Woman with a Blue Pencil

by Gordon McAlpine

  Jimmy straightened in his chair, speaking for the first time. “As a matter of fact, sir, I will come through for our nation.”

  “I wish I could believe you,” the Marine Corps colonel said.

  Jimmy nodded as if sympathizing. Then he smiled. After a moment, he pushed back his chair and stood.

  The distinguished contingent watched silently.

  Jimmy crossed the paneled room to Mr. Barratt’s desk. He reached for the beautiful but deadly Cymbidium orchid that Barratt had said he kept as a reminder of his nemesis. Jimmy grabbed the stem up near the purple bloom and snapped it off. Returning to the table, he dropped the bloom onto the table.

  “This is how I will deliver her up, gentlemen.”

  Excerpt from a letter dated October 16, 1942:

  . . . you’ve figured out by now that I consider the selection of names for characters to be an integral part of characterization (not everything, of course, but not “nothing” either). However, while I found your scene with the gathered Intelligence officers in Mr. Barratt’s office to be riveting, I must admit to having been distracted by the multitude of names you introduced. As a result, I’ve taken my blue pencil to the manuscript, eliminating most of the names. I think that with the exception of the Army general, Mr. Barratt’s most vocal challenger, all the others gathered around that conference table are just as well referred to simply by their titles. Additionally, I think that since we’re in Jimmy’s POV these cuts are further justified, as he’d not catch every name but would surely be aware of their powerful positions.

  On another note, I noticed the name you gave to the Marine colonel in your draft was “Czernicek.” Of course, there’s no reference to his first name being “Henry.” Nonetheless, while the name “Henry Czernicek” worked well in your initial (now discarded) synopsis and opening chapters as a murderous LAPD officer, I didn’t like seeing it used again in another context. I have a pet peeve about discarded characters’ names being interchangeable with other, subsequent characters. You may think of it as my personal quirk. Don’t get me wrong. I love that you recycled some elements of your original concept into this draft, such as the location of the bungalow in Echo Park, the ’37 Dodge, and even a few characters, such as Tony Fortuna. And I don’t mind that you used the same description, literally word-for-word, of the Orchid’s appearance as you used to describe poor Kyoko Sumida in the first chapter of your abandoned Japanese-hero novel. It’s a pretty face you sketch for us, no doubt. Obviously, you’re attracted to a particular, if conventional, kind of beauty. No problem. But I draw the line at reassigning to this work the names of characters cut from the original manuscript, as I believe it demonstrates a lack of specificity of imagination for your current characters.

  In any case, you keep creating at your end and know that I anxiously await your next chapters, blue pencil poised and ready!

  Warmly,

  Maxine Wakefield

  Maxine Wakefield,

  Associate Editor,

  Metropolitan Modern Mysteries, Inc.

  THE REVISED—CHAPTER FIVE

  Can Providence have worked in any way other than to have placed a single good man and a single unrepentant villain at Christ’s sides, reverse images of each other, bound together on Golgotha by their isolation from the world they had known before?

  —Sister Aimee Semple McPherson

  “Have you eaten lunch?” Henry Czernicek asked Sumida as they emerged from the library onto Fifth Street.

  “No.”

  “Hungry?”

  The last thing Sumida remembered eating was a homemade dinner of fried eggs with toast before leaving his house to see The Maltese Falcon at the Rialto Movie House. Was that early last night? Or was it almost two months ago? In either case, eating hadn’t occurred to him in the interim. But now, with Czernicek at his side, he felt better. That one person recognized him, and an LAPD detective at that, was a world of difference from being recognizable to no one. He felt almost cheerful. “I could stand to eat a sandwich,” he answered.

  “I know a good diner a couple of blocks away, just on the other side of Pershing Square near that Italian fruit stand,” Czernicek said, starting in that direction.

  Sumida caught up.

  “Funny, you and me again,” Czernicek continued as they neared the Biltmore Hotel, which was bustling with men in uniform, and continued on past the Philharmonic Hall, where Sumida had once taken Kyoko to see Vladimir Horowitz.

  “Yeah, funny. Or something,” Sumida answered.

  Their parting a few months before had not been friendly. Sam had believed, initially, that the LAPD would devote whatever manpower and effort was necessary to solve the murder of his wife. But he’d been naïve. After the investigation ruled out the most likely suspect—Sam himself—the department had seemed to lose interest. That was just a few days after the crime, when real police work would be necessary. Subsequently, the LAPD managed only to dig up a few sordid details about the last months of Sam and Kyoko’s marriage. She’d been seen in various downtown hotels with a Caucasian man, though none of the front desk clerks at the hotels could offer any descriptions of the man. Sumida had been under the impression that this was the sort of information cops beat out of uncooperative witnesses, “helping” them to remember. But there were no beatings—no one even taken to the station. So there were no artist’s renderings of the Caucasian lover displayed in newspapers as part of a dragnet. Czernicek himself pointed out to Sumida that even if they tracked down the man she’d been seeing they still might not have the actual murderer. A lead, perhaps . . . But most leads go nowhere. And when, three weeks into the investigation, the case had slipped so far down the list of active investigations that Sam no longer got his phone calls put through or returned, he waited one day outside Central Station for Czernicek and confronted the much-bigger man, offering a list of grievances that arose as much from his broken heart as from his disillusionment with the shoddy police work. Czernicek admitted then that finding the killers of Japs or Chinks was only a little higher up the list of police priorities than finding the killers of Mexicans or Negroes. Sam took a swing, which the plainclothesman sidestepped. Czernicek had laughed and said he could put Sam behind bars for attempting to assault an officer but would settle instead for Sumida’s agreement to spare the department his demands and move on with his life, accepting that most crimes are never solved. That’s when Sam had emptied his bank account to hire the first of a string of equally ineffective PIs. He hadn’t seen Czernicek again.

  Until today.

  And now they were lunching together. Funny . . .

  Funnier yet was that Czernicek was the only acquaintance Sumida had in the world. Ha-ha.

  “Get the pastrami,” Czernicek said, after they’d taken seats at the booth farthest from the counter, cash register, and crowd.

  The waitress, a nineteen or twenty-year-old looker in a hairnet and mustard-stained uniform, followed on their heels, stopping at their booth with one fist placed coquettishly against her hip. “Sorry, but we don’t serve Japs.”

  Sumida looked away.

  “This man’s name is Chan,” Czernicek said. “He’s Chinese.”

  She looked doubtful.

  Czernicek removed his badge from his suit jacket pocket and showed it to her. “You can trust me, little flower.”

  “Oh, well that’s okay then.” She removed her order pad from a big pocket on her uniform and a pencil from within her nest of blonde hair. “What can I get for you and your friend, Officer?”

  “My friend’s first name is Charlie,” Czernicek said.

  It took the waitress a moment to make the connection. “Charlie Chan?” Doubt crossed her face like a shadow.

  “And my name’s Henry Czernicek, LAPD,” he said.

  “Okay, fine,” she said. “You know what you want to order?”

  “Two pastrami sandwiches and coffee,” Czernicek answered, putting his ID back in his suit jacket pocket.

  She returned her penci
l to her hair and put her order pad into the pocket of her uniform.

  “Aren’t you a doll?” Czernicek said to her as she turned to go.

  She turned back, looking over her shoulder, mustering teenaged allure. “Thanks for the compliment, Detective.”

  “Detective what?” Czernicek quizzed her.

  She stopped. “Your name?”

  “Yeah, I just told you, little doll.”

  She shrugged. “Henry . . . something.”

  “Good enough,” Czernicek said.

  “Okay,” she said, confused.

  “You can put our order in now,” Czernicek instructed.

  She sashayed away.

  “Charlie Chan?” Sumida asked him.

  Czernicek said nothing, but watched the waitress go. Then he reached across the table and, without warning, grabbed Sumida’s wrist, twisting it hard until Sumida thought it might break.

  “Tell me what the hell is going on,” Czernicek demanded.

  “I don’t know.”

  He twisted harder.

  Sumida fixed Czernicek with a glare, even as tears formed unbidden in his eyes.

  Czernicek twisted harder still.

  Sumida could reach across the table with his free hand and hit the big cop in the head with the metal napkin dispenser, opening a hole in his skull. He knew after what he’d done last night in his own bungalow in Echo Park that he was more capable of inflicting physical damage than he’d believed.

  But what would that accomplish now?

  So instead he just held Czernicek’s glare, daring the big man to twist his wrist clean off.

  At last, Czernicek let go.

  “Okay, Sumida, so you don’t know what’s going on either. We’re partners then. But if this is some kind of trick . . .”

  Sumida dropped his sore wrist onto his lap, cradling it beneath the table. “That’s how it works being partners with you, Czernicek?”

  “I just needed to know you weren’t in on something.”

  Sumida laughed. “Me, in on something? I’m on the outside of everything, barely even looking in. You understand? Since last night . . . And, I suspect, since a long time before that. So don’t test me again, you son of a bitch.”

  Czernicek grinned. “Yeah, this is going to be a real fun partnership.”

  With his good hand, Sumida took a drink of water. “Tell me what happened when you went to the precinct.”

  Czernicek shrugged. “Everybody there acted like they didn’t know me.”

  “‘Acted’ like they didn’t know you or . . . didn’t know you?”

  “Yeah, that’s the question, Hamlet,” Czernicek said. “Do I be or don’t I be?”

  Sumida was surprised that Czernicek was capable of playfully appropriating Shakespeare. And he was disturbed by the appropriation—it was more than merely playful. It was the same question he’d been asking himself.

  But didn’t their recognizing one another put it to rest?

  Why did it feel to Sumida like the answer might still be no?

  “Of course, stranger yet was that I didn’t recognize any of them,” Czernicek said as he mindlessly picked out sugar cubes, one at a time, from a porcelain container next to the salt and paper shakers, lining the cubes in rows of six, parallel to the edge of the Formica tabletop before him. “Still, I walked across the homicide department toward my office, greeting these imposters as if they were compadres. At first, they ignored me, confused. When I got to my office door I found my name wasn’t on it anymore. That’s when two of them grabbed me by the arms and threw me out like I was some kind of crazy civilian. I’ll get the bastards, in time. You can count on that. But first I got to figure out what’s going on.”

  Sumida nodded.

  “What about you?” Czernicek asked.

  Sumida reviewed his own facts from the last eighteen hours, starting with the breaking of the film at the movie house. Of course, he left a few things out of his story. Like his visit to his home in Echo Park, where, according to the morning news on the car radio, Tony Fortuna had been killed. Who was to say that Czernicek wasn’t putting all this on just to get him to confess to the crime? And Sumida also left out his visit to the cemetery, as he didn’t want to bring up Kyoko’s name—not with the man who’d considered her insufficiently important to take finding her killer seriously. Sumida couldn’t afford to get tangled up in that resentment again. Not when Czernicek seemed his best hope to figure out what was happening. But he told Czernicek about his parking claim check at the downtown lot being two months old and about his aunt and uncle’s house now being occupied by strangers.

  “I was sitting in a coffee shop last night reading a book,” Czernicek said. “Hemingway’s new one, For Whom the Bell Tolls. I’d just bought it at Williams’ Book Store in San Pedro. Not even ten pages in . . .”

  “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a reader,” Sumida interrupted.

  Czernicek glared at him.

  “Being a man of action, I mean,” Sumida added.

  “There’s plenty of action in Hemingway,” Czernicek observed. Then he returned to lining up the sugar cubes in rows. “Suddenly, the lights in the coffee shop flicker. And then all the electricity goes out. Blackness. Even outside through the big picture windows. No moonlight, starlight, nothing. Just like you describe in the movie house. Only for a second or two. And when the light comes back on I’m still sitting in the booth with the book in my hand, like nothing’s changed, except that everybody in the place is different.”

  “Different?”

  Czernicek began to stack the parallel lines of sugar cubes atop one another, forming a wall three or four inches high in front of him. “I mean a whole set of different people, at the counter and in the booths. And then my regular waitress, who’s the reason I put up with the crap food at this place, comes over and asks for my order. As if she ever has to ask. Hell, I order the same thing every time I go there: chicken fried steak. Just like I always get the pastrami here. But now it’s like she doesn’t know that. And it’s like she doesn’t know me, which is exactly what she claims when I press her about it. Good God, I’ve taken that little girl to my bed a time or two after her shift and now she says she doesn’t recognize me? So I lose my temper and make a scene and it’s only by flashing my badge that things simmer down and I get out of there all right.”

  “But you’re telling me things weren’t all right, even after you got out of there.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m telling you,” Czernicek said, knocking over the sugar cube wall.

  The waitress came with the sandwiches on plates in each hand.

  Czernicek scooped up the sugar cubes and returned them to the porcelain bowl.

  Sumida made a mental note not to take sugar with his tea if he ever returned to this place.

  “Eat up,” Czernicek said, as the waitress put down the food.

  She turned and walked away.

  “That one,” Czernicek indicated, with a wave of his hand toward the retreating waitress. “She ought to know me too. And she sure as hell should know my last name. She lives at home and likes to fuck in her lacy little girlhood bedroom, not ten feet from her Mom and Dad’s room. She likes me to put a pillow over her face when she starts making too much noise. And now, you see, she doesn’t even recognize me.”

  Sumida shook his head. “You got a thing for waitresses, Czernicek?”

  “I got a thing for women,” he answered, biting into his sandwich. “But waitresses . . . Well, women who spend their whole working day on their feet are especially appreciative of a man who puts them flat on their backs.”

  Sumida grunted.

  “But this isn’t about that,” Czernicek said.

  “No.”

  “What’s going on, Sumida? Are we ghosts or something?”

  The thought had occurred to Sumida. He’d dismissed it. “I think these people would respond to us differently if that were the case,” he answered.

  “Then what’s your theory, professor?”r />
  Sumida picked up his sandwich with his good hand. He shrugged, I don’t know.

  “Hell of a lot of good running into you has done me,” Czernicek said.

  Sumida put his sandwich down. “Our recognizing each other means everything, however little we may understand what’s going on.”

  “Oh, why?”

  “Because it means we’re not insane.”

  Czernicek laughed. “Was that worrying you?”

  Sumida said nothing.

  “Or maybe it’s all a dream,” Czernicek said.

  Sumida shook his head. “You know that business about pinching yourself to ascertain that you’re not dreaming?”

  “Sure.”

  Sumida brought his sore wrist up from beneath the table, where he’d kept it resting on his lap.

  It was already black and blue where Czernicek had twisted it.

  “No dream,” Sumida said.

  Czernicek ignored his brutal handy work. “So that brings us back to our being ghosts.”

  Sumida shook his head. “I’ve been to the Hall of Records. There’s no indication of my ever having existed. No birth certificate, marriage license, real estate or tax records . . . nothing. Ghosts leave behind some indication of their having once been alive.”

  “So what do you make of it, Sumida?”

  Privately, Sumida suspected the two were not ghosts, but phantoms of another, even more disturbing order—beings who seemed never to have lived at all, despite their memories. Impossible, of course. “No clue,” he answered.

  “And why just you and me?” Czernicek wondered.

  Sumida had already silently inventoried the areas of common ground between them. There was only one . . . Kyoko, who was absent in the public records. “I don’t know, Czernicek. Maybe we’re just meant for each other.”

  “Very funny.”

  Sumida wondered if this strange reunion was an opportunity to accomplish what they had not accomplished before? To solve the crime? Had the two men been singled out for this sudden, inexplicable isolation—more than that, their excision from the past—for just such a purpose, justice? There was nothing Sumida wanted more than to find his wife’s killer; losing his house, his car, and his identity would prove a small price to pay if that was what setting things right required. But there remained the problem of how to begin such an investigation when there was no record of Kyoko’s either being born, married, or murdered. . . .