Foul Matter

by Martha Grimes

  Clive just wasn’t used to following people.

  When he checked into the Pittsburgh Hilton, he scanned the lobby looking for Pascal. There was no sign of her; there was only a couple sitting in a section marked off for morning coffee, the couple and a blond woman whose face was bent over a newspaper. How could she see the print through those dark glasses?

  The desk clerk returned his credit card to him along with a key card. Clive refused help from the bell captain, having only one small bag. He walked over to the bank of elevators. Two elevators arrived simultaneously and as he was about to step into one, he saw Ned coming out of another one on the other side. Ned didn’t even look at him. Clive thought he was probably wandering around in writer daze. He watched and saw him going up to the bar. So Clive would have time to leave his suitcase and wash up. Just as he pushed the up button, he saw a woman entering the glass door of the hotel.

  It was Pascal.

  At first glance he didn’t recognize her. It was her hair; it was pulled back and wound into a bun. He assumed she had done this the better to follow Ned. The hair loose and abundant would have called attention to her. He thought the makeup less liberally applied, too, not so heavy on the eye shadow. He thought how unnerving it was to think that a woman could so easily create a wholly new persona with nothing but a hairbrush and—sweet Christ! The guy in the boots with the beard coming through the automatic doors! Clive dived into the elevator as the door was closing. What was Dwight Staines doing here?

  When Ned threaded his way through the tables, heading for the bar, Sally dropped the Pittsburgh Press on the floor and bent down to retrieve it, hitting her head on the edge of the table. He had come so close. But he hadn’t seen her. She pulled a bit on the blond wig to make sure the bump hadn’t dislodged it.

  As she righted herself she caught a glimpse of a man who’d just boarded one of the elevators and thought surely she must be wrong. Why for God’s sakes would Clive Esterhaus be in Pittsburgh?

  Ned had checked into his room, dumped his duffel bag, and gone down for a cup of coffee before setting out to look at Pittsburgh. He hadn’t been back since he was in high school, just the first year before they’d moved to Scranton.

  Scranton was a sepia blur in his mind, but his Pittsburgh past, those days he could recall of it, were sharp and bright. He remembered “downtown,” those few city blocks that had seemed spectacularly bright—the movie theaters, the department stores. Horne’s, Kaufmann’s. He was surprised to see Joseph Horne’s all boarded up as if it had been a crack house, a broken-down haven for weepy-eyed druggies. He found that none of the downtown was as he remembered it; all of it looked condemned, or, he supposed, downtown had moved; it had relocated, and part of it was now the handsomely built-up area of the Point. That Golden Triangle Pittsburgh was so proud of. Deservedly so, he thought. It was a city that had rein-vented itself.

  They had been walking for more than an hour when Candy exclaimed, “Fuck’s sake! Don’t this guy eat or anything?” All Candy had eaten for breakfast and lunch had been the mingy bagel and so-called cream cheese.

  “Don’t worry. Even if he doesn’t, one of us can grab something to go.”

  “I don’t feel much like eatin’ on my feet, K.”

  “There she is again,” said Karl. He had called Candy’s attention to the redheaded woman originally because he thought that under the shapeless raincoat she had a great body; then he called Karl’s attention to the fact that the great body had been with them for an hour—sometimes walking behind, sometimes walking ahead. She was good, Karl said. If the two of them hadn’t been even better, they’d never have spotted her.

  “There’s another thing. You see that guy go by in a cab? Well, he’s done it twice. I didn’t get a good look at him, but something about him’s familiar. Now why would he be going around and around?”

  Saul decided he would have to forget this waving down of cabs and instead hire a car. Cabs were just too purposeful and too hard to direct if what you wanted to do was start and stop and circle back all the time.

  He had seen the two men on the pavement stare after him; it was them all right, the same two men who’d appeared in the little park, later in Swill’s—Paulie and Larry-something?—to sit down at his and Ned’s table. Had they said they were from Pittsburgh? They’d talked about Pittsburgh somehow, only he’d tuned them out, thinking about his book (the last fifty pages of which he had brought with him, the way Ned always did, because you never know when something will hit, do you?).

  And Saul wondered, as he had many times before, about convergences, confluences, sudden meetings of things you had never thought of as coming together. The rivers, for instance: the Monongahela and the Allegheny.

  It would be easier if he knew just what he was looking for when it came to Ned. He didn’t know; it was just this general feeling of something’s being out of whack, skewed, even ominous.

  The cab drove by a huge billboard advertising Porsche, Mercedes, and BMW. Ned, he saw, was coming back this way. It was nearly six P.M. Saul told the driver to drop him off at the Porsche dealership.

  THIRTY

  Ned crossed the street to look at the river. It was wide and gray and not especially pretty, but he thought he could remember himself standing at some point along the river where it passed through the city; he saw himself looking over the barrier, perhaps being picked up and his feet squarely planted there by his father. He was fantasizing. He did not know if that had ever happened, but it could have. Over there, on the North Side he thought an aunt had lived, rather poorer than the other relatives. He was not sure about the aunt; he could not picture her, not her face not her voice not her mannerisms.

  Sally walked on past him. She was getting pretty good at shadowing people, she thought. The trick, or one of them, was not to be taken by surprise, not to alter one’s course because the person you were following did. Sally considered this useful training because she lived most of her life startled. People could get a reaction out of her even if they weren’t looking for one. So Sally moved with great purpose past Ned, eyes looking straight ahead, her blond wig curls bouncing. A little farther along she would stop and take out her compact and look in the mirror to see when he started walking again.

  “You like it? I don’t. As rivers go, this one sucks,” said Candy. “He still standing there?”

  “Hasn’t moved. Probably caught up in some childhood dream.” Karl seemed to ponder what he’d said.

  Candy made a face. “Ever since you been reading that book, you come out with shit like that. So what’s he looking at?”

  “The other side of the river, looks like.”

  “I sure hope he’s not thinking of going there. This ain’t a bad city, is it? Stuff to look at. That stadium over there.”

  “If you’re from New York, it’s not much.”

  “So no place is if you compare it with New York, fuck’s sake.” Candy looked across the wide water. “Paris, maybe. Rome.” But his tone was dismissive, suggesting he was convinced Paris could not go head to head with New York. Neither could Rome.

  They stood looking across the river.

  Karl pulled the guidebook out of his coat pocket, thumbed a few pages. “Heinz Field.” Helpfully, he explained: “Three Rivers Stadium—called that because these rivers meet there—it got torn down couple years ago.”

  “How come?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Bummer.”

  “The one before that, that was Forbes Field. Tore that down, too.”

  “This city’s got nothin’ better to do, it tears down its stadiums? The history of a city’s in its teams, not its buildings. Willie Mays caught a line drive in Forbes Field that’s like nothing no one ever saw before. And what was that guy’s name was so great played with the Pirates? Even before my time? Clemente, that was it, Roger—no, Roberto Clemente. And Sandy Koufax. He pitched a string of no-hitters. Broke the record. Remember Sandy Koufax? We were kids, but remember?”

  “Ever
ybody remembers Sandy Koufax, even the ones that don’t. We were what—? Six, seven? But he was the Dodgers, not the Pirates.”

  “Yeah, of course. I didn’t mean he was a Pirate. But the Dodgers played here. The Pirates were hot, really hot. They played them all. Koufax pitched there.” Candy inclined his head in the direction of a stadium long gone. “Jackie Robinson ran the bases there. Stan Musial—” Candy broke off and shook his head sadly. “If you’re a baseball fan, it could bring you to tears.”

  Karl returned the book to his pocket. “Chrissakes, C, you remember all that stuff? What a memory.”

  “Yeah, well, you know—you don’t remember, then you forget.”

  The two of them turned their heads and looked down toward Ned. Still there. “Wonder why he came here anyway?”

  “He’s from here. It says so right in my book. So’s the other one.”

  “Givenchy? My guy?”

  “Giverney. Can’t you keep his name straight? ‘Givenchy’—that’s that mineral water from France.”

  Candy frowned. “You sure about that? We don’t drink nothin’ but Pellegrino.”

  “I told you—” Karl gave Candy a severe look. “It’s that water. Anyway, both these guys are from here. So that might be it. Like Ned did something to Paul Giverney when they were in school together. Paul’s never got over it. I blame myself for not probing into their backgrounds more. Find out what school they went to, you know, stuff like that.”

  “Yeah but you can’t be sure they went to school together.”

  “Didn’t I say? No, I’m not sure. It’s just possible.”

  “Do you really think a grown-up would carry a fucking grudge from his school days? Jesus. He must be real childish to do that.” Candy’s back was bothering him—it always did when he had to do a lot of walking. He turned to rest it against the stone wall. Here came a couple of black kids on skateboards, arms out and going at a good clip. It was cold, and they weren’t even wearing jackets. Candy thought about when he was young and how he didn’t like coats. He nodded toward the street where a few cars, like the kids, seemed to float by in the river mist. “That cab’s been sittin’ over there for as long as we’ve been standin’ here.”

  Karl turned. “Who’s in it, can you see?”

  Candy squinted. “Can’t see, except it’s some guy.”

  Karl was looking down the street, in the opposite direction from Ned, laughing. “Kids nearly ran into old Clive. He’s standing down there. Beats me, really beats me why he’s here.”

  “Dipshit,” said Candy, looking, too. Then in the other direction, where Ned was standing. Had been standing. “Yo! Our quarry is moving!”

  Karl chuckled. “ ‘Our quarry’—you been reading too many CIA spy novels, C.”

  “. . . a real departure, right? Literary, mainstream, whatever. But I figure, since it’ll be literary, well, Tom Kidd could edit me.”

  Clive was looking up the sidewalk at Candy and Karl and rubbing the shin that the skateboard had bumped into. “No, Dwight, Tom Kidd would not edit you. You cannot get Tom Kidd.” It was the only thing Clive had heard clearly in Staines’s monumentally long monologue that made Moby-Dick look infinitely beguiling in its brevity, or A la recherche du temps perdu recited by a stammerer simply fetching.

  “I’m not saying you’re not an editor par excellence, Clive, far be it from me to say that.” Dwight gunned his rented motorcycle.

  Clive was gearing up to grab this jerk by the strap of his helmet when he saw Candy and Karl move off. On the other side of the street, Pascal was going into the store whose window she’d been looking into. Clive could not see Ned; he was too far away or obscured by passersby. “Where’s your signing?”

  “It’s an independent, not one of your big chains. It’s over on”—Dwight took the Pittsburgh FastMap from his back pocket and scanned it—“Fifth Street.”

  “Why didn’t they hire you a limousine?”

  Dwight flapped his hand. “Hell, you know me, Clive. Just a kid from the sticks.” He gunned the engine again.

  If that was the case, “the sticks” was a warren of clichés, trite phrases, jargon, and neologisms. Yes, those were “the sticks” and Clive saw himself in the role of director of one of those summer blockbusters blowing the sticks all to smithereens and taking Dwight Staines with it. Clive suppressed a scream. Then he suddenly asked, “Who in hell is Blanche?”

  Dwight stopped revving the engine and looked mystified. “Who’s what?”

  “Blanche. The woman on the—oh, never mind.” Clive tried to laugh it off with a sickly little laugh, sickly because he had almost spoken honestly (a rare treat when dealing with one of their authors) for he had been about to say, “You know: the stick-figure woman in your latest. Blanche, the irrelevant little tart riding the train and thinking, thinking in your Molly Bloom-like excretions of consciousness—something you, Dwight, handle with as much subtlety as an elephant on ice skates—” He had almost said it before he remembered that robbing Queeg and Hyde of Dwight Staines was a rear-end run by Bobby that was an even more outstanding coup than the usual sneaky publishing coup. There were so many publishing coups in any one day that one publisher—it might have been Dreck—had ended up buying back one of its own authors. And he wondered why those few seconds before he’d veered off into unholy editorial scamming, why those seconds had been so liberating. He felt a yearning for those few seconds, something like homesick-ness. Clive could not understand this; he was not given to sentimental attachments. What he said instead was, “Have a good book signing, Dwight.”

  “Right. You’re reading StandOff, yes? This one’s really complex. I’d give you a capsule treatment of it—”

  (And I’d hide it under my tongue until I could spit it out.)

  “—only I veer off here. See you in the funny papers.”

  Clive hadn’t heard that expression since his dad had paused by the front door and said it to his mother before he walked out of their lives. Where in God’s name was he from that he’d be using that expression? Ah, but Clive knew where: the sticks, where “See you in the funny papers” was on everyone’s lips.

  Across the street Dwight flowed, whirr-whirring the cycle until he’d nearly jumped the curb and rammed the black beast into Pascal, who’d walked out of the store. Suddenly, she bent at the waist, and Clive saw her arms come up and hands flash out like a character in a John Woo film, and for one thrilling moment (almost as thrilling as the near approach of honesty a minute before), he thought Pascal was going to toss Dwight Staines back into the street. It didn’t happen, of course; her reaction was no doubt automatic when danger threatened. Dwight was running at the mouth over there, no doubt apologizing for being one of the world’s most popular writers, telling her to come to the book signing. Jesus.

  He zoomed off.

  A bus drove by and stopped a couple of blocks up ahead. He saw Candy and Karl board it. Clive hailed a cab. Its driver looked as if he’d fall asleep in the middle of the next intersection and didn’t look too keen on following anything, but he pulled away from the curb and followed the bus.

  Ned stood in Schenley Park watching a small group of boys playing kickball. Now he supposed it was soccer, but back then, it had been kickball. He must have played it. He thought again of that deep winter, the sky like slate, opaque and impenetrable; pools of water with ice skins; frosted glass, rime on sills . . . what winter was it? Was it even here?

  They were sitting on a bench beneath a huge oak.

  Candy complained. “Christ, I never knew a guy could stand around and look so much.”

  “Sing it again, C. And what’s to look at anyway?” Karl’s eyes scanned the park, stopped to watch the little group of kids playing soccer and a little girl on her own squatting down, digging in the ground at the base of a tree with a stick, then transferring the mound of earth to a pale yellow bucket. “They shouldn’t let her do that.”

  “What?” When Karl pointed, Candy said, “The kid?” He shrugged. “Probably sh
e’s with one of the other kids.”

  “Yeah? Well, is any one of them watching her?”

  “Don’t be so fuckin’ paranoid.”

  “Paranoid? We’re the guys she needs protecting from.”

  “Hey! No fuckin’ way, man,” said Candy. “We were never into that stuff.”

  “Remember years back when that dickhead Robanoff hired us?”

  “Yeah, the pedophile? Come on, we didn’t whack no kid, did we? Can we help it if you got moral degenerates out there? We’re real careful who we whack, who we don’t. Any other way, why are we here? We’re fuckin’ fastidious, man. I don’t know anyone in this game takes more care than we do. Gave back his deposit, didn’t we, I mean just before we capped him? Asshole.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” Karl sighed as if he were missing the experience and took out a cigar.

  Candy took out his Juicy Fruit gum, folded two sticks into his mouth. They sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the boys kicking the ball around.

  Karl said, “You play kickball when you were a kid?”

  “Me? Sure. They call it soccer now.”

  “Probably he did, too.” Karl nodded toward Ned.

  They went on smoking and chewing.

  Why was he so headstrong? Sally asked herself this, trying to convince herself, probably, that she knew him. Which, after watching him all afternoon, she felt she didn’t.

  It did not surprise her that Clive had turned up here also. That is not to say that it didn’t worry her. He must be spying on Ned, but for what reason? To see he didn’t hop a freighter to Europe? He must be watching him for Bobby Mackenzie, acting out some plan they had set in motion that must involve more than simply breaking Ned’s contract with Mackenzie-Haack.