by David Free
‘I could have killed you last night.’
‘You should have. Next time I’ll be ready for you. You fucked up. I feel reborn.’
‘The state of you on that couch.’
‘Yeah, I’m the sick one. Talk about the crooked timber of humanity. You’re riven, mate. You’re sawdust.’
‘Maybe you should ask yourself why I let you live.’
‘Because I’m not a woman?’
‘Maybe I want you around a bit longer.’
‘Why don’t you come back tonight? I believe you know the way.’
‘I’m busy tonight.’
‘But you missed something. You left something behind. That thing I found in her room. It’s a thumb drive. It’s encrypted, but one of these days I’ll crack it. Or maybe I’ll get sick of trying and give it to the cops, and let them work it out. And that’ll be it for you. Whatever she had on you, it’s on that drive. You want to bet against it? I know you don’t. Because that’s the sort of thing she did, isn’t it? We both know it. She was smarter than everyone else, especially you. That’s why you went back to the house. You knew she’d have some way of fucking you up from the grave. Well, I found it first. I’m zeroing in on you, pal. You’re a brainless sack of shit, but for some reason she had a use for you. When I work out what it was, I’ll have you. I’m close now. I’m so close. But I think you know that. You saw what I wrote on that pad.’
‘That was nothing. You weren’t even close. If you were, do you think you’d still be alive?’
‘So why’d you take it away?’
It was a mistake to ask. ‘Because I knew you’d forget,’ he said. ‘You’re pathetic, Saint. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’
‘You’re going to ask me about shame?’
‘Don’t dodge the question.’
‘I’m not here to answer your questions, champ. What do you think we’re doing here? Matching wits? Don’t flatter yourself. Play to your strengths. Come back tonight and try to kill me. Come for the stick before I crack it. I sleep with the doors unlocked, as you know. You want this thing to end, let’s end it.’
‘I don’t want it to end. Not yet.’
‘It’s ending, whether you like it or not. Come here tonight. This time I’ll be ready for you. No cops, for now. Just you and me. You do your best, I’ll do mine.’
‘I’ve told you,’ he said. ‘Tonight I’m doing something else.’
I should have hung up then. We’d covered the essentials, and I was sick of the sound of his voice. But any sound beat the sound that was waiting for me when he went, the sound of Missy in that other room. Silence is one thing. The silence that will never end is a bit much even for me.
I said, ‘You’re getting desperate, aren’t you? You’re starting to panic. Why’d you kill Missy? What did she do wrong? She burn you in one of her columns? She go public about the size of your dick? Or did she ask you one of her probing questions? Something like: “How did Jade Howe get the same bite marks on her that you put on me?”’
‘If you’d kept your mouth shut, Saint, she’d still be alive.’
‘Why? Did I give her the right idea?’
‘You shoot your mouth off about things you don’t understand. You’re getting dangerous to know.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘It means people around you keep dying.’
‘Because you keep killing them. Christ. People around me? There are no people around me. Not any more.’
‘I could name one or two,’ he said.
‘I wish I could.’ Did I know what he had in mind even then? ‘There’s nobody left.’
‘There’s your boss,’ he said.
I felt something like an electric shock – the mild kind, the not unpleasant kind.
He waited. He said, ‘You don’t like him much, do you?’
‘Now what makes you think that? Are you in the business?’
‘No. But I’m telling you the man’s in danger, and for some reason you don’t seem to care.’
‘That’s what you’re telling me, is it?’
‘You know it is.’
‘Maybe I don’t think you’re serious.’
‘Sounds like you want me to be.’
‘Killing a man? That isn’t your style. Even a man like Skeats.’
‘Jade didn’t like him either,’ he said. ‘She thought he was a fool. She thought he was pathetic.’
‘That’s nice to hear, but what’s your beef with him?’
‘What’s yours? The fact that Jade fucked him a lot?’
Something was dawning on me that would have dawned on me days ago, if my head wasn’t always so full of pain and pills and sloshing booze. ‘You are in the business,’ I said.
He said nothing. I took that as confirmation. He was in the ink trade. You didn’t have to be to want Skeats dead, but it helped. Yes, this freak was in the word racket, like the rest of us. Why had I taken so long to see it? Just because he was an amoral and embittered dunce? On reflection, that hardly ruled him out.
‘Who are you?’ I said. ‘A writer? Did I give you a bad review once? Did Skeats publish it? Did Missy Wilde give you one too? You’re a failure of some kind, clearly. But what kind? A washed-up poet? An even more failed critic than me?’
‘His family’s out of town tonight.’
He left a silence I didn’t fill.
‘Tonight it’s just him.’
‘Who is this? Lodge, is it you?’
‘Let’s be clear about what I’m saying.’ He said it petulantly, almost in a whine.
‘I get it,’ I assured him. ‘You’re really not that subtle.’
‘And you don’t care.’
What could I say to that except nothing?
‘I assumed you’d want to talk me out of it.’
‘Would it make a difference?’
‘Maybe. I don’t like doing these things.’
‘So turn yourself in.’
‘No. Someone has to stop me.’
‘There’s plenty of people in the phone book.’
‘This is your boss I’m talking about. The man who publishes your stuff. And this is the best you can do. I find this strange.’
‘You should get out more.’
‘The man who puts your words into print.’
‘In butchered form, my friend.’
‘So it’s only fair that we butcher him?’
‘Not we. You. You. I don’t make other men’s decisions for them. I can barely make my own.’
‘You’re making one right now.’
‘Is that right? Everyone’s a moralist now. Even you.’
‘You’re no better than I am, Saint.’
‘No, I’m quite a lot better than you are.’
‘Bullshit. You want this fucker to die.’
‘I’ve told you what I want.’ I was tired. I was in no mood to debate ethics with a man who murdered women and posed them like dolls. ‘I want you. Here. Now. Tonight.’
‘You know what I’m doing tonight.’
‘Don’t do it. Is that enough for you?’
‘Say it like you feel it.’
‘That’s all the feeling I’ve got left. If it’s not enough, do what you have to do. Just leave his family out of it.’
‘Like I told you,’ he said, ‘tonight it’ll be just him.’
Again that sense that the answer wasn’t far away. I knew this man somehow. Was it Skeats himself, checking to see whether I’d piss on him if he caught fire?
If it was, he had his answer.
‘Let it come down,’ I said.
After that I thought I started to smell her. I got a towel and soaked it with water and plastered it into the crack under the bedroom door. The smell propelled me out of the house then, out the side door and across the wi
dth of the deck. But even out there the stench was still with me. Maybe it was in my clothes. Or maybe it was under them. Maybe the dead smell was coming from me.
I leant on the rail and looked out at the trees. I noticed I had no drink in my hand, or even near it. This was telling. I’d brought my phone out instead, and had laid it on the rail. There was more of the afternoon left than I’d feared. I had time to think for once, just when I didn’t want to. I wanted night to hurry up and come down and take things out of my hands. I wanted to bail out of consciousness and let darkness take its course without me on board. I am better at behaving badly when I am asleep. Awake, I have a bad tendency to develop second thoughts. But bedtime was still a long way off, even by my clock. Like a spooked animal, the night had sniffed me and declined to come any closer: it could smell my thirsty evil. I felt stationary in time and space. I could shape the future instead of freefalling through it. Conceivably, being sober always felt like this. It would have been nice to have this clarity when it might have done Jade some good, or me, or even Missy. Why did the lucky day have to be Skeats’s?
The palm trees crossed swords in the high wind. The air played with my hair the way Jade used to, once. Exactly once. My appetite for Skeats’s death was souring. It wasn’t that I didn’t want him dead. I just didn’t want him to be dead because of me. There was a big difference. Even the moral idiot on the phone could see that. Would the world be a better and less stupid place without Skeats in it? Of course, but this was no time for idealism. What mattered was living with myself. Would that get easier or harder, if Skeats turned up dead in the morning? I thought I knew the answer, and didn’t like it, which probably meant it was right. You make the big decisions in your gut, and then you work out the reasons in your head. The truth was that I had enough corpses on my conscience already. Throw Skeats on the stack and I would vanish under the weight. I would sink right down into the earth with him. I would have no self left to enjoy his being dead with. There was no getting around it. He had to be warned. Calling him was the least I could do, as well as the most. Not doing it would be a whole new kind of disgrace. What failure on that scale would taste like I did not want to know. So why had I still not called him? Why chew the foul cud any longer than I had to?
The gum leaves hissed high in the breeze, like applause heard from a long way off. Somebody half-smart said you regret the things you don’t do more than the things you do. Whoever he was, I doubted he ever put a man to death. If he did, what were the things he regretted not doing? By now I’d looked at the phone for so long that I saw its shape when I blinked. The scene had the texture of something I would remember forever, no matter what happened next. The best I could do was make sure I remembered it for the right reason. Would Skeats have saved my skin if our positions were switched? I doubted it, but that was exactly why I had to save his. Wasn’t I better than him, at least by a bit? If I didn’t have that to cling to, I didn’t have much.
I dialled his number.
And he didn’t answer. Of course he didn’t. I pictured him glancing at his phone and seeing my name on it and glibly turning away, spurning the call that would save his worthless hide. Part of me, a very large part of me, wanted to let that be his last bad decision on earth. But the larger principle had to be remembered. I wasn’t saving him for his sake. I was saving him for mine. That’s all there is, in the end: just you.
I went inside to landline the prick. I sat there by the phone and waited a bitter eternity before redialling him, so he wouldn’t guess it was me.
He answered. When he heard my voice he inevitably said, ‘Ray, can I call you back?’
‘No,’ I said.
But I was already talking to a severed line.
He didn’t call me back.
And even then I couldn’t let him die.
11
One last time into the vile city, then. One last drive and I would be out of good deeds. Not drinking before I left, or even while I drove, was part of the martyrdom. My body was an inferno before I hit the plains. My phone was on the passenger seat in case Skeats called back. He hadn’t yet and he wasn’t going to. Till the end, to the death, he was not going to make things easy for me. It had never been his style.
From the foot of the hills to the city an endless chain of tail-lights stretched ahead through the dusk, glowing ruby-red like my spine. A river of metal and light going nowhere, and everybody in it was going to get there before me. The memory stick was in my pocket. I hadn’t been stupid enough to leave it behind. Missy was still on my bed. For some reason I hadn’t liked leaving her back there, alone. But what could happen to her now that hadn’t happened already?
The drive was endless, but it ended. Near the lit-up offices of the newspaper I found a dark lane to ditch the car in. Then I went through the paper’s revolving glass front door for what would surely be the last time, no matter how the rest of this went. In the lobby I summoned a lift and rode it up to Skeats’s floor. When it got there I stepped out into the mid-1960s. That was the last time the place had turned enough profit for a revamp. There were bent grey venetian blinds on the windows. The laminated floors were the colour of month-old avocado. The desks were cubbied off by ranks of chest-high tin filing cabinets set at right angles to one another. The place was vanishing even as I walked through it. Half the floor space had just been sold or let out to some IT firm. Two guys with nail guns were erecting a plaster wall across its width right now. Fresh blue carpet had been laid on the far side of the frame. I caught the sweet rubbery smell of it. The light was brighter over there. I saw virgin white workstations standing in its glare, and ergonomic chairs still sheathed in plastic. I saw cutting-edge computer towers. A stylised logo on the wall said something about networking solutions and synergy. Here was one more reason to let Skeats live. He was being walled off into the past anyway. He was more like me than I wanted to believe.
I was halfway to his corner office when I got a rogue urge to swing by Barrett Lodge’s warren en route. I thought I could afford the detour. I thought I’d done the hard part already, just by making the drive. And something about the Lodge factor gnawed at me. He was anomalous somehow. I’d checked out everybody else, so why hadn’t I checked out him?
Lodge’s filing cabinets were sandbagged almost to the ceiling with old proofs and review copies, with every book he’d ever glazed with the lukewarm drool of his approval. The old fool was so torpid he’d never even got around to selling them. Or maybe Skeats paid him so much that he didn’t need the extra cash. His little den was an Alamo of overpraised books. Until the last moment you never knew if he was in there or not.
This time he was: slumped at his strewn desk like an overfed vagrant, wearing the trench coat he never took off even when he was inside on a rainless day. His big body was formless and necrotic, like his prose. His huge mad thatch of hair was uncombed. He looked like a badly stuffed mastodon. His meaty paranoid face swerved up at me, bent into a rictus of hatred and fear. His mouth sagged open and I wished it hadn’t. He had more missing teeth than extant ones. His gums were a moist pornographic abyss, pink fretted with brown. On his post-apocalyptic desk he’d hacked out a rough clearing for the thing he was currently reading. It lay there open in front of him, an implausibly thick set of proofs. I’d have called it the thickest set of proofs I’d ever seen, but I’d seen it before. It was The Tainted Land. I knew its girth all too well. Lodge was about halfway through it. Pencilled exclamation marks and underscorings festooned the page. Apparently he liked what he saw. Of course he did.
‘Are you reviewing that?’ I asked him. Patently the answer was yes, but I needed time to start believing it.
He frowned, as if he found the question strange. And why shouldn’t he? Fingle’s book was big, local, no good. Of course he was reviewing it.
‘For Skeats?’ I asked.
‘Who else?’
‘And what do you think of it?’
‘Th
ey reckon it’ll be a shoo-in for the Miles.’
‘But what do you think of it? What do you think of it? Off the record. Man to man.’
I looked into the wet chasm of his maw while he said: ‘This is a fine novel. Huge, ambitious, epic in scope, Dallas Fingle is a stylist, a throwback to an age when literature still mattered, and a timely reminder that it matters still . . .’
We’re all kidding ourselves if we think we have a future, but some of us are kidding ourselves more than others. When I surged into Skeats’s office he was on the phone. He saw me and looked away fast, but not fast enough. I had seen the panic in his eyes.
‘Sure,’ he said into the phone, while I sat down across the desk from him. ‘That’s not an issue. If he wants me to cover that, I will.’
I waited. He wasn’t looking at me but he wasn’t looking away from me either. His shoulders had gone taut. He knew something was up. He could sense I had one more reason than usual to want to vault the desk and maim him. He knew that one of his lies had veered off the road and reduced itself to wreckage. He just didn’t know which one yet.
‘I’ll do that, Jill.’ He nodded eagerly into the phone. His curls were back at full loft tonight. His shirt was a radiant sheeny white: like his teeth, like Missy Wilde’s underwear. ‘I’ll do that.’ He looked at me without looking at me. ‘Whatever he prefers. Whatever he prefers.’
I waited while he said a few more things like that. When the call was done he put the phone back in its cradle. ‘Jill Tweedy from Bennett and Bennett,’ he explained through a zestless smile. ‘I’m interviewing Dallas Fingle tomorrow. Lady Muck wanted to dish out a few riding instructions.’
This was meant to sound airy, conspiratorial – as if I was his great chum and Tweedy wasn’t. ‘It’s going to be a weird scene,’ he flailed on. ‘They’re playing it like a movie junket. Fingle gets to sit in a comfy chair all day, not moving. Us hacks come in to interview him in shifts. Fifteen minutes each, plus five minutes for the photographer. Strictly no more. Apparently he’s not big on photos. Reckons they drain him spiritually.’