Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  A man in a dark suit ran forward, took off his shoes, and trotted toward my niche. Before he had come close enough to the light to expose his face, the bully-boy lumbered around the corner of an intersecting lane. The bully-boy raised his bat and attacked. I crept out to put an end to the lout. Then, bafflingly, a second form, in every way similar to the first, sprinted down the lane. One of them was my son, but which?

  I drew back. A promissory music filled my ears.

  The new arrival pushed the tourist aside and leaped upon the roughneck. Surely, this was my son. In seconds, he had claimed the baseball bat and was bringing it down on the roughneck’s skull.

  Taking in the careless beauty of his features, the darkness of his lustrous eyes, the abrupt angle of his cheekbones, I watched my scion saunter toward the lamplight. The commission of a violent homicide had ruffled him no more than it would his old man. The Adversary’s radiant monstrosity utterly belied the terror, the quailing dismay of his shadow-appearances. I supposed that the little shit had grown into this self-assurance around the time I erased from the earth, as Commanded, the last of the Dunstans no longer resident in Edgerton, those barrel scrapings through whom I had moved like a plague.

  But what in the world was he up to, and who or what was the replica whose life he had saved? I hugged the wall and watched the blood-soaked center of the stage.

  My foe strolled glittering into the spotlight. With the self-awareness of deliberate art, he appeared to hesitate. That devil knew exactly what he was doing. He was posing. Slowly, negligently, he turned his back to me and faced the man in first row center. After a beautifully timed delay, he spoke.

  Unfortunately, he uttered only an anticlimactic sentence concerning the hypothetical male obligation to honor the sexual overtures of females. Evidently he had bedded someone the other fellow had rejected. My inner receptors continued to hum in expectation of more essential info. My formidable son and adversary vanished down the intersecting lane. As if linked by an elastic band, the other stumbled into the circumference of the lamplight.

  The recognition of how close to understanding I had come while failing completely nearly made me burst into laughter. I was looking at the same face, more or less, considerably more than less. They were brothers.

  Star had given birth to two boys, and while I had vainly sought the first, it was the second son, apparently named Ned, whose shadow-self had floated behind me on their mutual birthday. Star’s death had summoned them both to Edgerton, and until a moment before, the dope now hovering at the edge of the light had been as clueless about his brother’s existence as I. Star had not wanted him to know. Star had protected him. Stunned, the lad moved forward to pursue his brother, shuddered back, and skedaddled.

  I have been given what I needed all along.

  4 HOW I FOUND MY

  SHADOW AT LAST,

  AND WHAT IT DID

  41

  “Under the bed is not a new concept,” said Lieutenant Rowley. “But you pushed that sucker way back there. Were you afraid someone would steal your winnings?”

  Lieutenant Rowley raised his rust-colored eyebrows toward his crinkly, rust-colored hair. The wrinkles in his forehead deepened, and his mouth stretched into a narrow line. Creases like hatchet marks appeared on his leathery cheeks. He was smiling. It was 4:56 A.M., and Rowley had been having a wonderful time since 3:30, when he and Officer Treuhaft, a human totem pole swathed in blue, had awakened Nettie and Clark, charged into my room, read my Miranda rights, and arrested me for the murder of a man named Minor Keyes. Rowley was just getting into his stride.

  “I didn’t win that money. I brought it with me from New York.”

  “Do you always take along five or six hundred dollars when you go out of town?”

  For the fourth or fifth time, I said, “I didn’t know if my ATM card would work here. I didn’t withdraw it all at once, it accumulated over the past week or so.”

  “Funny how it matches what Staggers and the others say you took off them. Even worse, they identified you.” Some of the savagery left his face. “It’s tough, Ned, but it isn’t as bad as you think.”

  A young policeman cracked open the door, came up to Rowley, and whispered in his ear. Rowley planted a finger on his shoulder and pushed him back. “Blanks? No ridges? Will you please get the hell out of here?”

  Rowley was about forty-five, roughly the same age as Stewart Hatch, but his skin looked borrowed from someone a decade older and recently deceased. “I mean that.” He willed some life into his face. “Know what? Right now, I’m the best friend you have.”

  He hitched his chair closer to the table. “Forget the money. Joe Staggers and his friends know you took money off them at the Speedway, and they know you were in Hatchtown tonight. Keep saying you weren’t involved, you’re looking at life in prison.”

  “I wasn’t in town on the night of the card game,” I said.

  Rowley fixed my eyes with his. “I’m on your side, Ned. I know how it went.” He thumped his hand on the table. “All of a sudden, a guy was coming at you with a baseball bat. The whole thing went down in a couple of seconds. To me, you were a Marine in there. Probably you didn’t even know he was dead, am I right?”

  Rowley spread his arms. “In the twenty-two years I been on this force, I never heard a better defense. Come in telling the truth, chances are you walk out free and clear. Why don’t we take your statement and put you on your way back home?”

  “I didn’t win any money in a card game at the Speedway,” I said. “On Wednesday night, a truck driver for Nationwide Paper named Bob Mims picked me up in Ohio and dropped me off at the Motel Comfort. In the bar, I met an assistant D.A. from Louisville who told me she could give me a ride here the next day. Her name is Ashleigh Ashton, and she’s staying at Merchants Hotel. Thursday morning, she dropped me off at St. Ann’s Hospital. Last night, I ran into Mrs. Ashton and Mrs. Hatch at Le Madrigal, and they invited me to their table for dinner. After that, I went to see Toby Kraft. I drank too much. On the way home, I got as far as Merchants Park and passed out on a bench. I got back to my aunt’s house around twelve-fifteen, twelve-thirty.”

  “Maybe twenty minutes later? A witness puts the time at twelve twenty-six.”

  “Why don’t you call Mrs. Ashton and ask her where I was on Wednesday night?”

  “We will,” Rowley said. “We’ll talk to Mrs. Ashton, and we’ll hear what she has to say about Wednesday. It won’t have any bearing on what happened at twelve twenty-six last night, but we’ll check it anyhow. In the meantime, I want you to think about what I said.”

  “I can’t confess to a murder I didn’t commit,” I said.

  Rowley took me downstairs to a cell. I stretched out on the cot and surprised myself by going to sleep.

  The clanging of the door woke me up. A gray-haired man with a pink, weary face that had a lot of miles on it walked into the cell. His belly pushed out the front of his white shirt, his sleeves were rolled up, and his tie was yanked down over his open collar. Behind him, Rowley loomed like a ferocious statue. “On your feet, Mr. Dunstan,” said the gray-haired man. “We’re releasing you.”

  I rubbed my hands over my face.

  “I’m Captain Mullan,” he said. “For the present, no charges will be brought against you. You can pick up your things and go back to your aunt’s house. I’d like to request that you remain in Edgerton for the next forty-eight hours and inform us of any changes of address. I want to talk to that truck driver, Bob Mims, before we give you a clean bill of health.”

  “My mother’s funeral is on Wednesday,” I said. “I won’t leave before that.”

  Mullan shoved his hands into his pockets. “You must be an old-fashioned gentleman, Mr. Dunstan.” From over Mullan’s shoulder, Rowley was giving me a smoky glare which suggested that he was no longer my best friend.

  “Why is that?”

  “Mrs. Ashton confirmed that she met you at the Motel Comfort on Wednesday night and drove you here the following da
y. She also tells us that you could not have been involved in an encounter with Mr. Keyes at twelve twenty-six this morning, because you came to her hotel room at approximately eleven o’clock and did not leave until exactly twelve twenty-five. The doorman and the desk clerk verify her statement.” Mullan smiled at me. He looked as though he should have been pulling pints of Guinness in a Third Avenue Irish Pub.

  Rowley said that I could pick up most of my property on the way out. “I’ll hold the money until we talk to Mims.” His face looked like a paving stone.

  An arcade of fluted stone columns stood before the entrance to the big stone facade of the building alongside Police Headquarters. I thought it must have been City Hall. Down at the bottom of the long flight of steps, uniformed policemen smoked and talked in front of half a dozen angled-in patrol cars. Across the street, a fountain at the center of a grassy square sent up a glittering spray.

  The policemen moved closer together. One flicked a half inch of cigarette at the bottom of the steps. I came down onto the sidewalk and saw that I was on Grace Street. Two blocks away, a pillared entrance that must have been the front of the library curved out from a row of storefronts and office buildings. The cops separated without quite spreading out.

  42

  Clark opened the door and called back into the house, “The boys didn’t rough him up too bad.”

  “They didn’t rough me up at all,” I said.

  Nettie surged up from the sofa, grabbed my biceps, and stared into my eyes. “I don’t know when I have been so upside-down upset in all my life.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “There’s nothing to worry about anymore, but for your sake, I ought to go somewhere else.”

  Nettie re-formed into a thunderhead.

  “Joe Staggers is likely to come looking for me. I don’t want to put you and Clark in any danger.”

  “Any Mountry knotheads turn up around here, they’ll be sorry they did. I’ll call May, and we’ll get breakfast ready.”

  Nettie and May attended to my edited version of the night’s events as they mopped up the contents of their plates. Clark shoveled in his one true meal of the day and agreed that I should take up Toby Kraft’s offer. “Mountry boys are stupider than mud, but they’re persistent. Best pack your things and give Toby a call. When they come around here, we can say you took off and we don’t know where.”

  I saw the box the UPS driver had delivered. Nettie followed my gaze. “About time you looked through your mother’s few things.”

  I set the carton on the bed and folded my clothes into the duffel before looking at it again. Star’s peaky handwriting glowed up from the shipping label, and sorrow, more than sorrow, heartbreak’s tremendous wallop, leaked through the taped seams. When I had run out of diversions, I pulled the carton onto my lap and ripped it open.

  I took out some old paperbacks and one hardback book and sorted through the thirty or forty CDs Star had shipped home—Billie and Ella, Louis and Nat and Sinatra, and a lot of records by Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Paul Desmond, and the other musicians she liked. All of these I slid into my bag. I set aside brooches, bracelets, a couple of gold necklaces, and three silk scarves for my aunts.

  At the bottom of the box lay a wallet-sized photograph and an envelope on which Star had written For Ned. I picked up the photograph, at first saw only an image of a small boy in a striped shirt, then realized that the small boy was myself and the photograph had been taken on the morning of my third birthday. I gave an involuntary shudder, put the photograph in my billfold, and opened the envelope. It contained what looked like a safety-deposit key taped to an index card above the words Illinois State Provident Bank, Grace Street.

  The idea that Star wanted me to have something she had secreted in a safety-deposit box gave me an uneasy tingle, but I tucked the key into my shirt pocket and turned to the little collection of books. I propped the paperbacks—Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Invisible Man, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Native Son—on an empty shelf and picked up the hardback.

  The dark green boards of its cover seemed more crude than ordinary bindings. The title, From Beyond, had been stamped in gold on the spine and front cover. I opened the book and turned to the title page:

  FROM BEYOND TALES OF THE UNKNOWN

  by

  EDWARD RINEHART

  I looked across the room to the closet without really seeing it. I heard myself say, “Edward Rinehart?” When I looked down again, the name was still there. I turned the page and saw:

  ©1957 Edward Rinehart

  On the facing page was the dedication:

  For the Providence Master & My Great Fathers

  The table of contents listed ten or twelve stories. Words like “Abandoned,” “Crypt,” and “Hideous” swam up at me, disconnected from whatever preceded or followed them. My numb eye took in “Blue,” and I concentrated on it long enough to see that the word formed half of a title called “Blue Fire.” I said something like Oh, no. The book slammed shut, and for a while I just looked at the binding. Hoping for a paragraph about the author, I opened it from the back, but Edward Rinehart had chosen to keep mum about his past. I crammed the book into my knapsack and went down the hall to stand under a cascade of hot water.

  Clean-shaven, wearing a white button-down shirt, blue blazer, and jeans, I came downstairs and overheard Clark discoursing about the differences between murder and manslaughter. I put my bags near the door and spread the jewelry and scarves on the coffee table. “Ladies,” I said, “Star would have wanted you to share the things she sent, but you’ll have to come in here to do it.”

  While Nettie and May exclaimed over the treasures, I faded into the kitchen and called Toby Kraft. He told me to go a rooming house on Chester Street. “The landlady’s an old acquaintance of mine, woman named Helen Janette. I’ll set it up in five minutes, get you a cheap rate.”

  43

  The cab deposited me in front of a building like a cardboard box mounted with a peaked hat. Its original pale brown had faded to the sandy yellow of old chinos. Two courses of the cement-block foundation, interrupted by basement windows, protruded above the ground, and a pitted walk led to the unceremonious front door. I went up the steps and read the names beside a vertical row of buzzers. JANETTE, TITE, CARPENTER & BURGESS, FELDMAN, a blank I supposed was for my room, BREMEN, REDMAN & CHALLIS, and ROWLES & MCKENNA. I pushed the button beside JANETTE, and a metallic buzz came through the window to my left. An interior door opened; footsteps rapped toward me. An economical white-haired woman in a short-sleeved safari shirt-jacket bored gimlet eyes into me from a face that made Lieutenant Rowley’s seem like a powder puff.

  “I suppose you’re the one from Toby Kraft.”

  “That’s me,” I said.

  Helen Janette backed up and watched me come in. Whatever she saw did not improve her frame of mind. “This is the deal. I’m giving you a nice, comfortable room on the second floor. You and Mr. Bremen are supposed to have exclusive access to the bathroom at your end of the hall, but the girls at the back go in there, too.”

  A door behind me clicked open. I glanced over my shoulder. A gaunt old man with a Neanderthal jaw, a mesh T-shirt, and a brown fedora was leaning against the opening to a darkened room. His shades had been pulled down, and a cartoon jittered across the television screen in the murk behind him.

  “This is Mr. Tite,” she said.

  I turned around and held out my hand. He ignored it.

  “The room is thirty dollars per night, a hundred eighty by the week. You get basic cable if you bring your own TV. For an extra ten dollars a week, clean linen every other day and vacuuming on Thursdays. No cooking in the rooms, no meals supplied, and no loud noises. If you can’t behave yourself, out you go, I don’t need the aggravation.”

  I said I’d be happy to pay for a week in advance, plus cleaning, if she took plastic. Helen Janette thrust out a hand and waggled her fingers. I dug out my Visa card, placed it on her palm, and followed her into her apartment. Mr. T
ite lounged against the doorframe and eyed me from beneath the brim of his hat. After I signed the slip, she said, “I’ll show the gentleman to his room now, Mr. Tite.”

  Tite straightened up, gave me a hard look, and backed out.

  “There are two more rooms at the other end of the house,” she said. “Miss Carpenter and Miss Burgess share the big one, and Mrs. Feldman has the other. Miss Carpenter and Miss Burgess have been with me fifteen years. I’ve never had a speck of trouble with Mrs. Feldman.”

  We began going up the stairs. “Your room is at the front, above Mr. Tite.” She turned halfway around and lowered her voice. “Mr. Bremen is across from you. He’s a crossing guard, and you know what they’re like.” She put her finger to her lips, then pointed upward with the same finger. “Drunkards.”

  At the top of the stairs, she marched to a white door on the far side of the corridor. An elderly guy with a ponderous belly and a flaring white mustache who was seated in front of his TV looked through his doorway and raised a hand the size of a stop sign. A broad yellow banner hung across the back of his room. “Hi there,” he called. “This our new inmate?”

  “I’m busy, Mr. Bremen.” She slammed the key into the lock.

  I followed Helen Janette inside. “Bed. Closet. Desk. Dresser. Your sink. I change the towels and washcloth every other day. If you want to move the phone to the table, there’s a jack behind it. You pay all your utilities. I don’t want to see any hot plates in here, but coffeemakers are okay. Mrs. Frahm left behind her radio–alarm clock, so that comes free of charge.”

  I looked at the digital numerals displayed on the black box next to the telephone. It was 8:31.

  “At the back on this side are Miss Redman and Miss Challis. They’re cute little things, but if you’re a gentleman, you’ll keep your distance. Mr. Rowles and Mr. McKenna are in the room across from them. Mr. Rowles and Mr. McKenna are pianists, and they’re out of town most of the time. Do you expect to be here longer than a week?”