Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  When asked to turn out his pockets, the boy proved to be carrying more than four hundred dollars. Suspicious, Burns fingerprinted him, only to discover that the tips of his fingers were devoid of the ridges and whorls that make up individual prints. Questioned about this anomaly, the boy replied that he had no need of fingerprints.

  “It was like he was making fun of me,” Burns said. “I asked him to give me his first name, anyhow, and he told me I could call him ‘Ottumwa Red.’ I have to say, that made me smile. I asked if he wanted anything to eat, and he said he wouldn’t mind a hamburger. So I sat him down in the Duty Office and told the half dozen guys there to keep an eye on him until I got back.” Burns walked to Burger Whopper, a block away. “Before I went in, I heard this big whooshing sound. I turned around and saw the whole station go dark for a couple of seconds.” He ran back.

  The desk sergeant and the officers in the reception area lay groaning on the floor. Prisoners groaned in the holding cells. “My friends in the Duty Office, they were gone, vanished—the place looked like the Marie-Célèste. And the kid was gone, too.”

  Asked for his opinion about what had happened, Burns said he believed the boy had been an alien being. “Like from another galaxy. One thing about earth people, they do have fingerprints. All I can say is, I’m glad the kid isn’t in Ottumwa anymore.”

  A building had imploded in Lansing, Michigan, killing thirteen people. Three other couples had been slaughtered in their houses. On the next page was a clipping about the murder of two young women who had been hiking in Vermont. I turned off the light and fell into bed without bothering to take off my clothes.

  61

  Dream-ropes and dream-weights held me to the bed. Held captive in the mind of Mr. X, I saw a door mist into haze; I saw a knife blade, a dark-complected man rise frowning from a chair. When he opened the door, Mr. X flowed in and said, “Mr. Booker, you have something that belongs to me.”

  Was that something me? No: the something was gone, it had already escaped.

  Booker sank to his knees, and Mr. X glided behind him and slashed his throat.

  No, I thought, that was Anscombe …

  No, there was Frank Sinatra singing “Fight … fight … fight it with … aaaaall of your might …”

  It was not the spectacle of Mr. X savaging a man named Sylvan Booker that whirled me away, it was what happened when Frank Sinatra was singing and the air smelled like pine needles and the people were named …

  A stuffed black cat and white rabbit lay tumbled on the floor. Into the mirror before me swam a misshapen figure shaking with malicious laughter. Horrified, I burst my ropes, threw off the weights, and woke up standing beside the bed with my hands flattened over my eyes.

  62

  The Russian doll gave me the detail that explained everything I was ready to understand. Nearly all the entries were dated within a day or two of June 25th. I had visited the murdered couples with Mr. X—I had seen them murdered. Star had collected these stories because she feared … that Robert was behind them? That Rinehart was? She thought that Robert had obliterated half a dozen policemen in Ottumwa, Iowa, and killed two young women hiking in Vermont. The newspapers had told her that her second son was loose in the world, wandering from one tragedy to another like a furious ghost.

  Robert had sent Ashleigh Ashton to the Motel Comfort because he had known I would be there. The next day, he had rescued me from life in prison by going to bed with her.

  I felt as though I, too, were a kind of Russian doll, hiding secrets inside secrets that led to an unknowable mystery. Robert; Edward Rinehart. It was too much, I could not work it out. Neither could I continue to endanger Laurie Hatch. I decided to go out and walk the streets until weariness forced me back to bed.

  When I stepped outside, a white sliver of my landlady’s face disappeared behind the fold of a curtain. I closed the door with a loud, satisfying bang. I wanted a drink. Maybe three drinks.

  Sounds of a commotion grew louder as I walked down Chester Street. All the troublemakers in Hatchtown had not yet found their beds. I did not want to be Robert’s toy. I hated the idea that he had been maneuvering me, directing me, shaping my life. Well, why? I stopped walking, struck by the most obvious question imaginable.

  The answer came when I remembered: “Mr. Booker, you have something that belongs to me.”

  Once a year, Mr. X had gone in search of Robert, my shadow. A connection of which I had known nothing had pulled me, the shadow’s shadow, into the search. Star and Robert had met at least twice, in front of Biegelman’s department store and outside Nettie’s house; surely, there had been other meetings. Maybe she had somehow kept Mr. X at bay. Our birthday arrived on the day after her funeral, and Robert could not face the annual challenge alone. He had saved my life because he needed me.

  I didn’t need him. Robert could go to hell. It was fine with me if Mr. X erased him.

  Brimming with rage, I took another step forward and realized that what I had missed all my life was the being I had just consigned to destruction. A tide of emotion I can only describe as yearning nearly brought me to my knees. Every cell in my body called out for reunion with its other, split-off self. All over again, more painfully for being an adult, I felt like an amputated half, bleeding for the want of what would make it whole. This is crazy, I said to myself. You felt like that when you were three years old.

  The enormous ache of yearning slipped back beneath its scar tissue, and Chester Street once again stretched out through the lamplight, peaceful and empty in the night air. It was past 3:00 on a Sunday morning in Edgerton. If Robert needed me to defeat Mr. X, I would help him or not, depending on how I felt at the time. But I was here because he was: Robert had set me on the path that led from Ashleigh Ashton to Laurie Hatch.

  I was still worrying about Laurie when I reached Merchants Park, decided to get a drink from her husband’s self-aggrandizing fountain, and finally noticed the flashing lights of the squad cars and ambulance in front of the Cobden Building. The voices I had heard came from the crowd at the top of the park and the smaller groups scattered beneath the trees.

  63

  A little man with a halo of curls fanning out beneath his cap waved a brown bag at me from a bench.

  I sat down next to him. “Hello, Piney. What’s going on?”

  “Hell if I know. Looks like trouble in the Cobden Building.”

  Two more patrol cars came screaming into Ferryman’s Road. At the top of the stairs, the ambulance attendants were talking to a gray-haired man whose tired face shone pink and red in the flashing lights. His stomach protruded like a shelf over the waistline of his suit. “Captain Mullan,” I said.

  “Your buddy. Have a taste.”

  Whatever was in the bottle tasted like cigar smoke.

  “Just a naive little domestic burgundy, but I thought you’d be amused by its pretensions.” Cackling, Piney raised the bottle. “A saying of my old friend Erwin Pipey Leake’s. Pipey used to be a professor at Albertus, came out with the damndest shit.” He stiffened with emotion. “Follow a shadow, it still flies you;/Seem to fly it, it will pursue. You know who wrote that?”

  I shook my head.

  “Ben Jonson. Darkling I listen; and for many a time/I have been half in love with easeful Death,/Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,/To take into the air my quiet breath. John Keats.”

  My scalp tingled.

  “People took Pipey for a bum. Nobody gave a damn when Black Death come along and took him out.” Piney wiped his eyes and jerked himself off the bench.

  He shambled forward, and I followed him through the crowd at the narrow end of the park. A man in a black leather jacket glanced at me, glanced away. Frenchy La Chapelle had been drawn out of his hole.

  Across Ferryman’s Road, bands of colored light flew across the front of the Cobden Building. Captain Mullan stood in front of the half-opened door in conversation with a man in a blue suit who looked as though he were hoping he might wake up to find himse
lf back in bed.

  “Who’s that with Mullan?”

  A burly guy with slicked-back dark hair said it was Hatch’s chief of security, Frank Holland.

  “My boy, Bruce McMicken,” Piney said.

  “I’m not your boy,” Bruce said.

  “Somebody broke into the Cobden Building?”

  Bruce McMicken gave me a sidelong glance. His slablike face made him look like either a bartender or a patrolman. “According to one of the cops, whoever got in trashed the place. Screwed up the computers. Roughed up the guard, too. That’s why the ambulance.”

  “An older man? I saw him going in the other day.”

  “Yeah, Earl.”

  “I got no use for Earl Sawyer,” Piney said. “Standoffish.”

  “Earl’s just unfriendly,” said Bruce. “At least he doesn’t sleep in alleys, like you.”

  Piney uttered a phlegmy chuckle, as if he had been complimented.

  “Here’s the boss.”

  A thickset man in a blue button-down shirt, khaki shorts, and loafers without socks burst through the door and took charge. He had the broad, executive face and beveled haircut of an untrustworthy senator.

  “Stewart Hatch?”

  “Of the Hatchtown Hatches,” Piney said.

  The paramedics carried the stretcher through the door, and the three men on the steps went down onto the lawn. Earl Sawyer’s battered face protruded from one end of the blanket. His eyes were closed, and a stripe of blood crossed his cheek like a banner. Lieutenant Rowley followed the paramedics down the steps and joined Captain Mullan on the short front lawn. Stewart Hatch climbed into the ambulance after the paramedics.

  Bruce, Piney, and I moved onto the sidewalk. The paramedics were shifting the unconscious guard onto a gurney. Frank Holland wandered up to the rear of the ambulance.

  “Shitting in his pants,” Bruce said. “They got a top-of-the-line security system in there. A fly lands on a lampshade, sirens are supposed to go off.”

  Holland turned away from the ambulance, and Hatch and one of the paramedics jumped down. The paramedic shut the doors and trotted up to the driver’s seat.

  “By the way,” Piney whispered, “it wasn’t you, was it?”

  “Me?” I thought he was talking about Earl Sawyer and the Cobden Building. “I just got here.”

  “That deal Friday night.”

  “No,” I said. “It wasn’t me.”

  Piney patted my arm. The ambulance pulled out into Commercial Avenue. Stewart Hatch began jabbing his index finger into Frank Holland’s chest.

  Bruce McMicken said, “Adios, amigos,” and vanished through the diminishing crowd.

  I saw Lieutenant Rowley take in my presence. He bent toward Mullan. None too happily, Mullan looked at me. I nodded.

  Stewart Hatch gave a dismissive glance at the onlookers. “Go home,” he called out. “The show’s over.” His eyes stopped when they came to me.

  Stopped is not quite the word. When Stewart Hatch’s eyes met mine, they widened with a kind of shock of recognition that immediately gave way to what looked like loathing.

  He had us followed, I thought. He saw pictures of Laurie and me.

  “Don’t expect no Christmas cards,” Piney said.

  Hatch’s thick, already suntanned legs propelled him before Rowley and Mullan. Looking as though some portion of him were continuing to churn forward, he rammed his fists into the pockets of his shorts and tilted his head to Rowley’s ear.

  Rowley found me with his dead face and dead eyes. Hatch churned into the Cobden Building with his security director scuttling behind him.

  Rowley looked as happy as someone like Rowley can get. He no longer had to pretend to be my best friend. Piney had disappeared. The few people near me melted away as Rowley moved up onto my side of the street, planted himself in front of me, and exhaled recycled cigarette smoke.

  “Nice seeing you again, Lieutenant,” I said.

  Rowley looked from side to side. His corpse’s face swung back to me, and the creases dividing his cheeks filled with shadows. “You’re even dumber than I thought. What is your problem, Dunstan?”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “I went out for a walk and saw all the excitement.”

  He stepped forward, forcing me back. “The bus station is on Grace Street, three blocks down from Town Square. That’s one choice. Or, stick around and have us drop in tomorrow morning.”

  “Did Hatch tell you to say that, Lieutenant?”

  Rowley hit me in the stomach, hard. All the air went out of me, and I staggered backward. He clipped the side of my head with a jab that spun me onto the grass. I rolled away, fighting for breath. Rowley skipped up and kicked me under my ribs. He squatted and thumped my head. “Help me out here. You were saying something?”

  I managed to drag in a breath. “I’m beginning to get your point.”

  The cops on the other side of the street had turned their backs.

  Rowley stood up and took a step back.

  “One thing,” I said.

  He placed his hands on his knees and bent toward me. His face was a black, featureless pane.

  I took another breath. “When I opened that package, I thought we had an arrangement.”

  “An arrangement.”

  “I thought a hundred bucks would keep me from getting kicked in the side.”

  Rowley snapped to his feet and walked away.

  When I put my key in the front door the back of my neck tingled, and I glanced over my shoulder, expecting to find Rowley summoning me into the back of a patrol car. All I saw was Frenchy La Chapelle twitching up Chester Street. Frenchy checked the number on an apartment building, then glanced at me. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket, wandered to the curb, and looked down the street as if waiting for a ride. After another glance in my direction, he shifted into his usual sidewalk boogaloo and slid around a corner into Hatchtown.

  64

  At 10:00 A.M. on Sunday morning, there was a rap on my door while I was trying to persuade Laurie Hatch to drive Posy Fairbrother into town to retrieve the Mercedes. “I have a visitor,” I said.

  “Get rid of her and come to my house. I’ll give you a tremendous brunch.”

  The knock came again, in triplicate. “I think it’s a cop who doesn’t like me very much.”

  “Put down the phone and let him in, so I can hear what happens. Then let him know you’re talking to me.”

  Helen Janette’s voice came through the door. “Mr. Dunstan, if you don’t open up, I’ll do it myself.”

  Clustered behind my landlady were Captain Mullan, Lieutenant Rowley, Officer Treuhaft, the human totem pole who had come with Rowley to Nettie’s house, and, so close to Rowley that they could have held hands, Stewart Hatch. Stewart was wearing white trousers and a blue double-breasted blazer over a polo shirt with an upturned collar. All he needed was a yachting cap.

  “This is the last straw, Mr. Dunstan,” said Helen Janette, and barged away.

  Captain Mullan said, “May we come in?”

  “Be my guest. I’m on the phone.”

  The four men pushed past me. Hatch started walking around and smirking at my surroundings, and the other three watched me sit on the bed and pick up the telephone.

  “I have to hang up. Captain Mullan, Lieutenant Rowley, Officer Treuhaft, and a gentleman who appears to be Mr. Stewart Hatch just came in.”

  “Stewart’s there?”

  Hatch turned around when he heard his name. “Who are you talking to?”

  “My attorney,” I said.

  Hatch looked at Mullan. “I take that as an admission of guilt.”

  “The great Roy Cohn,” I said. “A little dead, a little moldy, but still vicious as all get-out.”

  Mullan smiled, and Hatch spun around and opened my closet. “Step back, Mr. Hatch,” Mullan said.

  “Should I talk to him?” Laurie asked.

  “Probably not a good idea,” I said, and put down the telephone.
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br />   “I want this man arrested for auto theft, Mullan,” Hatch said. “This time, keep him in a cell while we work on the other charges.”

  “Sit down, please, Mr. Hatch,” Mullan said, giving a disgusted look at Rowley. “You’re an interested party, not a police officer.”

  “Mr. Hatch is the victim here, Captain,” said Rowley.

  Mullan stared at Hatch until he dropped into the chair near the window. “Mr. Dunstan,” Mullan said, “do we have your permission to search your room?”

  “Please do,” I said. “But if this is about Mr. Hatch’s Mercedes, you’re wasting your time. It’s not here.”

  Treuhaft unzipped my knapsack and turned it upside down over the bed. Rowley pulled out dresser drawers and rummaged through my socks and underwear.

  “Mr. Dunstan,” Mullan said, “did you remove a Mercedes 500SL from a garage at the residence at 4825 Blueberry Lane in Ellendale between the hours of midnight and two A.M. this morning and transport it to Harry Street, around the corner from this building?”

  “Of course he did,” Hatch said.

  “Of course I did,” I said. “At the request of Mrs. Hatch.”

  “Ask him what he was doing there in the first place.”

  Mullan looked back at me. I said, “Mrs. Hatch invited me to dinner. I don’t have a car, so she came in and picked me up. During and after dinner, we had several glasses of wine. At the end of the evening, she asked if I would mind driving myself back in a car her husband had left in her garage.”

  I looked over at Hatch. “It’s a beautiful car, Mr. Hatch.” His eyes went flat. To Mullan, I said, “This morning, I suggested to Mrs. Hatch that she and Posy, the nanny, come in together, so that Posy could drive the Mercedes back to Ellendale.”

  “Posy,” Hatch said. He made it sound like the name of a poisonous insect.

  “This guy always gets his alibis from women, have you noticed?” Rowley came over to the bed. “Why did you conceal the car?”