The Awful Truth About the Herbert Quarry Affair

by Marco Ocram

  “Ximena Ximenez.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “Harmony Pines.”

  “Shit, that’s right by Mason’s Ridge.”

  Two days later we had visited the addresses of all but one of the taxidermists and crossed out twenty-five of the twenty-six names on the list. Two of those we had visited had been in prison, one had died, one had been declared insane—a condition Como claimed he was close to sharing—and one had emigrated to Guatemala over a year ago; the work of the rest had been far too crude, according to Como, to have matched the exquisite perfection of the taxidermy in the Kelloggs’ neighbors’ house. Only one name remained on the list: Aaron Aaronovitch.

  Exhausted and stubble faced, we sat in the Gran Torino on a curve of a mountain road, munching burgers and fries while contemplating the towns and villages spread below us, at least twenty-five of which we had recently visited. The car was littered with the discarded containers of the armsful of fast food Como had bought to fuel our epic search. I had asked him if there was an organic vegan option, but he told me it would spoil the mood of the scene. As we nourished our bodies, we nourished our minds also, talking philosophically of this, that and the other. Mainly the other.

  “You don’t have a girlfriend, Writer?”

  “No.”

  “How come?”

  I picked out a particularly long fry as I thought about the question.

  “I dunno, Como. I never seemed to meet anyone before I was famous. After my book topped the charts, I met lots of women, but they only wanted the celebrity Marco, not the real one.”

  “They didn’t lust after you because of your irresistible sexual charisma?” Como smirked.

  “No.” I tried to make light of my complete lack of irresistible sexual charisma. “Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Just like the rest of the crap you write.” Como rubbed a reassuring hand on my shoulder to compensate for his hurtful quip. “Speaking of which, why don’t you just write yourself a girlfriend?”

  It was a good question. I wagged the fry to conduct the orchestra of my thoughts. “It’s not that easy, Como. I’m meant to be breaking the mold of literature, so I’m not supposed to actually write anything on purpose—I just have to type whatever comes out. If I did type a girlfriend…”

  My words petered out as my mind was enveloped in a struggle of competing visions. In the blue corner, my ideal soulmate, beautifully conceived and wrought for a lifetime of perfect compatibility. In the red corner, a hastily drawn Jackson Pollock character, overly influenced by subconscious thoughts of my Bronx mom. I put the fry back in the box and closed the lid, suddenly off my food. Thankfully Como changed the subject.

  “Tell me, Writer, how did you cope with all that fame you got?”

  I fondled the burger box reflectively as my mind went back. “It was strange. At first, I thought it was brilliant. The lonely spotty gangling kid everyone ignored had become someone everybody wanted to meet. I had money and success. I bought a loft apartment in Greenwich Village and had a really mean time there.”

  I paused again, this time to wonder whether my readers would appreciate the Greenwich Mean Time reference without me having to labor it. “I found myself invited to parties with rock stars and actors—people I’d idolized. It was incredible. But still I felt lonely, and the fame became intrusive. I couldn’t jog around town without hordes of kids running after me wanting to know about my predictions for the magnetic moment of the tau muon.”

  Como nodded, either in sympathy or boredom.

  “How about you, Como—is there anyone special in your life? Ever think about settling down?”

  “I came close once or twice, but settling down doesn’t really fit with police work—know what I mean?”

  Of course I knew what he meant. The trope of the lonely cop was one of the most overworked themes in fiction—I was appalled that he’d contaminated my narrative with such a cliché. I hurried us to another subject.

  “Speaking of police work…”

  Como took the hint and started the car. “What’s the address?”

  I found the list among all the food wrappers and looked at the only entry I hadn’t crossed out.

  “Five Marlow Court, Clarkesville.”

  “Marlow Court? Christ, Writer, that’s right next door to police HQ. If we’d done the list from A to Z, we’d have nailed Aaronovitch two days ago without even having to get in the frigging car. You’re such a fucking asshole, you know that?”

  Thinking it best to treat the question as rhetorical, I maintained a philosophical silence as Como drove us moodily back to Clarkesville.

  LESSON TWENTY-TWO

  ‘Herbert, when I last checked, I was managing to write five thousand words per hour. Is that a sufficient rate of productivity to attract the attention of a publisher?’

  ‘More than sufficient, Marco, assuming, of course, that what you have written is not total garbage.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  In which the reader is astonished by two revelations.

  We parked the ’74 Gran Torino outside the Aaronovitch house. Como switched off the sirens and I slid over the hood to get to the sidewalk in a more dramatic way—instantly regretting it, as I bruised myself horribly.

  Como rang the bell while I rubbed my coccyx. A refined elderly gentleman opened the door, walking with a stick. Como flashed his badge. “Detective Como Galahad of Clarkesville County Police. This dumbass is Marco Ocram off TV. We’d like to ask a few questions. Can we come in?”

  “Of course.”

  Aaronovitch led us along a musty hall crammed with the most spectacular and exotic taxidermy I had ever seen. Peacocks, a snow leopard, the rare Carisco monkey, two giant turtles, male and female, a huge anaconda entwined around the newel post of the stairs, an eight-foot polar bear towering over us with paws outstretched ready to strike, a tiny humming bird, its delicate tongue questing for pollen, three iguanas, a chameleon cunningly colored to match the flock wallpaper behind it, a brace of partridge that…

  Como nudged me heavily in the ribs to bring my attention back to the case. We walked into an old-fashioned parlor where a little old lady rocked back and forth in a chair. Como removed his hat gallahadly, sorry, gallantly.

  “Evening, Ma’am. We are sorry to intrude.”

  Old Aaronovitch laughed.

  “She won’t mind, Detective. It’s a long time since anyone disturbed my wife.”

  Como and I looked at the old lady, then at each other. She was stuffed. In an instant Como had his Colt Sauer PPK service pistol in his hand. He pinned Aaronovitch to the wall by his throat, kicked his feet apart and frisked him expertly. Finding no weapons, he released the old man, who sat in an armchair in a paroxysm of coughing. I went to get a glass of water—and one for the old man too. When he recovered, we began an impromptu interrogation.

  “How do you explain this?” Como pointed with his gun at the figure still rocking in the chair.

  “I can explain everything,” said the elderly taxidermist.

  “Make it snappy,” said Como, with a touch of impatience that did no credit to the police force he represented, although it did allow me another two lines of padding.

  On the far wall of the room was a large mirror through which I caught the surreal tableau: the stuffed old lady, serene in her rocking chair, the huge figure of Como staring at the frail taxidermist, and I scratching my left buttock as I waited for my mental pot to fill with word-paint I could splat onto the page.

  Eventually Aaronovitch spoke…

  “As you can see, I am a master taxidermist, one of the best. My work is sought by the rich and famous the world over. My beautiful wife and I retired to Clarkesville to enjoy the last of our days together. But within a month of settling here she was killed in a tragic road accident, her beautiful body totally disfigured. I could not bear the sight of it, nor the thought of being without her, so I asked if I could stuff her,
as I knew I had the skills to make her beautiful once more. It was a request that had never been made before, and the local authorities were very conservative in their outlook, so I had to fight a long legal battle, going all the way to the Supreme Court to get permission to stuff my wife, whose mangled body was in cold storage. But I won out, and the body was released to me. Never in all the thousands of commissions I undertook for the rich and famous did I exercise as much skill and care, and now you can see for yourself that my wife looks alive and radiant in her favorite rocking chair, to which I added a small electric motor with an offset spigot and crank to rock it just as she loved to do herself.

  “Eventually, however, my money ran out. I had an idea born of desperation. Why should I be the only person to be consoled by the stuffing of a loved one? Why not offer the service to others? Surely there would be huge demand. I secured a loan and advertised my new taxidermy service for the recently bereaved. But, alas, I underestimated the conservatism of small-town Americans. No one took up my offer.”

  “No one?” Como asked doubtfully.

  “No one.”

  “So how can you account for this?” Como took out an iPad and confronted the master taxidermist with a video of the two stuffed neighbors of the Kelloggs.

  Aaronovitch was as engrossed as he was astonished. “Such incredible work. Such mastery. I have never seen the like outside my own studio.” He replayed parts of the video again and again, marveling at the exquisite examples of the taxidermist’s art.

  “Only one hand could have performed such delicate work,” he went on.

  “Whose?” asked Como and I in unison.

  “I didn’t know his name at the time, his real name that is. He told me to call him Mister Vmith. He came to me one day having seen my advertisement for stuffed bodies and asked if I could teach him the art. Money would be no obvtacle, he told me. He was a huge strong brute, horribly disfigured, and unable to pronounce his esses, all of which came out as vees, but he was the perfect pupil. Not only did he readily assimilate my skills; in some ways he surpassed them. Many of the stupendous pieces you were admiring in my hall were stuffed by his hand. It was only later I found the true identity of the disfigured brute. He was…”

  In the mirror, Como and I stood with our respective mouths agape in matching Os of suspense.

  “…Bluther Cale, the manservant of the billionaire industrialist Elijah Bow.”

  There was a pause of some minutes while we waited for our astonished mouth-gapes to relax to the point at which we could speak, after which Como said:

  “I’m sorry to reawaken your grief-laden memories, Mister Aaronovitch, but did they find the driver responsible for your wife’s fatal accident?”

  “Did they? Oh yes, they found that son of a bitch alright, but he had something over the police chief and they never touched him. Too little evidence they said, when half my wife’s face was squashed into his radiator grille.”

  “Who was he?”

  “That bastard pedophile writer, Herbert Quarry.”

  LESSON TWENTY-THREE

  ‘Tell me, Herbert, how did you become a bestselling novelist?’

  ‘It was a long time ago, Marco. I knew it was my destiny to write, as writing is a disease, an inherited disease, in one’s genes as surely as cancer, or red hair, or any other inherent characteristic. For me writing was everything. It was food, it was drink, it was sun and rain, it was wakefulness and sleep, it was sex and abstinence, it was like boxing. It was everything. Do you understand, Marco? Everything.’

  ‘I understand, Herbert.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  In which police brutality prompts the spilling of beans, Marco has second thoughts about Herbert’s innocence, and Como starts a trend for subsequent books.

  Como and I looked at each other in amazement, as we seemed to be doing in virtually every chapter recently.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, “are you saying Herbert Quarry killed your wife but had something over Chief McGee that allowed him to evade charges?”

  “That is exactly what I’m saying, and if you had any gumption you would already have left to confront Quarry and check the truth of my words.”

  Stung by the old man’s bitter admonishment, Como and I stormed out of the house and leaped into the Gran Turismo. Or was it a Gran Torino? It’s all very well Herbert saying that chapters are like paintings in a gallery, but in a gallery you don’t expect consistency between one painting and the next. In a book it’s different. I can just imagine the readers going nuts if I get the name of the car wrong—and how are you meant to break the mold of literature when you’re forever worrying about trivia? Nodding an exasperated head at the tedium of it all, I returned to the plot.

  “Where to now?” I asked.

  “You know where, Writer.” Como rammed the selector into ‘Drive’ and we left rubber halfway down the street as we raced off to the county jail.

  Slam! Como drove Herbert’s head into the wall of the visiting room while I looked-on with concern for my mentor.

  “I’ll give you one last chance to level with us Quarry, and then it’s no more mister nice guy.”

  Herbert felt his way into a chair, blinded by the blood from a cut on his forehead. “Ok, ok, I’ll tell you all I know.”

  I set up the reel-to-reel recorder I carry with me everywhere, nodding to Herbert to begin his story as I adjusted the gain.

  “It was some years ago. My last novel wasn’t selling, and the publisher was breathing down my neck for the next. Millions were riding on it, as an advance was about to be negotiated, and there was a bidding war for the film rights. I couldn’t cope with the pressure, so I got drunk, blind drunk, in a bar in town. A young woman walked in, an ex. I tried to talk with her, but she blanked me and stormed off. I suppose she was disgusted by my drunken appearance and lack of self-esteem. It was as if a mirror had been held to my face. I realized I was a pathetic loser. I had everything to live for—a lifestyle most people could only fantasize about—yet I was letting a little pressure get to me, pressure that was nothing compared with the day-to-day agonies of existence endured by nobodies everywhere. In a mood of utter self-disgust, I staggered to my car to drive home, determined never to touch a drink again. But as I was getting close to my house on the beach overlooking the ocean, an old lady lurched from nowhere into the path of my car. I can never forget the look on her face, a face blinded by my headlights before a sickening thump as I mowed her down. I skidded off the road and hit a tree. McGee was first on the scene. He found me slumped over the wheel, but I was sufficiently awake to recognize him. When his eyes met mine, he knew I knew his guilty secret, and he put me in the back of his car. Squad cars and an ambulance arrived. He left another officer in command, drove me to police HQ and locked me in a cell. The next morning, after I had sobered up, he made me give a urine sample, which showed little sign of alcohol in my body. Later he said the sample had been provided immediately after the accident, so I could not be prosecuted for drunk driving. The fact that the old lady was in the middle of an unlit road on a bend made it look like an understandable accident, and no attempt was made to prosecute me. But the old lady’s husband received a tip-off, and ever since then he has vowed to bring me down, even if it takes him until his last breath.”

  “What was McGee’s guilty secret?” asked either Como or I—it doesn’t matter which, so take your pick.

  “Two days earlier, I had been walking in the woods near my house on the beach overlooking the ocean. It was a beautiful morning, warm and sunny. Shafts of golden light filtered down between the pristine foliage. Damsel flies hovered in the pure air. The world had a newly created quality, Eden-like, the scent of the air enchanting the mind with its infinite promise of…”

  “Get on with it, Quarry.” That was definitely Como.

  “And don’t use a hyphen in overlooking.” That was me.

  “Sorry, sorry. I saw a police car had been driven between the trees
, about a hundred yards off the road. Thinking there might have been an accident, I went to see if I could help. I saw a couple lying on a blanket. One was a girl of perhaps fifteen or sixteen—the other was a man in police uniform. He jumped up sharply at the sound of my approach. It was Chief McGee.”

  Wow. I rewound the tape while Como paced around the room like a caged tiger wondering what to do next.

  Como punched the wall. “We’ve been idiots. We’ve missed some obvious clues.” Herbert and I waited for him to go on. “McGee says he caught you red handed through a tip-off. Somebody called the emergency line. How would that somebody know, unless they were looking through the window of your house? And who looks through a window to see someone cutting up a body, and then calls the emergency line without giving their name?”

  It was a good question—two good questions, actually—and I was surprised I hadn’t raised it, or them, earlier.

  “Someone’s got some answering to do. Come on, Writer.” He gestured for me to follow, leaving Herbert to be led back to his cell by a guard.

  As we cruised back to police HQ in the Gran Torino, Como seemed in a more philosophical frame of mind. “So, Writer, explain this. Here we are, thirty thousand words in, and yet a fundamental plot device has only just been deployed. How could that be?”

  For a moment I had no answer. I had to think. Then I realized it was the result of Herbert’s advice. Write the first thing that comes into your head. Don’t overthink it. Don’t plan out a plot. Spontaneity is the writer’s friend. Plans are poison. Again and again in different words Herbert had convinced me it was wrong to think ahead. And here we were looking foolish amateurs through a lack of planning. A thought lurking in my subconscious mushroomed into my mind like a…like a giant mushroom. What if Herbert too had been trying to mislead me? What if all this talk of writing like Jackson Pollock was designed to distract me from thinking through to the obvious truth, that my mentor Herbert really was guilty after all? I wasn’t ready to share my doubts with Como, so I parried his question with a suitable sporting analogy…