“That been a problem?”
“It cost me a marriage.”
“Maybe I’ll learn how someday, too.”
Then they were back. Somebody, presumably Forester, had torn Price’s nice lacy shirt into shreds. Haskins looked miserable.
Forester said, “I’m going to tell you what happened that night.”
I nodded.
“I’ve got some beer in the back seat. Would either of you like one?”
Karen said, “Yes, we would.”
So he went and got a six pack of Michelob and we all had a beer and just before he started talking he and Karen shared another one of those peculiar glances and then he said, “The four of us—myself, Price, Haskins, and Michael Brandon—had done something we were very ashamed of.”
“Afraid of,” Haskins said.
“Afraid that, if it came out, our lives would be ruined. Forever,” Forester said.
Price said, “Just say it, Forester.” He glared at me. “We raped a girl, the four of us.”
“Brandon spent two months afterward seeing the girl, bringing her flowers, apologizing to her over and over again, telling her how sorry we were, that we’d been drunk and it wasn’t like us to do that and—” Forester sighed, put his eyes to the ground. “In fact we had been drunk; in fact it wasn’t like us to do such a thing—”
Haskins said, “It really wasn’t. It really wasn’t.”
For a time there was just the barn owl and the crickets again, no talk, and then gently I said, “What happened to Brandon that night?”
“We were out as we usually were, drinking beer, talking about it, afraid the girl would finally turn us into the police, still trying to figure out why we’d ever done such a thing—”
The hatred was gone from Price’s eyes. For the first time the matinee idol looked as melancholy as his friends. “No matter what you think of me, Dwyer, I don’t rape women. But that night—” He shrugged, looked away.
“Brandon,” I said. “You were going to tell me about Brandon.”
“We came up here, had a case of beer or something, and talked about it some more, and that night,” Forester said, “that night Brandon just snapped. He couldn’t handle how ashamed he was or how afraid he was of being turned in. Right in the middle of talking—”
Haskins took over. “Right in the middle, he just got up and ran out to the Point.” He indicated the cliff behind us. “And before we could stop him, he jumped.”
“Jesus,” Price said, “I can’t forget his screaming on the way down. I can’t ever forget it.”
I looked at Karen. “So what she heard you three talking about outside the party that night was not that you’d killed Brandon but that you were afraid a serious investigation into his suicide might turn up the rape?”
Forester said, “Exactly.” He stared at Karen. “We didn’t kill Michael, Karen. We loved him. He was our friend.”
But by then, completely without warning, she had started to cry and then she began literally sobbing, her entire body shaking with some grief I could neither understand nor assuage.
I nodded to Forester to get back in his car and leave. They stood and watched us a moment and then they got into the Mercedes and went away, taking the burden of years and guilt with them.
This time I drove. I went far out the river road, miles out, where you pick up the piney hills and the deer standing by the side of the road.
From the glove compartment she took a pint of J&B, and I knew better than to try and stop her.
I said, “You were the girl they raped, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police?”
She smiled at me. “The police weren’t exactly going to believe a girl from the Highlands about the sons of rich men.”
I sighed. She was right.
“Then Michael started coming around to see me. I can’t say I ever forgave him, but I started to feel sorry for him. His fear—” She shook her head, looked out the window. She said, almost to herself, “But I had to write those letters, get them there tonight, know for sure if they killed him.” She paused. “You believe them?”
“That they didn’t kill him?”
“Right.”
“Yes, I believe them.”
“So do I.”
Then she went back to staring out the window, her small face childlike there in silhouette against the moonsilver river. “Can I ask you a question, Dwyer?”
“Sure.”
“You think we’re ever going to get out of the Highlands?”
“No,” I said, and drove on faster in her fine new expensive car. “No, I don’t.”
JOHN JAKES
Say John Jakes (1932– ) and you instantly think bestselling writer. But think John Jakes before his reign on all the bestseller lists, and you find a writer adept at virtually every kind of genre fiction, from spy to Western to hard-boiled crime.
He was one of the last writers to use the pulps as a training ground. You find his name in the pulp-edged magazines dating from approximately 1950 to 1957, at which point most of these magazines were gone.
He was good from the git-go, particularly with crime fiction, and especially in the private eye novels about the diminutive Johnny Havoc, books that hold up well for two very good reasons. They’re fun to read and they do a good job of telling you what America was like in the early 1960s. Recently his mystery short fiction was collected in the anthology Crime Time.
No Comment
The gruesome Slub Canal murders had a long history.
The start of it could be dated 1953. A developer from nearby Buffalo bought some land within sight of the main plant of Metrochemical, Inc., and the waterway for which the tract was eventually named. Young couples, most with husbands employed at Metrochem, snapped up all the houses before they were built; those were the days when a Philco TV, a carport, and a chain link fence consummated the American Dream, and you knew your company would take care of you till you retired or died.
Soon children from the tract houses were playing along the canal bank. Under a slaggy winter sky at twilight, mothers who came to call them in began to notice the slow, sludgelike quality of the canal that had flowed briskly and noisily only a couple of years before, when the lots were being sold. Looking along the canal to the huge tangle of pipes and smokestacks of Metrochem, the mothers could see two large conduits in the bank spilling more sludge. Flames from the stacks snapped like flags, and even on sunny days a deep lavender haze filled the air. No one thought much of it, though.
One night in 1963, Mrs. Sheila Johnson of 22 Crystal Court went into the bedroom belonging to her twins and screamed. Kimmy, the girl, the frail one, slept to the left of the door. Near her bed a small night-light glowed. In the bed, Kimmy’s forearm bones glowed. They glowed a faint but unmistakable green through her pale translucent skin. Seven months later—two days after her sixth birthday—Kimmy breathed her last. For the final two months she had screamed almost constantly as the cancer ate her bones away.
By this time the nation was beginning to wake up to the dangers of chemical pollution. Metrochemical, meanwhile, was expanding, increasing production and changing its name to Metrochem World-Wide. A young man named Hollister (Buddy) Wood was promoted from accountant to sales assistant, to broaden his background. He was considered a comer.
Not everyone in the tract worked for MWW. Stan Krasno did not. Stan lived at 36 Sparkling Avenue with his wife and three tiny daughters. Stan’s house backed up to Slub Canal. Sometimes on a summer night, getting a beer from the Frigidaire, he could hear turgid bubbles popping on the canal’s surface. If he glanced out the window at the right time, he could see the same popping bubbles briefly emit a yellow-green glow. It worried him in an unfocused way.
Stan’s wife Helen took a job in the sales literature department at MWW when the last of her three girls entered school. Stan worked in the meat department of the Sav-All Supermart in one of the new Buffalo suburbs creeping out toward
Slub Canal. The meat department occupied the right wall as you entered. From behind the work area’s one-way glass Stan could see the MWW executives driving to and from work in their company Cadillacs. At this point they did not yet have chauffeurs.
By the late sixties, when MWW was making chemicals for Vietnam, four children and two adults from the tract had died of forms of cancer. Several women held a meeting which Helen Krasno attended. They prepared a sincere if crudely written petition and presented it to the company, requesting an inquiry into possible links between the deaths and the plant’s waste-dumping practices. Assistant to the President Buddy Wood returned the petition through the mail, having written on the front page THE COMPANY HAS NO COMMENT.
In the early seventies three more deaths occurred. By now cause and effect were no longer in doubt, at least to the residents of Slub Canal. This caused some agonizing moments in the Krasno household.
The Krasnos were devout Catholics. Stan never missed a Sunday mass and went regularly, compulsively, to confession. “Bless me, Father . . .” His list of sins, some real, some fanciful, was always long. Helen had the deep misfortune of believing that the basic teachings of her religion should be practiced universally. She lived by standards of honesty, decency, fairness, personal responsibility, and took it on faith that everyone else did, too. She assumed everyone’s word was good, without exception.
Helen also believed in loyalty to her employer. But her ideals, her family, and her neighbors won out. She began to write Congressmen and organize Saturday coffees. She invited a young and hairy environmentalist to sleep on the couch after he addressed a group in the living room. She took a night school course in better letter writing, and bought a book on improving telephone skills. Finally the government sent investigators to Slub Canal. At this point Helen lost her job. It was claimed that she misdirected a huge shipment of sales literature to the Bangkok branch when it was urgently needed in Frankfurt.
Stan Krasno expressed his outrage to his bowling buddies. One of the best of them, Chief of Police Milt Dubofsky, a pal since high school, warned him, “Don’t do anything rash. I’d have to haul you in and knock a confession out of you and then you’d be on your way to jail.” He was only half-joking.
There were six more harrowing cancer deaths in the next three years. Buddy Wood, now president of MWW, turned aside questions from teams of TV and newspaper reporters who swarmed into Slub Canal, photographing the green-brown “water” which now hardly moved at all. While Buddy Wood certainly didn’t own the company, he was a large stockholder thanks to his option programs, and he had become the target of the anger of Slub Canal householders, including Stan Krasno. Chopping or packaging meat, Stan would stare out through the one-way glass, watch Buddy Wood’s silver stretch whisk by and angrily recall that Helen couldn’t even get work as a domestic, cleaning the homes of the executives of MWW; as soon as someone learned her name, the door closed in her face.
The news media practically camped in Slub Canal. Buddy Wood, now plump and middle-aged, was occasionally photographed coming out the gate in his silver limo; he wore rimless bifocals at this point in life, and dyed his hair dark brown to promote a youthful image, as so many businessmen did. He never smiled for cameras.
The day the government announced its twenty-million-dollar suit against MWW for violations of environmental laws, Buddy Wood issued a statement from his office before dashing off to Scottsdale on the company jet with his wife Chrissy. Buddy was scheduled to address a conference of high-level corporate executives on the subject of the dangers of executive stress. Chrissy carried their tennis rackets and her ankle-length mink coat. The departing statement consisted of two words. “No comment.”
That was all you ever heard from the company, Stan Krasno thought as he sat in front of his flickering TV that evening, a beer can in one hand and the lights turned off to hide the increasing shabbiness of the deteriorating house. That was all you heard, “no comment,” or “the company declines comment,” or “spokesmen for the company declined comment,” or “the New York attorneys representing the company declined comment at this time. . . .” Stan belched and stood and listened because he thought he’d heard a sound. Yes, there it was again. A bubble went pop in Slub Canal. The smell made him gag.
Stan slouched to the door of the bedroom where his teenage daughter, Cherylanne, slept; the other girls were grown and gone, Babette married, Lynne Marie in cosmetology school. Stan opened the door, looked in, and practically tore the phone off the wall before he got Helen on the line; she was night manager at the local Señor Speedy Taco Hacienda.
“She’s green, her bones are green, I can see ’em,” Stan screamed into the phone.
Ten and a half months later, lying mewling in a pool of her own green diarrhea, Cherylanne died at three-ten A.M. In the adjoining bedroom Helen was likewise dying; she expired a week after her daughter’s burial. Stan was hysterical most of that night.
Next day he summoned reporters from the Buffalo media and accused MWW of murdering his wife and child. This provoked a surprising personal appearance by Buddy Wood on evening news shows. Looking grave and correct in his seven hundred dollar custom-tailored suit, the lights reflecting off his rimless glasses, he said:
“At this point in time we have no comment other than to extend the sympathy of the entire Metrochem family to Mr. Krasno in his hour of loss. We will of course launch a thorough and objective investigation. Beyond that, I must say again that we cannot comment at this time. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to make a flight out of JFK to Zurich this evening for a conference on the merger announced last week. I have no further comment.” Off camera, his wife Chrissy waited with their skis. The camera caught a glimpse of her and, at home, Stan went wild.
“No comment, no comment,” he screamed. “Fucking coward. Fucking CRIMINAL. Always hiding, hiding behind your fucking lawyers and your fucking hired help to save your fucking profits and your fucking greedy ass.” Stan no longer believed in the carport-and-chain-link dream, or that MWW, or any other company, would take care of an ordinary Joe unless it served some cold-blooded purpose.
Ten days later the Woods returned to their suburban Buffalo home, severely jet-lagged and exhausted. At five-fourteen in the morning, alarms went off in the central office of the security service which looked after their property. The service automatically dialed the local police, who rushed to the site of the alarm. They found the huge house broken into on the first floor. Upstairs, in the enormous master bedroom suite (two complete baths and his-and-hers walk-in closets in which you could hold a small dinner party) they found carnage.
Buddy and Chrissy Wood had been stabbed to death through their night clothes. Many cuts were visible on both bodies, but his had been mutilated. The bedding was blood-soaked; the walls resembled huge wet abstract paintings done in red. In the warm ashes in the bedroom hearth, a detective discovered something black and meaty. It turned out to be most of Buddy Wood’s tongue.
When Chief Milt Dubofsky got the call, he was only mildly surprised. He’d watched his bowling buddy Stan slowly come apart following his wife’s firing and then her death a week after their daughter’s. “The poor son of a bitch,” the chief said, strapping on his hip holster with considerable reluctance. He drove to the shoebox house on Sparkling Avenue with two deputies. Guns drawn, they knocked at the front door.
“Stan? This is Milt. Got to talk to you.”
From inside came a weird gargling noise.
“Stan, if you come out peaceably, you won’t get hurt. But you’ve got to come out. We’ve got to talk about what you did.”
The noise again, a kind of moist glottal choking sound. Chief Milt Dubofsky cautiously tested the door.
Not locked. Unhappily, he gestured his deputies forward with his gun.
They found Stan seated in an old armchair in his living room. The arms of the chair were soaked with blood. Pools of it glistened under his shoes. Stan was still alive—barely—with a delirious smile on his blo
odstained mouth. He made another of those weird gagging sounds as if to demonstrate that he couldn’t speak. One of the deputies turned away to be sick.
“Stan, you got to tell me—” But Stan was shaking his head. Grinning, very pleased, he pointed to his bloody mouth with the butcher knife in his right hand. Then the Chief saw the bloody object lying in Stan’s lap. What he had done to Wood, he had done to himself.
LAWRENCE BLOCK
Is it all right to prefer Bernie Rhodenbarr to Matt Scudder? That question was asked, in all seriousness, in a recent on-line exchange.
Because the Bernies are hilarious and the Scudders dark and brooding, the e-mail inquirer apparently wanted to know if her preference revealed a certain, shall we say, shallowness in her reading tastes. Not at all. Lawrence Block (1938– ) is one of the best crime fiction writers in the world, whatever his literary mood of the moment happens to be.
Block’s career is one of those up-from-the-trenches, decades-in-the-making sagas that makes you cheer him on. He’s written just about every kind of fiction—high, low, and unmentionable—and he’s done virtually all of it with style, wit, and enormous acumen.
Recently he has turned to editing books, with five stellar anthologies published, Master’s Choice, volumes 1 and 2; Opening Shots, volumes 1 and 2; and Speaking of Lust. His latest novel is Everybody Dies.
While everybody talks about his newer Bernies and Scudders, and how wonderful they are (and they damned well are), do yourself a favor and read some of his earlier books, such as After the First Death, The Specialists, and Such Men Are Dangerous.
He is also one of the best short story writers the crime field has ever produced. Of the dozens of marvelous stories to pick from, this one shows his talents in full swing.
How Would You Like It?
I suppose it really started for me when I saw the man whipping his horse. He was a hansom cab driver, dressed up like the chimney sweep in Mary Poppins with a top hat and a cutaway tailcoat, and I saw him on Central Park South, where the horse-drawn rigs queue up waiting for tourists who want a ride in the park. His horse was a swaybacked old gelding with a noble face, and it did something to me to see the way that driver used the whip. He didn’t have to hit the horse like that.
A Century of Noir Page 58