Foul Matter

by Martha Grimes

  A knock at his door startled him, especially since it was a sound he rarely heard. Maybe a package, UPS or Fed Ex. As he was getting out of bed he imagined a man whose only contact with the world beyond his door was a courier service. He stood thinking about this and forgot to go the door. Knuckles rapped again, louder, and he went to the door.

  It was Saul.

  Ned was flabbergasted. They were friends of long standing, of more than a decade, but Saul hardly ever came here. “Saul!”

  “Ned. Will you do me a favor?”

  “Sure. Of course. Come on in. What’s wrong? You look like hell. It’s the first time I ever saw you look like hell. What’s this?”

  Saul was reaching out a package wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, some three or even four inches thick. “A manuscript. The one I’ve been working on.”

  Ned’s eyes widened. He was almost alarmed.

  Saul went on. “In Pittsburgh it came to me suddenly that maybe the reason I couldn’t write the ending was because I’d already written it. Maybe what I had down was the ending.”

  Ned was hefting the manuscript as if weighing it. “I’ll be more than glad to read it, Saul.” An understatement if there ever was one.

  Now Saul looked genuinely pained. “Well . . . I was thinking of Tom Kidd. Do you think he would? Since I don’t have an editor.”

  “Are you kidding? Of course he would. My God.” Ned started to laugh. “God . . . a new book from Saul Prouil. I can guarantee he’d read it. I can take it over there right now.” Ned had never seen Saul in what one might call “a state.” Saul was always the epitome of cool. He was disappointed that Saul was not giving the manuscript to him for a reading, but he himself would have done the same thing. Or would he? Probably he would have felt a manuscript was getting a far better reading if in Saul’s hands than in the hands of an editor. Except, of course, Tom Kidd. “I’ll get dressed.”

  Saul called after him, “Are you sick? You were still in bed.”

  “I was just tired. That trip seemed to wear me out.” In five minutes he was out of the bedroom, barefoot, pulling a sweatshirt over his head. “I don’t know what the hell it was. Did you ever get the feeling you were being watched?”

  “Watched? No. You going paranoid on us?” Saul smiled.

  Ned stuffed his feet into shoes. “Yeah. Right. Who’d want to watch me? Let’s go.”

  He gave Saul a push through the door, locked it, and they left.

  FORTY

  Candy and Karl were standing in front of a travel agency in Chelsea looking at a flock of cardboard flamingos whose shocking pinkness advertised two weeks in South Beach and Key West. That poster sat against a hodgepodge of smaller pictures and travel ornamentation: a bucket of sand, a bikini, an exotic drink with a stirrer featuring a naked girl.

  Ruminatively, both were chewing gum. They were not talking about Key West, but about Ned Isaly.

  Candy said, as he studied the bikini, “So how do we proceed here? I mean, the only other time this happened was with that little kid? Remember that little kid, K?”

  “Do I remember? How could I forget. Six years old, cute as Christmas.”

  “Heir—or is it heiress—to twenty million smackers,” said Candy.

  “Well that was a no-brainer. We just gave the jerk his money back.”

  “Before we put him on a plane to Australia,” said Candy.

  “Dumb fuck went, too.” Karl sniggered. “Without so much as a complaint.”

  “Easy to do with a Walther in your ear.” Now they both sniggered.

  “Tell you one thing, C. If it was this Mackenzie creep, it’d be no trouble for me taking him out in the middle of Lincoln Center. I mean it.”

  They stood for another silent minute thinking about that and looking at the window, Candy tilting his head nearly to his shoulder to look at a picture of a couple of women playing with a huge beach ball.

  Karl said, “Listen, let’s go in.”

  “We want to go to Key West? You kidding? That’s where all the faggots live.”

  “Not all a them. A lot are in Provincetown, the ones not in Chelsea.” Karl said this out of the corner of his mouth so the travel agent wouldn’t hear them as he bent his glossy strawberry blond head over some brochures.

  Karl got the agent’s attention and made his inquiry. Candy laughed. “You thinkin’ what I think you’re thinkin’?”

  “Wouldn’t be surprised.” Karl laughed, too.

  The agent sighed with all the pleasure of one who’d finished either a good meal or good sex. “Now, gentlemen, I think I’ve got everything in order here,” at which point he shoved over a ticket, an itinerary, and several brochures. And a glossy magazine advertising one of the cruises. “In case you decide later.”

  Candy pocketed the ticket, Karl the glossy stuff. They thanked him and left.

  Fresh sticks of gum in their mouths, they stood on the sidewalk as the swell of gypsy-looking women and kids with nose rings on skateboards swept around them.

  “I could use a beer, C, how about you?”

  “Swill’s?”

  “Yeah, why not?”

  They had come to think of themselves as regulars and the table midway down the room as theirs and were offended when they found others occupying it, Candy fantasizing bringing in his sawed-off shotgun and gunning them down as would, he claimed, have happened in Depression years.

  Swill’s was, as usual, dusk dark; one seemed to be looking through the gray haze of time, which was kind of restful. Almost like watching one of those black-and-white movies they didn’t make anymore, except when some director wanted to make one over again.

  Candy had got their beers at the bar and said hello to Ned, who was standing there talking to that fag poet. He returned to the table to hear Karl talk about this black-and-white movie thing. “One of these days some asshole producer is going to do Casablanca in color.”

  “Assholes,” said Karl, pulling his beer over. “Casablanca’s got to be in black and white.” Karl had lit a cigar and sucked in on it and was inspecting the coals at the end. “Trouble is, everyone wants something for nothing. Make a movie already been made once, you can do it with your head up your ass. I ask, where’s the imagination in that?”

  “It’s only foreign movies show any imagination. That and in-dies.” Candy had heard this observation made more than once in Swill’s. “You got your Fellinis, your Kurosawas—”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Did I say he wasn’t? You got your David Lynch, your John Sayles.”

  “You’re right, one hundred percent. Think of the guy who remade Psycho. What he was doing was just playing on people’s nostalgia. You know, the Hitchcock one.”

  Candy gave a moment’s thought to this and said, “Well, but wait a minute, K. You can’t feel nostalgia for Psycho. You never been to the Bates Motel.”

  “I know I haven’t. But I could think I was when I was watching that movie.”

  Candy was dismissive. “Come on, K. You can’t feel nostalgia for someplace you never been.”

  Ned was still standing at the bar, talking now to the bartender and owner, Jimmy Longjeans.

  Karl pointed toward Ned and said, “Let’s get him over.”

  One on each side, they got him.

  “I would have gone peacefully, for God’s sakes,” said Ned. “Something on your mind?”

  Karl said, “We’re having a kind of argument.”

  “About what?”

  Karl said, “I’m saying you can feel nostalgia for a place or time you’ve never been to.”

  Ned still stood, drinking Bud from a bottle. “Well, yes, you can. I mean I think so.” Why had these two been in Pittsburgh, really? Ned wondered. There was something wonderfully old-fashioned about them, like Kennedy fifty-cent coins.

  Karl kicked back a chair in a way that suggested he was used to kicking back chairs and said, “Sit down,” in a way he was used to telling people to sit down. But he did not mean to give offense, whi
ch was pretty much what he said, together with “Please (sit down).”

  So Ned sat.

  Candy said, “You were saying?”

  “About nostalgia? That it might not have to do with a particular time and place.”

  They squinted at him as if compressing the field of vision might leave another faculty free to play around.

  “I don’t get it,” Candy said. “You?” He turned to Karl, who was thinking and didn’t answer.

  Ned said, “You might be attaching a feeling to somewhere that wasn’t ever the source of it. Maybe you don’t recall the source because remembering it’s too painful.”

  They cocked their heads like big birds, listening carefully.

  “Anyway, it’s what the book I’m writing is about.”

  Was it? It gave Ned a jolt. He thought of Nathalie and thought she had been sorely used and not just by Patric but by Ned himself. He saw her there in the Jardin des Plantes, waiting for Patric, who wasn’t going to come. He’d left Paris for his house in l’Hérault. Why was she waiting if she knew he wasn’t coming? Hope against hope, a strange way, thought Ned, of denoting hopelessness. She thought:He will walk toward me, turning in from the Rue Linne, carrying roses. He will not have gone, after all; he will have sent his wife and children off without him to Beaulieu-sur-Mer. Now they could be together for two weeks, two weeks uninterrupted. They would sit in cafés along the Boulevard St.-Germain, in Deux Magots, or along the Rue de la Paix, the café jammed with Americans who remembered it from the old song.

  Nathalie imagined Patric with the same ferocious intensity with which he, Ned, imagined Nathalie.

  She watched the path with such an intensity that Patric might actually materialize there, holding flowers . . .

  He only half heard the question asked of him and looked up. “Sorry, you said—”

  The taller one nodded, then asked, “What’s your book called?”

  “Separation.” Ned said, “Why were you guys in Pittsburgh anyway?”

  “Oh . . . yeah . . . we got business in Pittsburgh. Accounts, you know.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Coincidence. Listen, we’re just on our way over to Mackenzie-Haack. We want to see Mackenzie before he leaves town. He’s one of our accounts.”

  “Yeah,” said Candy. “Before he leaves town.” He grinned.

  FORTY-ONE

  Candy and Karl walked into the enormous lobby of the Mackenzie-Haack Building. The lobby looked like a marble sepulchre with its black floor tiles reflecting upward and white Doric columns on either side. The floor looked slippery slick and icy black enough to skate on.

  They walked up to a black marble half-moon structure with RECEPTION on a small brass plaque. Behind the counter sat a guard. Another guard stood by him. Both looked bored. On the wall behind them were the huge intertwined initials MH.

  “Bobby Mackenzie,” said Candy, rolling his wad of gum from the left side of his mouth to the right. He had worn his black fedora.

  Karl had worn his, too. Both of them also wore their mirror Ray-Bans.

  The guard looked them slowly up and down, obviously not caring much for what he saw. “Names?”

  “Mr. Black and Mr. White.”

  The second guard stopped yawning, narrowed his eyes at them, and adjusted his Sam Brown gun belt.

  The first one scoured a big book of names, dates, and times, looked almost happy that he didn’t find Mr. Black and Mr. White. “You got an appointment? Because here it says you don’t.”

  Karl reached over the marble surface of the desk, picked up the phone, and held it out. “Call him and say we’re friends of Mr. Zito’s. Danny Zito’s.”

  The guard looked increasingly unhappy and, now, fearful. He buzzed a number, spoke into the phone, waited a few seconds, and was given an instruction. He hung up and wrote “Black” and “White” on two identification tags. He handed these over to them. “S’posed to keep this on at all times you’re in the building.”

  The tags had little metal clips that they used to fasten them to their lapels; they were directed to a bank of elevators that would whisk them to the twentieth floor. Nonstop. As soon as they entered the elevator, Candy and Karl jerked off the tags. They didn’t think much of wearing identification.

  Out of the elevator, past another receptionist, down a carpeted hall, blowups of book jackets lining the walls right and left.

  “These guys are really into books,” said Candy.

  Bobby Mackenzie was seated at his desk, feet planted on top of it. He appeared to be editing some pages. Clive was standing by the window that gave out on a panoramic view of Manhattan. Bobby did not rise. He did not invite them to sit down in the two leather chairs on the other side of the desk.

  Clive did.

  “Clive, my man!” Candy gave him a high five.

  Clive rather enjoyed returning it. He offered them chairs on the other side of the desk.

  Bobby looked displeased. After all, he hadn’t arranged this meeting and he didn’t want them sitting down. “So why are you here? There wasn’t supposed to be any further meeting until the job was done. Far as I know, it isn’t. I saw Ned Isaly this morning walking into Tom Kidd’s office, unmistakably alive.”

  “Don’t be testy, Bobby. This ain’t as public as Michael’s. Nice office.” Candy looked around.

  “The job is finished, as far as we’re concerned.” Karl drew an envelope from an inside pocket; he was sitting near enough to the desk that he could skid it across the polished mahogany. “The advance. It’s all there except expenses incurred. Pittsburgh Hilton, that kind of thing.”

  Bobby looked at the envelope as if it were a package of vipers that he’d dearly love to toss back. “So you can’t do it? That’s what you’re saying?” Bobby sneered, or at least tried to; a sneer in this company wasn’t easy. “Clive?” He turned then to Clive as if offering him the job.

  Clive shrugged. If a shrug could look happy, this was it.

  “But that ain’t all, Bobby,” said Karl. “We got a couple things to take up with you, things we want done.”

  Bobby stared at them in genuine disbelief. “Things you want—done?” He laughed abruptly and turned to Clive again.

  The happy shrug returned, even happier.

  “Things you want done,” Bobby said it again, shaking his head. “I don’t think so. Now why don’t you just get out of here. Fuck off.” He fluttered his fingers toward the office door.

  Clive looked from Bobby to Karl and Candy, this time a trifle nervously. Was Bobby so totally unaware of life going on outside of himself and his little publishing fiefdom that he thought he controlled everything? Including these two? Hadn’t he, for God’s sakes, read Danny Zito’s book while leafing through it?

  Karl and Candy looked at each other as if questioning the wisdom of the term: “ ‘Fuck off.’ Bobby says ‘Fuck off,’ K. Does he really mean us?”

  “Yeah, I heard him, C. You talking to us, Bobby?”

  Clive thought this sounded exactly like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. Karl even looked like him. Clive had never noticed this before.

  Bobby looked up from the pages he was marking up, pretending to think the two of them had already gone. “Get lost.”

  Clive squirmed. But he was enjoying it.

  Karl looked at Candy in mock surprise. “ ‘Get lost.’ That’s in case we didn’t understand ‘Fuck off.’ ” His expression settled in a little. “Now, Bobby, listen up: all we want is for you to ensure Ned Isaly’s book, his new book, makes it to the TBR best-seller list. (Their time spent in Swill’s had definitely not been in vain.) No no, hear me out—” He held up his hand to stave off whatever reply might be coming from Bobby’s dropped-down mouth. “It don’t have to begin in the top ten; it don’t have to suddenly appear there in a hail of bullets—”

  (Clive liked that analogy a lot.)

  “—it’s okay if it’s on that ‘extended’ list for a couple weeks. After all, Ned’s stuff is a far cry from Dwight Staines—
which is a relief—and since Ned’s literary, and, well, it’s hard getting that on the list at all. But we insist it’s in the top ten for the rest of the time, say, five or six weeks. At least five or six, maybe seven’s better. And maybe it ought to crawl up to the top five, now we’re talking about it—”

  Candy shook his head, “Top ten, K. We ain’t asking for miracles. If Ned’s never been on the list before, then top ten’s a real victory, right?”

  Karl brooded. “It should be top five, a good writer like him. He should be in the top five.”

  “You’re both nuts.” Bobby’s hand shot to the telephone.

  Synchronized as the Rockettes, choreographed by Bob Fosse, liquid as Twyla Tharp, in one fluid motion they thrust their hands inside their Armani jackets (deconstructed for just this relaxed effect) and pulled out guns.

  Frozen silence. They shoved the slides up and back. In that still room, they made a noise like Niagara.

  Clive felt a jolt of electricity, a rush of adrenaline putting his senses on red alert. It was not an unpleasant feeling. How often did he ever have it? But were these the amiable “Waltzing Matilda” boys of the Pittsburgh group? Even hit men had their lighter side, he supposed.

  Karl continued. “That’s the first thing—the list. Understood?”

  Bobby slammed himself farther back in his chair. “You’re—” (He wanted to say “crazy” but looked again at the black muzzles pointed his way.) “—kidding. I don’t control the best-seller lists. Nobody does. Nobody but the public, the reading public, the ones who buy the books.”

  Candy and Karl both laughed richly and shook their heads.

  Karl tipped his hat back on his head and said, “Bobby, the public doesn’t control anything. They are controlled by whoever or whatever blows the strongest wind their way. And in addition, Bobby, there’s one thing our line of work has taught us and that is nothing, nothing, is impossible if you want it done enough. You’d be surprised.” Karl raised the gun a fraction.

  Bobby made a dismissive noise that brought Candy to his feet, gun hand propped in his other hand. “Shit, K. This guy don’t know any more about marketing than my aunt Fanny. Lemme cork him up.”