from the girl to Karl. “If she only knew. Her life in her hands.”

  “Go on.”

  “Okay, so she goes in, into the pharmacy, and everything’s changed. Instead of all glass shelves and chrome there’s dark wood paneling and those colored bottles these pharmacies used to have along the rear counter, beakers, they’re called. And this guy, the pharmacist, that’s where it gets even more hairy. The guy is still the same one she knew, same name, same person except he’s dressed different, you know, more old-timey. And he knows her, calls her by her name—it’s Laura—asks about her kid. He’s like nothing ever happened—”

  “And it’s not like Philip K. Dick?”

  “No! I told you, it’s not like him. It’s more like—what’s that guy, that program that used to have a lot of episodes about people turning up in the old hometown and finding it changed?”

  “Rod Serling. Rod Serling—what was the name of the show . . . ? Never mind, go on.”

  “Then she goes to this boutique next door.

  “In the windows were dresses on headless and armless mannequins, dresses that might have been stylish back in the thirties or forties. A pleated skirt, the polka-dot one with small capped sleeves—”

  “Jesus,” Karl said. “Is this supposed to be scary or is it set on Seventh Avenue?” Karl twirled his toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “Though come to think of it, I guess Seventh Avenue is scary, I mean if you have to deliver shit there.”

  “He’s just setting the scene, Chrissakes. So she looks in and sees this woman, Miss Fleming, who owns the joint:“Miss Fleming looked as she always did. No, not quite. Her hair was done differently, in a coil at the nape of her neck—”

  Karl slid down in his seat. “Come on, C, get to the scary part.”

  “Well, but this is scary, you think about it. To have everything changed just a little, just enough to make you think maybe it’s her that’s changed.” Candy sat back, pleased with this analysis. “Okay, I’ll leave out the beauty shop business—”

  “Please do.”

  “She starts walking.

  “Telling herself, Don’t hurry, don’t hurry. She forced herself to look at the houses she passed, relieved they all looked familiar. Except this house, with its Moorish architecture, the recessed door under an arching stucco roof—”

  “What in fuck’s Moorish architecture? I have a hard enough time with modern and Victorian and that crap.”

  The writer at the next table was looking their way. Karl was about to say something emphatic—like “Fuck off!”—until he realized the fellow wasn’t really looking at them but through them. He was in his own head. Karl liked that.

  “Okay,” said Candy, “I’ll just capsize some of the description; suffice it to say, there’s a little something wrong with each place she passes. So she walks along“—in dread of her own house. Then she thought she knew what all of this was: a dream, one of those lucid dreams where one inhabits his own dream, knowing that he’s dreaming—”

  “Whoa! That went right past me. You know you’re dreaming in your own dream?”

  “Yeah.”

  Karl shifted the toothpick back. “It’s a tautology.”

  “A what?”

  “Tautology. A kind of contradicting yourself. Like that.”

  “Like what? Where’re you going with this, K?”

  Karl shrugged.

  “Well, don’t go there,” said Candy. Then he laughed; this book was really getting to him. He looked over at the writer. “Look there, guy’s still writing away. Only time he’s stopped is to drink his beer.”

  “Maybe he’s like that writer in that King story, the Jack Nicholson one. Remember when his wife finds a whole stack of pages beside his typewriter with only one thing typed on them, one line: ‘All work and no play,’ et cetera? Remember that?”

  Candy nodded. Swill’s was filling up even more. A little group with punk hair shades—electric blue, eggplant purple—were moving like a small squadron through the room. The girls seemed to be dressed in scarves, no hemlines or sleeves discernible, just a lot of material, bunched here and there or flowing behind. This squadron—three girls, two boys—sported enough body jewelry to open a branch of Robert Lee Morris. They stopped at the table where the writer sat. It was a table for four and the spokesman, a skinny guy with a rhinestone in his eyebrow and a fade haircut, was telling the writer to sit somewhere else because it was a table for four.

  “Fuck they think they are?” Candy was incensed.

  There were five of them, so they still needed another chair and quickly homed in on the extra one at Candy and Karl’s table. Candy immediately clamped his feet on the seat. Without a word, the skinny guy wrapped his hand around the third chair, the one that Candy had just stashed his feet on, and pulled. Candy’s feet stopped him in midpull.

  “We need this, man,” said the skinny guy.

  “Ever
think of asking?”

  The kid yanked and Candy’s feet hit the floor. Candy stood up. He was a head shorter than the kid, but that made no difference to the armlock Candy got him in. And twisted. The kid yelped like a puppy. Candy repeated it: “I said, ever think of asking?”

  The kid blurted out a “Please” tacked on to an apology.

  Candy let him go. “Punk.” He sat down again, scarcely noticing the attention he’d attracted.

  Swill’s was packed for this hour in the evening when Saul sat down at the table in the window. It pleased them that most of the other regulars had accepted that this window table was Ned’s and Saul’s. Most of them, but not all. Whenever he had the chance, b. w. brill would flop there, take out a roll of foolscap, a pen, and his pipe. He would be joined occasionally by Freida Jurkowski, another poet, and they would try to top each other with their most recent recitals. b. w. brill was all over the Village coffeehouses where he made as much impact as the background music.

  There was a pecking order in here, but it had nothing to do with Ned or Saul; no one could come anywhere within pecking distance of them. But b.w. and Freida liked to make it appear they could because they’d been published. True. Only there were certain terms of publication that didn’t impress even the unpublished (that is, nearly everyone in Swill’s). Paperback original was one (although more publishers were turning to it) and especially paperback original romance. The only thing worse was vanity publishing, Vanguard Press, one of those the writer had to pay to get his stuff published. Insofar as anyone knew, none of the Swill’s regulars had ever opted for it. Or if they had, certainly wouldn’t want to admit it, which pretty much undercut the whole idea of (modestly) flashing your book around. Then there were the “little poetry” reviews that weren’t of the Sewanee, Kenyon, Prairie Schooner caliber. The ones Freida could count as hers were chapbooks and ones with stapled pages. b.w. had published nothing since his book, five years ago, except a poem in a small review called Unguentine Press. UP had since folded, and b. w. brill had found no new home for his “verses,” which is what he liked to call them, as if self-deprecation would summon up admiration in his listeners, which, of course, it didn’t since everyone (except Freida and a couple of other poets) knew he was a horse’s ass whom it was impossible to deprecate too much.