by Nick Craine
2
Chez Anonymous
THE GATEKEEPERS of Havlock House were snarling and yipping behind the dungeonesque front door, hitting the high notes like tiny aggrieved castratos. Although only Bunion qualified for that role, seeing as Hormone was a grrrrl. Chellis could hear her nails clicking on the foyer’s parquet floor as she danced and yapped, her nails painted some trendy canine colour, like Bitch Black.
“Potato I have,” he called out. If they were so smart they’d catch the reference. Bunion even resembled a Joyce scholar he knew. Knew of, that is.
The doggies instantly shut up. Either Mrs. Havlock was striding down the hall like Darth Vadar, silencing all before her, or they had stopped to reflect and scratch their little heads.
Chellis tried the handle, which turned easily enough. He was expected after all, and this was officially rural Ontario where doors were not locked, or locked only by those reckless enough to have read In Cold Blood. Who would dare waltz into Mrs. Havlock’s house uninvited anyway? He opened the door a crack and peeked in. Two short, trembling, keen-eyed individuals with spindly legs and insufficient fur stared up at him. Moistly – eyes lubricated with interest. They resembled a pair of eccentrically designed and animate end tables. Assured that they would not chew off his ankles, he slipped in. They watched him carefully. One false move and there would be an ear-cracking volley of complaint. He retrieved two still-intact potato chips from his jacket pocket, one of which was shaped remarkably like Kissinger’s very own potato head and would have brought a small fortune on eBay, but there was no reneging now. With a priestly flourish he offered each doggie one of these misshapen hosts, comprised of grease, salt, and genetically modified unknowns, which caused him to ponder who and what else the Body and Blood Himself had to jostle along with nowadays. How much of St. Monsanto, that other miracle worker, gopher genes and whatnot, did the faithful have to swallow in their transubstantiated wheat wafers? The pooches accepted their treats with delicacy and good manners, then skittered off in opposite directions to devour them in privacy. At which point Chellis was greeted by the lady of the house, appropriately titled, as theirs was a feudal relationship.
“There you are, Chellis.”
“Sorry, Mrs. H. I’m a nanosecond late.”
“Don’t apologize.”
“Okay. Sorry.”
“Never apologize.”
“Right.” Sorry.
“Unless you kill someone by mistake.”
“Got it.”
“I wasn’t serious.”
“Of course not . . . sorry.”
“You don’t look sorry.”
“What can I say?” Whaaa. Jesus!
“Come along then. The stopper’s already off the bottle.”
Mrs. Havlock led the way to her den (lions and tigers and bears) which gave Chellis the opportunity to observe her better half (oh my). She was tall, aristocratically slim and trim, with great legs for a geezer babe. Her white hair was shorter than usual, the cut post-punkish, expensively so. Ominously, she had on her dress with the twitchy white figures on a black, silky background. The classic, but plain little black dress, anonymous as night and as common, was insufficient for someone as distinctive as Mrs. Havlock. This particular dress, with its pre-linguistic design, signified gestation on her part and imminent labour on his. In this endeavour they were a couple with an almost embarrassing number of progeny. A disturbing metaphor, but there had been private occasions when Mrs. H had stood a chubby manuscript on its feet, bounced it up and down, tidied and patted it, and then smiled at him with enormous maternal pride.
“A body,” she said, once he was uncomfortably settled in the minion’s armchair. This was the chintz chair with short legs and the strategically-placed spring poking up in the seat. If this spring ever sproinged, ripping through the fabric, it was guaranteed to ream the chair’s occupant, giving new meaning to the word colonize.
She poured him two slim fingers of Lagavulin, and for herself two heftier ones, then seated herself in her burgundy leather arm chair, and proceeded to loom.
“I thought you’d go in for something different this time,” he said.
“Yes, as did I. But I keep seeing this body. It simply won’t go away. It’s under a Flowering Judas bush.”
“Could be mulch.”
This earned him a stern, school-mistressy glare. Followed by a sigh. “A body. Male. Who is it?”
Chellis sipped his drink, watching her the way the doggies had watched him. Please no anthropological forensics, he silently begged, his yearning for a tidy corpse set on internal whine. Let’s keep the maggots out of the poor bastard’s nose, the slugs out of his mossy, scooped-out eye sockets.
“So,” he said.
“So,” she said. “Forensics are popular right now. That would be new territory for me.”
“Overdone. Interest is going to bottom out soon.” If he didn’t bottom out first.
“In gore? With a scientific twist? I doubt it, dear, but you might be right. I’d much rather lead than follow a trend. Why are you squirming like that?”
“I’m excited.”
“Oh, goody.”
“Does this body happen to have a knife slotted in its forehead?”
Eye-rolling this time. Athena Havlock might be waging a fair battle against cliché in her prose, but her facial expressions could use some revision and updating. “This is not a comedy, Chellis. I can’t see his face, he’s lying on his side, turned away from me.”
“Not a very co-operative dead man.”
“They rarely are.”
“A job for Lazar, then?”
“Yes, I believe so.”
Okay, now he got it: she wanted to play with him again. Marcel Lazar was Mrs. Havlock’s Perfect Man, but at least he had the decency to be fictional. Lazar had a full head of firmly-rooted black hair, a curling strand of which generally tumbled sexily onto his forehead (forelock foreplay) à la Ted Hughes – a forehead so smoothly granitic that a knife blade would snap like plastic if some witless criminal tried to sheath it there. Lazar was built like the poet, too (in his vital, earthside days), although unlike another famous colleague in the mystery genre, he himself did not indulge in any lyrical sidelines. Mrs. H had cordoned that area off, announcing brusquely that, “Writers should not write about writers and writing.” Chellis could see how this might lead to some linguistic redundancy, but her complaint had more to do with her belief that such a subject was self-indulgent and imaginatively lax. The latter was not a failing of hers, so she was tough on it as a deficiency in others. Besides, she occasionally broke her own rule by using the odd short-lived, inkslinging character, primarily it seemed for the pleasure of wiping out the competition.
In any event, Lazar was not her only playmate. While Chellis had only leathery Uncle Bob to embrace him in his lonely moments, Mrs. Havlock was surrounded by an extensive family – all invented, but what could be better? One whole wall of books in her den was a shrine devoted to them. Gazing up at it now, he spotted veterinarian and amateur detective Lenny Scott’s series: Dead Fly, Monkey Business, Fish Bait, and his favourite, Pig Latin, in which Lenny meets that studly cop and they have antasticfay exsay on the operating table directly after she neuters his whisky-drinking police dog, Rebus.
Very few people knew that Mrs. Havlock, writing as Betty Mac-Beth, was Lenny’s mother, or that she had also pseudonymously given birth to corporate crime buster Sitwell Z. Barker, star investigator of misdeeds in the beauty industry, In Your Face; real-estate development, Rubble Without a Cause; the world of theatre, Am Ham; waste management, A Brown Study; the fast food business, In Bad Taste; and religious cult leaders, Holy Shits. Mrs. Hav laboured efficiently and tirelessly in the cultural service industry, supplying enough material to satisfy vast vermi-composters full of bookworms. She wrote literary thrillers, literary mysteries, literary mainstream, and occasionally even something literary, for which she allowed interviews and picked up awards. The latter category she produced
under her own name, but the rest was strictly under the table. Not that she regarded the populist novels as slumming; she simply enjoyed the secrecy and freedom involved – and the cash. Publicly, she was known for her philosophical and linguistically challenging works, and consequently was not in much demand. Just the way she liked it.
Besides, being prolific was highly suspect.
In a sense, Athena Havlock’s real name – if it was her real name – was her pseudonym, the nominal shield that protected her various other identities and allowed her to infiltrate the shelves of bookstores like an occupying force, if undercover. For this, she usually chose pen names that positioned her books cheek-by-jowl with the bestsellers. Mrs. Havlock was Stephanie Kinglet, Dan Beige, and Jon Greedham – she was everyone’s evil twin. Whether she did this out of business acumen or mischief, Chellis could never quite tell.
“Wakey, wakey, dear.”
“Unh. More please.” He held out his glass, doing his best Oliver Twist imitation, and she indulged him with a smile and generous tipple. He preferred Laphroaig, which naturally she knew, but he was prepared to suffer the classier scotch.
“Thinking?”
“Non-stop.”
“Good boy.”
Hadn’t he been praised thus once already today? But then, he was her good boy, her Jack Horner who sat so quietly in his corner pulling out plum after plum for her. Such as . . . the behavioural effects of frontal lobe damage (inappropriate euphoria, vulgarity, rudeness), the substance used by Victorian women to restore colour to silk (hartshorn), the number of bones in the face (fourteen), the name of Sir Isaac Newton’s dog (Diamond), the parts of the claw hammer (cheek, eye, face, claw, handle), the antidote to Brown Recluse spider bites (ice), the slang term for wattles, human (neck drapery). Or he might be required to plumb the many and more extensive subjects that added ballast and authenticity to her work: the invisible stitching involved in corporate malfeasance, the skinny on high-end fashion models, the formal constituents of an operetta, the how-to of condominium construction, the cutthroat politics of just about anything that involved more than one person. Whatever it was she wanted, he’d find it, for he was her little researcher on the side, the secret agent she sent out into the wide informational world of detail and particularity. Lazar was basically a dumb-fuck, an empty head that Chellis had to fill like a candy jar book after book. That old writing adage, write about what you know? Well, Athena wrote about what he, Chellis knew. An exaggeration, of course. She was a sharpie, no doubt about it. Nor was he unhappy in his work, for it was the one job in the whole of his misdirected and pointless life that fit him to a T. A dream job and he hadn’t even done anything to deserve it. Mrs. Havlock had picked him up in the local ValuMart one day along with the gherkins and Melba toast. She bagged him and carted him home.
He had been working at ValuMart stocking shelves for about a year, the lost-in-the-ozone year that followed Rennie’s death. Rennie was his faux-mum (her term), and she’d bought it while clowning around on a back road bicycle tour. Her bike was clipped and sent spiralling into the netherworld by an SUV driven by an SOB, some country-dwelling executive too busy yakking on his cell and picking his nose to notice 23 cyclists travelling in a tight, roadside-hugging pack ahead. Even for those still in shock, the wake had been a blast – the Stones, Muddy Waters, Van the Man – but the aftermath was all downhill. For Chellis, mindless employment had been just the thing. After work every day he helped himself to one of the trashy novels in the rack beside the freezer that held the microwavable dinners. He’d grab one of those, too, and that would provide his two squares: a tasteless Turkey à la King to go with the other King (admittedly the better fare). He’d return the book the next morning, then later choose another, one of which happened to be a fattie by Sitwell Z. Barker, involving skullduggery in the confectionary business. Blood Sugar it was called, and it wasn’t half-bad, a cut above its kind. This put him in the uncommon position of being qualified to recommend the book to its author the following day, while wrestling a monstrous package of Cushy Tushy toilet paper out of its carton.
He’d been observing her, a classy-looking older woman, who was assessing the book rack with a keener level of interest than it warranted. Most shoppers, if they stopped at all, did a quick scan for their author-brand, then tossed it in the cart along with the back bacon and the cheese doodles.
“That one’s worth a look,” he offered. She was running her fingers over the raised lettering on the cover of Blood Sugar.
She turned to him, evidently pleased. “You’ve read it?”
“Yep.” Stockboy eloquence.
“What did you like about it?”
“Unhh, the complexity of the narration, the shifting points of view, the strong character development, the intricate plotting.”
Raised eyebrows. “Was there anything you didn’t like?”
“Sure. Lots.”
Eyes narrowed. “Such as?”
“Well, it’s not Madame Bovary, is it?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Not even Flaubert’s Parrot.”
“Not meant to be, I expect.”
Chellis then listed the book’s many factual slip-ups and inaccuracies. “It’s pretty sloppy in that respect. Cheap copy-editing. Still worth a read, though.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Dunno. I like looking things up.”
“Do you? What on earth are you doing here?”
Ho hum. Spanish Inquisition. “Working.”
“You’re wasting your life.”
“That’s the idea.”
“Come with me,” she ordered.
He followed her obediently to the checkout counter and that was that. Mrs. Havlock informed the manager that Chellis had a new position. “Concierge” was how she described it. Let someone else unpack the arse-friendly, but environmentally toxic Cushy Tushy. He had graduated to a whole new level of stockboydom.
“You have a list for me then, Mrs. H?”
“Indeed, I do.”
She handed Chellis a sealed envelope. Within would be the seeds for the newest tome, seven or eight words scrawled in vernal green ink that he was to nurse and nurture until they were plump with potential. It didn’t always make sense to him, what she wanted, until he read the final product and saw how cleverly she served up the raw materials of his sleuthing efforts.
“One other thing,” she said.
“Oh?”
“What do you make of this?” She swivelled her chair toward a rolltop desk, seized a folder that was sitting on top of a pile of proofs, and flipped it open. From it she retrieved a five by eight photograph which, swivelling back to face him, she held out, her expression unreadable.
He took the photograph and studied it closely. Further inspirational material, he assumed, although this was a new tack for her. The photo, black and white, was that of a graveyard, old style, with mossy, picturesque markers and stones. Lichen by the bushel. Cherubs, clasped hands, and roses were a dominant decorative feature, unlike the guitars and transport trucks one sometimes encountered etched on polished black granite while strolling through the more modern cemetery to visit one’s eternally amused mum. Died Laughing. If his own wit hadn’t been petrified at the time, he would have had that inscribed on her headstone. The script on these venerable ones, where visible, was an elegant italic or a chunky Roman. Verses abounded, heaven was repeatedly invoked, and entire families were gathered in the earth below, not infrequently sharing luckless and proximate death dates. Families of mounds, and too bad for you if you had in life despised your whole clan. This party was forever.
“What’s wrong with this picture, you’re asking?”
“Precisely.”
“The gravestone off to the left.”
“Yes?”
“Family name, ‘Strange’. Cool name, but that’s not it.”
“No.”
“Alistair Strange, husband, 1851 – 1899. The children, Elizabeth, Alwyn, Duncan, and No
ra. The wife, Bethea Strange 1865 – . No death date. I wonder why?”
“So do I, dear.”
“Where did you get this?”
“That’s what’s so interesting. Someone left it in my mailbox, but in a blank envelope. No return address and no further information of any kind in it. Only the picture.”
“Some wacko fan.”
“This residence is known to so few, as you’re well aware. Not even to my publishers. Business mail goes to my Toronto address. Locally, I’m known simply as that wealthy old bag from the city. And you wouldn’t blab.”
“My wallet’s lips are open, but mine are sealed.”
“Good. Speaking of secrets spilled, how is your inventor friend?”
Chellis winced. “She called.”
“Entirely understandable, her pique. Secrets do have to be kept. I wouldn’t be very happy, either, if someone were to divulge mine. Don’t know what I’d do.”
“Mine are so secret, I don’t even know what they are.”
She sipped her whisky, and gazed at him over the rim of the glass. “I’m intrigued.”
“Thanks.”
“Not by you, dear. You’re an open book. The photo, find out about it will you?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Who sent it, and why? Where is this boneyard? Who were these ‘Strange’ people? That sort of thing.”
Wonderful. “I’m not a private investigator.”
“Read up then. That’s your job, is it not? Get one of those Dummies’ books on the subject.” She gave him one of her commanding, imperial looks. “And before you go . . . do you have any more of those potato chips?”
3
Crime and Punishment
“SO WHAT DO YOU THINK?”
Careful, careful. “It’s . . . ridiculous.”
“No it isn’t. What do you mean ridiculous?”
“A full-body sun hat?” Chellis tried to keep a straight face. “You think someone is actually going to buy something like that?”
“One size fits all.”
“Even a very big someone? A giantess?”
“One size fits two. It’s romantic. And healthy, full protection from UV.”