Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  Like a clearing in a forest, a rectangular section of the table at the left of the kitchen stood apart from the mess rising up around it. At the center of the clearing, a black, gold-trimmed fountain pen lay parallel to the edge of a bound journal similar to those in which Toby Kraft had entered his fictional accounts. Above the rubble at the far end of the table hung a photograph in a silver frame. Crayons and a golden marker had overlaid the image within the frame: the photograph had been taken out and deliberately altered before being replaced. I moved up through the chaos surrounding Captain Mullan and myself; I stood in front of the table and took in what my father had done to a formal portrait of the Hatches.

  Hand-drawn knives and arrows bristled like quills from Carpenter and Ellen Hatch. Their eyes had been inked out, and vampire smiles erased their mouths. Swirls of black crayon eradicated small Cobden Hatch. A golden crown broadcast vibrating rays from the head of young Cordwainer, and a golden heart flamed at the center of his chest.

  “You noticed that picture,” Mullan said.

  It was what Earl Sawyer had shoved into a drawer on Buxton Place; it was what Edward Rinehart had ordered Toby Kraft to steal from his family’s house on Mansion Row.

  “Tell me the name of the kid wearing the crown.”

  “Earl Sawyer,” I said. “Edward Rinehart.”

  “Congratulations, Mr. Dunstan. Your father and Stewart’s father were brothers, which makes you and Stewart first cousins.”

  “I guess Earl wasn’t too fond of his family,” I said.

  “Pull that chair out,” Mullan said. “Swing it around and sit down.”

  I pulled out the chair in front of the table and sat down.

  “Here we are, Mr. Dunstan,” Mullan said. “You and me. Lieutenant Rowley is working the phone, shoring up his walls, doing his best to bribe or threaten himself above flood level, but Rowley can’t touch what we do in this room. Do you understand that?”

  “What does Rowley know about Earl Sawyer?”

  Another wintry smile. “He knows that Earl has been going around murdering people for the past thirty years. The exciting little twist that Earl Sawyer happens to be long-lost Cordwainer Hatch has not yet come to his attention.”

  “And are we supposed to hide that?”

  “We can’t keep that from coming out. I don’t give a damn if it does. All I want to do is hold the publicity to a minimum and walk away with my reputation and my pension intact. Reporters are going to pile in from all over the country. I’ll have to dodge microphones every time I walk out of Headquarters. I can handle that.”

  “So why are we here?” I asked him.

  “If you’re willing to help me see what’s going on, maybe we can salvage something out of this mess. Do you trust me, Mr. Dunstan?”

  “I can’t answer that,” I said.

  “All right. Nothing you say to me is on the record. That is a promise. Do you want to keep talking?”

  “Let’s see how it goes,” I said.

  “There may be hope after all.” Mullan gazed at the mutilated photograph behind me. “You weren’t surprised to hear that the boy in that picture was Cordwainer Hatch.”

  “I learned that Cordwainer Hatch was my father about twelve hours ago.” I told him I had dropped into Hugh Coventry’s office and heard about the disappearance of the Hatch photographs. I gave him a vague reason for suspecting Nettie and described finding the file in her bedroom. “As soon as I looked at them, I knew Cordwainer was my father.”

  “I take it that Cordwainer is dead.”

  I did not answer.

  “What I want to do is going to be a lot easier if I don’t have to set up a manhunt for Cordwainer Hatch while his nephew is on trial. I think something happened today—a showdown—and because you’re still here, he probably isn’t. Say something to me.”

  I said nothing.

  “This is between you and me, Mr. Dunstan. If you tell me you killed him with your own hands, I wouldn’t consider bringing charges against you.”

  “Cordwainer Hatch is dead.”

  “You could do us both some good by telling me where to find his body.”

  “Nobody is ever going to find his body.”

  Mullan regarded me utterly without judgment. “Two years from now, some guy on a backhoe, or a kid out walking in the woods, is not going to come upon his remains. The next time the river floods, his body is not going to wash up on a sandbar.”

  “Nothing like that will ever happen. It’s your turn to trust me.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “Are you wearing a wire?”

  He smiled.

  “You’d have to say he killed himself.”

  “Let me ask you a question completely from left field. Did any of these missing photographs, including the ones of your family, have anything to do with that?”

  “Is there something you’re not telling me, Captain?”

  “I’ll be a little more explicit. When Stewart Hatch accused you of attacking him with a knife, he also said that he suspected you of having broken into his house for the purpose of retrieving some photographs he had mistakenly removed from the library. I don’t give a damn if you went into Stewart’s house and took back something that belonged to your family. I want to know if you showed those pictures to Cordwainer Hatch.”

  The alarms ringing throughout my nervous system were getting louder. “Why would I?”

  Mullan took a moment to answer, and when he did, it took me another moment to understand what he was telling me. “When I was a boy, my mother once pointed out Howard Dunstan to me on the street. He was an old man, but he didn’t look tame, like most old guys. In fact, he scared me. My mother said, ‘When I was a girl, Howard Dunstan could make you feel like the first day of spring just by smiling at you.’ I gather that he had the same effect on a lot of women.”

  I stared at Mullan in forthright awe complicated only by my shock. He knew everything—he knew everything he could know. Ever since we had been left alone in my room at the Brazen Head, Mullan had been leading me toward the point I had been trying to conceal. “You’re too good for this town,” I said.

  “They don’t have stories like this in Cape Girardeau. The minute Stewart Hatch laid eyes on you, he tried to get you arrested or run out of town. But he never had any idea who Earl was, did he?”

  “He thought Cordwainer was dead.”

  “And Cordwainer didn’t know, either. But I have an idea of what he thought he was. Turn around and open that journal, or whatever you call it. He had beautiful penmanship, I’ll say that for him.”

  I swung around and put my hands on the journal. My fingers turned a thick wad of pages, and I read I, too, have had my Judases, the first of them one Clothhead Spelvin, whose betrayal I answered with a summary visit to his jail cell.

  Further down the page, Cordwainer Hatch’s calligraphic handwriting declared, In a weathered manner, I am still handsome, if I say so myself.

  On an earlier page, in irate black capitals: I HATE ART. ART NEVER DID ANYONE A BIT OF GOOD.

  And on an earlier still: Great Ones, You with whom this Drudge shares a common Ancestry, should You exist at all, I humbly request a degree of recognition commensurate to my Service.

  Then I turned to the last words he had written. I set down the Pen—& close the Book—the Triumph hastens—My Heartless Fathers—

  Behind me, Mullan asked, “Did you show him a picture of Howard Dunstan?”

  I closed the journal. “What are you going to do with this?”

  “That’s an excellent question. While the officers you saw posted at the door were looking through the front room, I came in here, opened that book, and read a couple of paragraphs. I ordered the officers outside and skimmed through the rest. Cordwainer Hatch thought he came from a race of alien monsters who put him here to set up their takeover. He claimed he could transport himself through space, enter locked rooms, and make himself invisible. What happens if that goes public? A thousand reporters start di
gging into these murders. The whole town turns into the National Enquirer. The chief is out, and I’m out, spending the rest of my life running from people who want to write books about the Edgerton monster.”

  “Won’t you need this as evidence?”

  “That cardboard box has all the evidence I’ll ever need.” He looked down at a glistening garbage-undulation four feet away. A well-fed rat had poked half of its body through the surface and was staring back at him. “Get away from me,” Mullan said.

  Sleek, prosperous, and unafraid, the rat twitched its nose and emerged from the garbage. Mullan stamped on the floor. The rat inched forward, its black eyes fixed on him.

  He unbuttoned his jacket and reached for his revolver. “Sometimes self-respect makes you do things you know you shouldn’t.” Mullan cocked the revolver and aimed it at the rat.

  Baring its teeth, the animal elongated over the floor. Mullan jumped back and fired. A second before it reached Mullan’s feet, the rat turned into a bloody lump of hair and an open pink mouth. My ears rang. A tinny echo of Mullan’s voice said, “At least I can claim I fired in self-defense.” He kicked the corpse into the garbage and reholstered the pistol.

  “Good shot.” I sounded as though I were speaking through a towel.

  “I must be losing my mind.” His mouth moved, but all I could hear was the tinny echo. “I think this guy could do everything he says. I don’t know any other way to explain how Prentiss and Frenchy were killed.”

  My muffled voice said, “Good point.”

  “Do you have a twin brother, Mr. Dunstan? He says you do. He claims this brother of yours killed Minor Keyes.”

  “I have a brother. He isn’t really a human being.” Mullan was looking at me, hard, as though seeing more than he wanted to. “I didn’t know he existed until he showed himself in that lane.”

  “That’s as far as I want to go, Mr. Dunstan.” I thought he wished he had an excuse to plug another ambitious rat. “The position of the Edgerton Police Department is that your father, Cordwainer Hatch, committed his crimes out of rage at his family’s rejection. Prints from this hovel are going to match those taken at the time of Cordwainer’s first arrest. The FBI will have Rinehart’s prints on file, and the body buried at Greenhaven will be an administrative error. Frenchy La Chapelle and Clyde Prentiss were suicides. The murders of Toby Kraft and Cassandra Little have been linked to organized crime. A witness currently under police protection has established to our satisfaction that Cordwainer Hatch, alias Edward Rinehart, alias Earl Sawyer, died in the course of a struggle and that his body can never be recovered.”

  “Unless you plan to hang me out to dry, I’ll have to be a lot more precise about the body.” Both of our voices might as well have come from the realm of my father’s Cruel Gods.

  “Shut up and listen,” Mullan said. “Remember what I say, because you’ll have to repeat it about a hundred times.”

  127

  I will never know, but I’d give three-to-one odds that Captain Mullan was one of those people gifted with the capacity to dream in long, coherent narrative structures. Maybe years of detective work, or of homicide investigations especially, develop the ability to create fiction, in the way working out at a gym develops other muscles.

  What I do know is that Mullan reached into his imagination and instantly, without hesitation, unfurled the story that rescued us both. Here and there, I gave him some help. He prompted me to get some details clear in my mind. This is what he told me:

  After my mother had given me Edward Rinehart’s name, I learned of his arrest in 1958 and death in the Greenhaven riot. Suki Teeter told me more. Still curious, I asked Hugh Coventry to check the Buxton Place property records and noticed that they had been purchased in the names of characters from the works of Rinehart’s favorite author. I visited the properties and encountered Earl Sawyer, who admitted me inside them. Sawyer learned that I was staying at the Brazen Head, remarked that he lived nearby, and gave me his address. The following night, an anonymous man called me from the lobby of the Brazen Head and said that he was in possession of certain missing Dunstan family photographs. He refused to say how he had obtained the photographs, but wondered what they were worth to me. We settled on one hundred dollars. I came downstairs, glimpsed a man going outside, and followed him into Veal Yard.

  “What did he look like?” I asked.

  In the darkness, he had appeared to be a Caucasian male of five-ten or five-eleven and approximately 160 pounds. He had been wearing a dark blue or black zippered jacket, dark trousers, and gloves. I brought the photographs to my room and noticed the resemblance between Howard Dunstan and myself. After my mother’s funeral, Rachel Milton advised me to look at some photographs in the care of Hugh Coventry, not the Dunstan photographs I had already obtained. I went to the library and found that the Hatch file had been discovered missing shortly after Mrs. Hatch had accompanied my aunts to the archive.

  It occurred to me that my aunts may have taken the Hatch file to hold in ransom for their own, and I later discovered it concealed in my Aunt Nettie’s house. The resemblance of a young man I assumed was Cordwainer Hatch to both Howard Dunstan and myself suggested that I had learned Edward Rinehart’s true identity.

  I visited Mrs. Hatch; I tangled with drunken Stewart. When I returned to the hotel, I thought about calling Earl Sawyer to ask if he would be willing to examine some old photographs. Earl might let slip some small detail that could lead me to his employer. He was not listed in the telephone directory, so I spent half an hour wandering through the lanes in search of his address, then found myself before a derelict building. I realized that I’d had nothing to drink since midafternoon and was extremely thirsty. Yet, there I was, in front of Sawyer’s residence. I knocked. Sawyer recoiled at the sight of me, but after I explained why I had come, readily let me in.

  I pretended not to notice the condition of his rooms. Sawyer said he knew his place was a mess, but if he could live that way full-time, I could stand it for a couple of minutes.

  “Got that?” Mullan said. “ ‘If I can live this way full-time, you can stand it for a couple of minutes.’ ”

  “Why is that important?” I asked.

  “Because it’s specific enough to sound real.”

  I repeated the phrase, and Mullan went on with my story.

  Sawyer took me into the squalor of the front room. My presence evoked an odd, amused courtliness that seemed edged with hysteria. He asked to see the photographs. I gave him the Dunstan folder, and told him to look at the image of the young Howard Dunstan. He did so without any apparent recognition.

  I put the Hatch folder in his hands. Sawyer stared at certain individual photographs with unmistakable interest. He looked again at the photograph of Howard Dunstan and placed it beside a picture of Cordwainer Hatch. He seemed a bit dazed. I asked him if he had any bottled water, and he thrust both of the folders at me and went into the kitchen. I followed, to be certain that whatever I drank came from a bottle and was poured into a clean glass.

  Unaware that I had followed him, Sawyer kicked away rubble from in front of his icebox. I noticed the photograph above the table and went up for a closer look. As soon as I had seen what Earl had done to the photograph, I understood that he was Cordwainer Hatch.

  He whirled around and asked what I was doing. I pointed at the boy wearing the crown and flaming heart and said, This is you.

  What if it is? he asked me. I stopped being Cordwainer Hatch a long time ago.

  “Repeat that,” Mullan ordered. “

  ‘I stopped being Cordwainer Hatch a long time ago.’ ”

  “Then you said, ‘You came back to Edgerton as Edward Rinehart, and whether you know it or not, I’m your son.’ Repeat that, too.”

  Earl Sawyer had not been surprised by my announcement. He nodded, regarding me with the faintly hysterical excitement I had seen on Buxton Place. He said, For what it’s worth, I guess you are. I never wanted any part of you. I began to back out of the kitche
n, wanting only to return to my room and drink sanitary water from a sanitary glass. Sawyer came toward me, saying, I want to show you something. He opened the back door. I owe you that much. I followed him out into a close, winding passage.

  Mullan opened the back door and said, “Come along, Mr. Dunstan.”

  128

  He plunged up the tiny lane, swerving with its abrupt shifts of direction, charging with the ease of long familiarity across unexpected corners and through boxlike courts.

  “Do you know what this thing is called?”

  “Horsehair,” I said.

  “Do you know why?”

  “Because it’s so narrow, I suppose.”

  “Good guess,” Mullan said, leaving me to wonder if it had been no more than that, and turned into a lane twice the width of Horsehair. His dim figure moved aside and waited. The wider lane extended twenty feet to the right and met a brick wall. This was where Horsehair came to an end: not, as I had thought, into one of the streets bordering Hatchtown, but at a bluntly abbreviated lane between a brick wall and the slanting facade of a long-forgotten foundry. I looked at the wall and saw the word Knacker.

  “Do you know what knackers used to do?”

  I did not.

  He waved to the building I thought was a foundry. Its wide double doors were inset with windows, like the old stable doors on Buxton Place. Mullan lowered his shoulder and pushed one of them sideways, and the entire structure trembled. We went into a long, wide space where hooks glinted from listing walls. In the center of the hard-packed earthen floor was a sunken circle about six feet in diameter. A cold, biting vapor scraped into my sinuses, and I sneezed.

  Mullan moved toward the pit. “A hundred years ago, they led old horses through that lane and brought them here. The double doors were supposed to remind them of their stables.”