PAST
DUE
WILLIAM LASHNER
For Martin and Rosalie
Contents
E-BOOK EXTRA:
On Writing: An Interview with William Lashner
Chapter 1
There is something perversely cheerful about a crime scene in…
Chapter 2
Joey Cheaps.
Chapter 3
But that was the morning and now, in the deep…
Chapter 4
When I came home from the crime scene I sat…
Chapter 5
“You want some veal, Victor?”
Chapter 6
I didn’t know what it was about hospitals that pressed…
Chapter 7
“What are we supposed to do with this?” said Beth…
Chapter 8
They say Philly is a city of neighborhoods, but it’s…
Chapter 9
The envelope.
Chapter 10
“I had seen her before,” said my father between rasps…
Chapter 11
She was dressed for the part of the woman trailing…
Chapter 12
Before I could reach her she had scrambled back to…
Chapter 13
“Ossobuco,” said Detective McDeiss, his rich voice rolling over the…
Chapter 14
Phil Skink was a long walk off a dank pier.
Chapter 15
She dropped into a chair, pulled at the hem of…
Chapter 16
I was feeling chipper about things when next I visited…
Chapter 17
When I was a kid, we used to head out…
Chapter 18
I had a date the very night of my deposition…
Chapter 19
“I had been warned you would darken my doorstep,” said…
Chapter 20
“What I heard,” said my private investigator Phil Skink, “is…
Chapter 21
“Tommy Greeley was the kind of friend you only find…
Chapter 22
“That doctor came in again,” said my father, after I…
Chapter 23
“He’s late,” I said.
Chapter 24
Where sit the honorable justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court?
Chapter 25
Whatever waters I had expected to roil by my visit…
Chapter 26
The nine blocks between my shabby office and the District…
Chapter 27
I was thinking it through, what Slocum and McDeiss had…
Chapter 28
I was still on the vestibule floor when the Good…
Chapter 29
“What the hell you want from me, Vic?”
Chapter 30
I limped into the hospital to visit my father, leaning…
Chapter 31
“Back in the day, Dude,” said Lonnie Chambers, his eyes…
Chapter 32
She was stunning. I’ve said that already, haven’t I? But…
Chapter 33
Seven ninety-nine Wolf Street. Apartment Three B.
Chapter 34
I had set up a date with R.T. at Alden…
Chapter 35
She was waiting for me in my office when I…
Chapter 36
Alura Straczynski’s arm clasped firmly in mine, she led me…
Chapter 37
I was drunk and I was horny and I thought…
Chapter 38
I was lying in my bed, alone, my head turned…
Chapter 39
“They want to build a mall here,” said Earl Dante…
Chapter 40
And then a doorway of shelves in that treasure room…
Chapter 41
Traffic Court. ’Nuff said.
Chapter 42
I sat in the dinky little lockup at Traffic Court,…
Chapter 43
I stood at the door of the small Mount Airy…
Chapter 44
Above her writing desk, framed and written out in fine…
Chapter 45
“All rise.”
Chapter 46
After scowling at the security camera and being buzzed through…
Chapter 47
I didn’t know I was in a race. If I…
Chapter 48
There is something perversely cheerful about a crime scene in…
Chapter 49
“Victor?”
Chapter 50
“I knew a girl once, name of Gwendolyn,” said Skink.
Chapter 51
A great Russian writer once wrote that happy families are…
Chapter 52
“I was just trying to ask a question,” said Kimberly,…
Chapter 53
A few years back, for the first time, they played…
Chapter 54
“We just want to talk, Sully,” I said in the…
Chapter 55
“Tommy told me it was easy money. We cased it…
Chapter 56
Flying home to Philadelphia I was trying to read a…
Chapter 57
Coming home from Brockton, I shouldn’t have been surprised, what…
Chapter 58
A dark blue Taurus was parked outside the entrance to…
Chapter 59
“How do you like this setup?” said Derek Manley as…
Chapter 60
It was all coming into focus, what had happened twenty…
Chapter 61
“Hamlet?” said Eddie Dean from the doorway.
Chapter 62
It was just after eleven when I finally got to…
Chapter 63
I could barely restrain my anger as I strode down…
Chapter 64
He walked up the path with a slow, awkward gait,…
Chapter 65
“If it had been anyone else but Tommy,” said Jackson…
Chapter 66
He stood before the old rehabed factory building with a…
Chapter 67
The justice, hunched over one of the journals, stared at…
Chapter 68
I planned a quick visit to the hospital, just to…
Chapter 69
“What the hell are you doing here, Your Honor?” I…
Chapter 70
Before Justice Straczynski had a chance to snap shut his…
Chapter 71
It smelled of oiled metal, stale air, must, ammonia, rot,…
Chapter 72
There would be a sword fight, of course there would…
Chapter 73
“Helloo?” came a familiar voice from the hallway and with…
Chapter 74
It was McDeiss who had tripped on the wire, who…
Chapter 75
I was late for the hospital, but I had one…
Acknowledgments
About The Author
Books By William Lashner
Credits
Copyright
About The Publisher
E-Book Extra
On Writing: An Interview with William Lashner
Question: How do you come up with your ideas?
Lashner: Ideas are easy to come by, they tumble out of the newspaper, they fall out of the sky. Almost every day I get an idea for a story. The trick is finding an idea that can sustain a year or more of work, that can grow and mutate into something compelling enough to be the center of a novel. So the real question is: how do I know if an idea is worth working on for a couple months to see if I might want to use if for a book? That’s not so easily answered. The idea has to speak to me somehow, it has to con
tain within it the characters that can bring it to life, and it has to embody a pair of contrasting ideas that can fight it out over the course of the story. This last bit is crucial. Every story has a main idea and a counter idea. Both ideas should be strong and have merit and the way they battle through the course of the book is what gives the novel its power. In Past Due, the ideas that are fighting it out through the book are all about how we can avoid becoming slaves to our pasts, whether it is better to put it behind us and move on or to fight to understand it and embrace it, with all its pain and failures.
Question: How do you turn an idea into a novel?
Lashner: For me it’s a three-part process. First I work with the idea, build it into a story, outline as much as I can. I don’t really do any of the hard work of writing until I have a beginning and an ending. Endings are important; they tell which of the contrasting ideas came out the winner or if the two ideas battle it out to a draw. In that way, they contain the ultimate meaning of the work. I don’t start the actual writing until I know the ending, even though the ending most often changes before I get there.
Once I have the basic outline, I begin the hard part, the first draft. I have kids and I spend the weekends with them, but five days a week I’m in my office, outlining and writing. I like to do between four to six pages a day. If I do much more, the writing is usually flabby. If I do much less, there’s no momentum to the pages. It is slower in the beginning, it speeds up at the end, but pretty much four to six pages, and I try to write them as well as I can. I don’t figure I’ll pretty it up in the rewrite. The major unit of prose writing, I think, is the paragraph so I spend a lot of time on each paragraph, keeping it taut and interesting and trying to find the humor it in. Four to six pages a day. And on each page I try to have a gem or two, something in the dialogue, a turn of phrase, something funny. Sometimes I sit around and nothing gets done, but the key is that I’m there, putting in the time. Often, after a day of nothing, I get so frustrated with myself I start banging out stuff at the end and it’s pretty good because I’ve been thinking about it all day.
After the first draft comes the most crucial part, the rewrite. I take what I have and then I imagine it all over again. What if this happens? What if that happens? How can I make it stronger, more structured, more interesting? It’s like I’m back to the first part, the outlining part, but this time I have a lump of prose to work with. When I figure out how to make the changes, then I go through it again and again until it works. Hostile Witness took ten rewrites, but I had never written a mystery before and so I left out some crucial stuff the first time through, stuff like suspects. In my rewrite for Past Due I emphasized some characters and themes that hadn’t been given enough attention in the first draft. For instance, the picture of Joey Cheaps is much more in depth after the rewrite; before he was just a petty hood who gets himself into trouble, but after the rewrite he became a more tragic figure, a guy who wasn’t smart enough or good enough and who let one failed crime, and the lie behind it, ruin his entire life.
Question: Do you write on computer?
Lashner: I’m not sure why this question comes up so much. Every writer has to figure out his own process and so you should end up doing what works for you. I write on a computer because I rewrite as I write, rearranging sentences, chopping clauses, and it makes the process go more smoothly. Also, I can type almost as fast I can think and that helps getting out ideas when I’m in the flow.
The interesting thing about process, however, is that the tools you use to get the words down do make a difference. When I write in longhand my sentences are sharper, terser. Maybe that is why I write a lot of dialogue out longhand. On the other hand, the ease of writing on computer gives my sentences a rhythm and tone that I don’t get writing longhand.
Question: What writers have had the most influence on you?
Lashner: One of the best ways for a young writer to get a hold on their own style is to start by writing like the authors they most admire. It’s an amazing thing, you start out by sounding like someone else but as the words pile up something slowly changes and after a couple of hundred thousand words you end up sounding like yourself. It’s a lot of work, and a lot of words, but it is worth it. By the time I started Hostile Witness, my first published novel, I had written close to half a million words of unpublished stuff and so by then I had a sense of my own style, but before then there were a number of writers I had spent time copying.
Everyone seems to try, at least for a time, to write like Hemingway. His prose is so taut and spare, he makes it looks so easy. His story, “Hills Like White Elephants” seems so simple, I figured even I could do it. But the story is a masterpiece and my pale imitation of his style was a disaster. Then I discovered Kerouac and for a couple years wrote like him, long flowing sentences filled with exclamations of joy and sadness. Then for a time I tried to write like the American minimalists, Raymond Carver, Joy Williams, and I got pretty good at that. The thing about writing flat emotionless prose is that it sounds writerly. That was the prose that got me into writing school, but I wasn’t happy with it. It sounded like someone, but it didn’t sound like me.
I decided to write a first person novel and so I read all the first person books I could get my hands on. I remember A Summons to Memphis had a big effect on me, and Farewell My Lovely, but the novel that caught me most completely was All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren. His language was gorgeous, of course, thick with metaphor and simile, but the thing that struck me was the streak of self-flagellation in Jack Burden’s prose. That seemed perfect for what I was trying to do and so I spent a lot of time trying to write like that. It got so bad I even read my stuff back in a Southern accent, but I consider that book one of the greatest American novels and its influence on my writing has been profound.
Question: What advice would you give to someone who wants to write?
Lashner: You have to do two things and you have to do them a lot. First you have to read as much as you can, and not just the type of book you want to write. It’s not enough, if you want to write mysteries, to read only mysteries. Read everything: romance, comedy, high literature, fast paced thrillers, science fiction. Read Martin Amis because he’s funny as hell, read Toni Morrison because of her clear eyed vision of America, read Dashiell Hammett because he’s so sharp, read Moby Dick because Melville broke all the rules, read any comic book by Frank Miller because he gets right to the point. Whenever anyone tells me she wants to write I always ask what she reads and I get a pretty good idea right there of her chances. And if you find something you really like, outline it, so that you can see how it works. Remember, now you’re reading like a writer, not just a reader, and that’s a whole different thing.
Second, you have to write. A lot. There’s no way around it. At the start it is really hard and it comes out lousy and you just have to keep doing it. My first novel was so bad I wouldn’t even show it to my mother. My mother. Some of my things she put up on the refrigerator were brutal, yet still I wouldn’t show her this. But it’s four hundred pages of prose, which is a lot of words. I learned so much writing those four hundred pages of bad prose, stuff you can’t learn from reading books about writing. The only way to find your voice is to write your way into it. But the great thing about writing is that you don’t need anybody’s permission. To make a movie you need someone to give you money. To act, you need to be cast. But to write, all you need to do is say, “I want to write,” and no one can stop you.
Copyright © William Lashner, 2004
Chapter
1
THERE IS SOMETHING perversely cheerful about a crime scene in the middle of the night, the pulsating red and blue lights, the great beams of white, the strobes of photographers’ flashes. Festively festooned with yellow tape, a crime scene at night is a place cars drive slowly by, as if before an overdone Christmas display with bowing reindeers and whirling Santas. In the uniformed workers busily going about their business, in the helicopters spinning madly ov
erhead, in the television vans with their jaunty microwave disks, in the reporters giving their live reports, in the excited onlookers excitedly looking on, in all of it lies the thrilling sense of relief that the arbitrary finger of desolation has squashed flat this night a total stranger.
Unless the corpse within the tape is not a total stranger. Then, suddenly, the crime scene at night is not so cheery.
I didn’t yet know why I had been summoned to the crime scene at Pier 84 on Philadelphia’s dank waterfront, or whose death was the subject of this swirl of activity, but I knew the deceased was not a total stranger or I would never have been called, and that was enough to turn the cheeriness of the scene into something bleak and icy. The possibilities flitted through my mind like bats through a dusky sky, an endless swarm, each swoop or swerve carrying its own name and causing its own jolt of fear.
“I was called by McDeiss,” I told one of the uniforms standing as solid as a Roman sentry at the gated entrance to the pier, his arms crossed, his thick leather jacket zippered tight. Far behind him, lying between two huge shipping containers, surrounded by cops and technicians, slipping out of a strange dark puddle, was a lump of something covered by blue.
“You a reporter?” said the cop.
“I’m a lawyer.”
“Even worse. Yo, Pete,” he called out to a young cop standing a few feet away. “What’s more trouble than a lawyer?”
“Two lawyers,” said Pete.
“Go tell Detective McDeiss to hold on to his wallet, there’s a lawyer here to see him.”
“Who died?” I managed to get out.
“Talk to McDeiss.”
“What happened?”
“Some guy got an early good-night kiss.”
Until then I hadn’t known if the victim was man or woman, now the possibilities narrowed. Half of the swooping bats dissolved and disappeared, yet that didn’t seem to help at all.
The pier was a flat sheet of cement, jutting out into the wide, slow Delaware River, just north of the Walt Whitman Bridge. Rail lines crisscrossed its length and an arcade-style warehouse squatted in its center, with trailers hitched at the bays in front like puppies sucking milk from their mother’s teats. Chocolate milk, because Pier 84 was the primary cocoa-receiving facility in the entire country. On Pier 84, burlap sacks, unloaded from heavy cargo ships, were thrown into shipping containers and hauled by rail and truck to the gay little chocolate town of Hershey, Pennsylvania. You would expect you could smell the sweet rich flavor of the chocolate even on the pier, but you’d be wrong. All you could smell that night was the wet of the river, the oxide of rusting metal, and something dark and desolate and sadly familiar beneath it all.
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