Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  Downstairs, I opened the front door of the townhouse onto a burst of sunlight and a shimmer of green.

  Clark wobbled down the steps with the hint of a strut. Nettie and May filed out into the brightness of Paddlewheel Road, and I came down behind them. The Buick gleamed from a parking meter two spaces from Commercial Avenue. A feeling of unreality clung to me. I had given away about a million and a half dollars.

  Clark inspected the sleeves of his jacket. “Seems to me I’m in danger of falling a little bit behind the current styles. How much are we supposed to get from Toby?”

  “Four hundred and eighty thousand,” Nettie said.

  “It isn’t that much, considered in the cold light of day. You couldn’t say that a man with four hundred and eighty thousand dollars in the bank is a man of wealth, so don’t start putting us in that category.”

  “I want a big gas range with a griddle,” Nettie said. “And I’m going to get one, no matter what category we’re in.”

  “Do you know what I’d like?” May said. “A home entertainment center and a satellite dish, instead of my no-good little TV that only gets three stations.”

  “We can both have one,” Nettie said. “But I can’t get over the idea it’s wrong to pay for a frivolity like that.”

  “We don’t have to pay for our home entertainment centers,” May said. “I’d just like one, that’s all.”

  “New clothes,” Clark said. “The day we get that first check, I’m going into Lyall’s and coming out clean. Then I’ll stroll over to the Speedway and buy Cassie a double Johnnie Walker Black in honor of old Toby, God rest his soul.”

  “Clark,” I said. “There’s something you should know.”

  “Toby Kraft will rest easier now,” May said. “I have always said that in spite of his faults, Toby was a very loyal man.”

  I said, “Clark, this morning—”

  Nettie broke in. “Since he did not wish us to aggravate our grief, we should honor his wishes and let him have the dignified burial he requested. Reverend Swing is officiating at Star’s burial, Neddie. Reverend Swing is famous for his funerals.”

  “I’m sure I’ll love Reverend Swing,” I said. “But I have to tell Clark—”

  “You don’t want to go against the last wishes of a dying man,” Clark broke in.

  “Clark,” I said, too loudly. “You won’t be buying any drinks for Cassie Little.”

  Irritated, he said, “And why is that, pray tell?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “You’re mistaken. She had a little cold the other day, but otherwise that girl’s in the pink.”

  “I’m sorry, Uncle Clark.” It was too late to go back and do this the right way. Ashen shock was already moving into his face. “Cassie was killed in her apartment last night. Her boyfriend, Frenchy, was killed too, in a cell at Police Headquarters.”

  May said, “They were in that Clyde Prentiss gang. Killed to keep them quiet, that’s what they were.”

  Clark’s eyes looked glazed.

  “Bruce McMicken found her body. It was in the paper this morning.”

  Clark closed his mouth, opened it, closed it again. “That’s cold, boy. Cold. You should have broken the news a little easier.”

  “I tried,” I said, “but everybody kept interrupting.”

  “You should have more respect for a man’s grief.” He sneered ferociously at the sidewalk. “That Frenchy murdered her to keep her away from other men, and then he killed himself in remorse. I hope I can get my new clothes in time for her funeral rites.”

  “Here we are, baking on the sidewalk,” Nettie said. “Time to get home.”

  I said, “I’ll see you at Little Ridge, ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  “They can’t put her in the ground all that fast,” Clark wailed.

  “It’s Star’s funeral tomorrow, not your girlfriend’s. Open up that car, so it airs out.” Nettie brought a slip of paper from her bag. “You had calls this morning, Ned, from Mrs. Rachel Milton and your friend Mrs. Hatch. We had a nice conversation. I wrote down their numbers.” She thrust the slip at me.

  92

  I felt as though I were no longer quite anchored in reality, or in what I had assumed to be reality. In Merchants Park the grass flared brilliant green. Hard, white-gold light shattered across the tops of the cars. I alternated between gliding above the pavement and slogging against a heavy current. Toby Kraft’s blood-soaked body and disgruntled face kept swimming into view.

  Glittering darkness beckoned from the entrances to the lanes along Word Street. Bruce McMicken barreled head-down across the sidewalk and yanked open the door of the Speedway. The ghost of Frenchy La Chapelle jittered along behind him. A blue neon sign above a narrow window said PEEP INN, and when I peeped in I saw a man stroking the bare arm of the young woman whose head blocked his face. She lifted her profile and exposed a slender neck. The man leaned forward to say something that made her laugh. My heart stuttered and turned cold.

  Robert put a cigarette to his lips. His mouth tightened as he inhaled, and hot, acrid smoke poured into my lungs. I turned from the window and stumbled ahead, coughing. I raised my hand to wipe my forehead and found I could see through it, as if through a smeary, hand-shaped piece of glass, to the buildings along Word Street.

  I held the other beside it, my fingers spread. Indistinctly, the pavement was visible through both of them. I rushed to a shop window to see if my entire body was disappearing. The window reflected a thoroughly visible face. Normal, nontransparent hands emerged from my sleeves. I started to breathe again. When I looked back at the shop window, the reflection of the giant in the dashiki who had spoken to me on Pine Street was disapprovingly regarding me from three feet away.

  “What’s wrong with you now?” he asked.

  I laughed. “I hardly know where to begin.”

  “Give it a try.”

  “This morning, I found a dead man covered in blood. This afternoon, I discovered that the dead man had left me about two million dollars in his will. I gave three-fourths of the money away. And about five seconds ago, I started to disappear.”

  The giant threw back his head and boomed out spacious laughter. I couldn’t help responding any more than I had been able to do with Stewart Hatch, and I laughed along with the giant until I had to wipe my eyes.

  “Well,” said the giant, still emitting subterranean rumbles, “if you can laugh at your own foolishness, at least you’re not crazy. But you’re a study, Ned Dunstan, I have to say that.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “There could be a lot of reasons why a man might start to disappear. People disappear all the time, for reasons good and bad. But getting a boatload of money is the worst one I ever heard.” He shook his head, grinning.

  “How do you know my name?” I asked again.

  “Ned.” He looked down at me with an expression critical only to the extent that it remarked what I had failed to notice. “How do you think I know your name?”

  I moved back to take in all of him. He was about six foot eight and 275 pounds, with a chiseled face, gleaming eyes, and teeth white enough for toothpaste commercials. A woven African cap covered his scalp from hairline to the inch of gray above his ears. He wore black, sharply creased silk trousers and black, polished loafers no smaller than size 13. The dashiki, darker and subtler than the one I had seen Friday on Pine Street, combined deep greens and blues with widely spaced crimson stripes. His skin shone like burnished mahogany. He looked like the culmination of an ancient line of African royalty. His dazzling grin widened.

  No, I thought, he doesn’t look like a king, he looks like a—

  A wave of compacted light and warmth rolled out from the center of his being, and my thoughts died before the recognition that, whatever this man might have been, he was mysteriously of my own kind, not a Dunstan but akin to the Dunstans. A sense of protectiveness and security accompanied the surge of warmth, and I wanted to clasp his hand and ask for his help.
>
  I heard myself say, “What’s your name?”

  “Walter,” the giant said. “Pay attention. Walter, not Wally. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s being called Wally.”

  “Do you have a last name, Walter?”

  “Bernstein. If I happened to be a little guy, I suppose I’d have to put up with some snickering, but I never hear anyone laugh.”

  “Was your father … ?”

  “My father was a shade or two lighter than me. I don’t see any reason to be so all-fired curious.”

  “But I am curious,” I said. “I feel so baffled. Every time I think I finally understand something, I have to start all over again at the beginning.” I stopped talking. I did not want to whine in front of Walter Bernstein.

  “You’re still taking baby steps,” he said. “On top of that, you’re a goddamned Dunstan. Dunstans never focus on the big picture, they run around stirring up trouble and leaving their messes behind them. The same things happen over and over again, understand? You can make a difference, if you watch your back and do your best.”

  “At what?”

  “There’s more to you than you know. Keep that in mind, not how baffled you are. Why shouldn’t you be baffled? Did you think life was supposed to be simple?”

  “Why do you care? What makes you pop up?”

  “Maybe I’m sick of watching the Dunstans screw up over and over. You’re not the only ones who got left behind, you know. Ever listen to Wagner? Read any Norse mythology, Icelandic mythology? Celtic? The Mediterranean isn’t the whole damn world. I look at Goat Gridwell, I want to puke. You want to talk about disappearing, there it is. Makes me sick.”

  “But what can—”

  “Take care of business, that’s what you can do.” Walter Bernstein moved around me and strode on. Then, as at our first encounter, he stopped and looked back. “You got a chance, if you use your head.” He gave me a searching look and marched off down Word Street through the blazing sunlight. No one saw him but me.

  93

  Rachel Milton picked up a moment after her maid put me on hold. “Ned, I’m so relieved you got back to me. Suki told me about your mother. How are you doing?”

  “I seem to be a little disconnected,” I said.

  “I could kick myself for not putting everything else aside and running down to the hospital. Did you get my flowers?”

  “Thank you. That was very thoughtful.” I stretched out on my bed and watched two heavyweight flies circling between the ceiling and the window. Every second or third time, one of them flew into the glass, dropped under the table, and buzzed back up two or three seconds later.

  “I hear you and Laurie Hatch have gotten to know each other.”

  “A little bit.”

  “She and I used to be good friends until a silly misunderstanding came between us. The next time you talk to Laurie, would you tell her that I would like to repair our friendship?”

  “I’ll mention it,” I said.

  Rachel Milton asked about the funeral, and I gave her the details.

  “I have to say goodbye to Star, and I want to see you. I remember when you were born!” She paused for a purposeful beat. “And I knew your father. We were all so jealous when he decided that your mother was the one for him.” Another meaningful pause. “Suki told me you were interested in Edward Rinehart.”

  “I’d like to hear anything you could tell me,” I said.

  “After the funeral, we’ll go somewhere for lunch.”

  A fly struck the window with the sound of a tennis ball hitting a concrete wall and dropped to the floor. I wondered what was buzzing around in Rachel Milton’s brain and decided to postpone speculation until after the funeral. Then I succumbed and called Laurie Hatch.

  “Where are you?” Her voice sounded like music. “I was so, I don’t know what I was, but I didn’t know where to find you, and I called your aunt. Did she tell you?”

  “It took her a while,” I said. “I’m at the Brazen Head.”

  “The Brazen Head? Where’s that?”

  I gave her my number. “All this stuff has been going on, I hardly know where to begin.”

  “Start with the fire.”

  I told her about the fire and Toby Kraft. “In another part of the forest, these goons who mistook me for someone else nearly jammed me up, but I got away. Compared to Edgerton, Manhattan is like a tropical island.”

  “So come to my tropical island.”

  “I have to go to a lawyer’s office and sign some papers. After that I should probably just crash here.”

  She paused for a second. “I gather that you and Stewart had a long conversation.”

  “Nothing he said made any difference to me, Laurie.”

  “Did Ashleigh call you? An amazing thing happened.”

  “I seem to be out of the Ashleigh loop,” I said. “Good news?”

  “I don’t know how, but she found exactly what she needed. Did you have anything to do with that?”

  “How could I?” I asked.

  “Ashleigh wouldn’t tell me how she got the papers, so I was wondering…. Forget it. The best part is, Stewart still thinks he’s in the clear. He’s sickeningly pleased with himself, especially since he’s certain that you’ll never talk to me again.”

  I said that I had understood Stewart’s motives.

  “But I told you those dumb stories I made up fifteen years ago because the real one was so ugly. I appalled myself.” I thought I heard ice ringing in a glass. “He must have had a field day when he came to Teddy Wainwright.”

  “I didn’t pay attention. Oh! I almost forgot. Rachel Milton tried to get in touch with me, and when I called her back, she asked me to tell you that she wants to be friends again. Anyway, she’s eager to talk to you.”

  “While we’re on the subject of astonishing tales …” Laurie’s voice had fallen into its old, easy amusement. “Grennie has a thirty-five-year-old girlfriend from Hong Kong who’s a financial genius. He met her when she came to his office to set up a charitable foundation, and he’s been seeing her on the sly for months. She’s extraordinarily pretty—Ming-Hwa Sullivan. She got married to a guy from Edgerton named Bill Sullivan when they were at Harvard Business School. They came back here because he got a job at First Illinois. She went into business for herself and became a huge success, and they split up. Grennie wants to marry her.”

  “And Rachel wants to cry on your shoulder,” I said.

  Her voice changed again. “I told you a stupid lie, and Stewart poisoned your mind. I have to explain what really happened.”

  “The real story,” I said.

  “Should I pick you up?”

  I told her that I’d rented a car.

  “Get inside the thing and drive it to my house.”

  “I’ll be there around six,” I said.

  94

  Laurie and I carried our glasses and the remainder of the bottle into the living room and sat on the sofa near the fireplace and the big Tamara de Lempicka. She set the bottle on the carpet and leaned back into the cushions, cupping the glass in her hands. “I’m so embarrassed, I can hardly speak.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said.

  “This enormous lie is right in front of us. This stupid habit! I thought no one could accept me if they knew my real story. I could hardly accept myself. It was so shameful.” Tears rose to the surface of her eyes. “We were so poor. My father was killed holding up a liquor store. Is this the kind of person you want to have dinner with?”

  “It’s no disgrace to have a tough start,” I said.

  Laurie fixed me with a burning glance. “I grew up with the idea that the world … Okay. There was no safety anywhere. You didn’t know if there was going to be food for dinner, and we were always getting evicted because my mother couldn’t pay the rent. Every time we moved, I went to a different school, so I never had any friends. Not that I would have had friends anyhow. My clothes were from secondhand stores, not the cool ones, the ratty places. I
was a laughingstock. Every day, I thought a big hole was going to open up in front of me, and I’d fall in and just keep on falling. I thought we were going to wind up on the street. Or that I’d be taken away to some kind of prison, and my mother would die.”

  She wiped her eyes. “Anyhow, when she got married to this cameraman at Warner Brothers, Morry Burger, it was like being rescued from drowning. He had a job and a house in Studio City. For a while, everything was okay. But good old Morry drank a bottle of gin a day, and he started beating up my mother when he came home from work. I hid in my room, and I listened to him hitting her, and her crying, and him yelling at her to stop crying, and it was like … the hole opened up, and I fell in. I stopped feeling anything at all, I was like a zombie. Which was just as well, as it turned out. Here we get to the first of the good parts.”

  Laurie sank back again, holding her glass in front of her face. “When I was eleven, Morry started climbing into my bed at night. My mother was passed out. She would have killed me if she knew. Well, maybe she did know, but she never admitted it.

  “Then Morry got fired from Warners. He managed to find some work, but the jobs never lasted more than a couple of weeks. I ran away from home about a dozen times, but the cops always brought me back. We lost the house in Studio City, which Morry found really depressing, I might add. For about six months, we moved from one dump to another, mainly on the edges of Hancock Park. And then, one night my mother went out and someone killed her in back of a drugstore. They never found the guy.

  “I was already smoking a lot of grass. After my mother got killed, I met this girl named Esther Gold. Esther Gold was a rich screwup who gave me amphetamines and ’ludes, and we got tight. One night, Morry grabbed my bag and found some pills, which gave him the brilliant idea that I was so depraved he might as well make money and influence people by selling me to his friends. Which he did, once or twice a month. But even though having to get into bed with Morry’s friends as well as Morry was vile, disgusting, hideous, Esther Gold started scoring Percodans and Dilaudids, and whenever one of Morry’s pals came over, I zoned out.”