Heir Apparent

by James, Terry

  “Whatever it is, I’m not interested. Find yourself some other aphrodisiac.”

  I walked off.

  “Mr. King,” he persisted, taking a few steps along with me. “This is an offer you can’t refuse.”

  “Watch me.”

  I crossed the street and got in my car. As I pulled out I glanced in the sideview mirror. He was still standing there, a pathetic little figure in my mirror.

  Back in the office I dialed my old friend Rob Justice. He and I went way back to my First National Bank days, where we were both security guards. He had since moved on to plusher carpeting. He was now working for the Kelsey Group, the biggest detective outfit in town. Halfway through the number my finger paused, stilled by a sudden suspicion. I replaced the receiver. Rob? No, it couldn’t be. He did know a lot about my cases, as he was one of my few reliable sources of good information, freely sharing the Kelsey files with me in exchange for a bottle of gin or a couple of tickets to the ballpark now and then. Of course he knew where I lived, what kind of car I drove, where my office was. We had spent more than a few nights getting swacked in my apartment. He himself was in the novels, his red beard and hulking physique likened to a “Dakota bear.” But that didn’t necessarily absolve him from suspicion.

  No, I thought. No way in hell.

  I picked up the receiver again and dialed his number. His secretary answered on the third ring.

  “Hey, Eddie,” she said in her Midwestern twang. “What’s cooking?”

  Even Leslie, a woman I had never met and knew virtually nothing about despite having talked to her an untold number of times over the years, was no longer immune from suspicion.

  “Could I have a quick word with Rob, if he’s not too busy?”

  “Sure thang.” She patched me through.

  “Hey, bud,” he said half a minute later. “Long time no hear.”

  “I’ve had a weird week.”

  “Your whole life is a weird week.”

  “This one could be the weirdest yet.”

  I would be lying if I said that part of me wasn’t listening very carefully to his response as I told him all about Walter Morris and the Eddie King detective novels. But that maniacal laugh of his, which erupted before I had even finished the story, effectively cleared him of all suspicion.

  “You’re shittin me,” he roared.

  “I wish I were.”

  “How have we never heard of these things?”

  “Do you read detective novels?”

  “No, but I know enough people who do,” he said. “Are these best-sellers or what?”

  “No. Not that I know of. They’re published by some outfit in Minnesota.”

  “Twelve years, man. It’s unbelievable. I’ve got to read one. Who are your suspects?”

  “I was thinking the cleaning lady. She’s got a set of keys to the office. But it’s a lot more than just the files.”

  “It’s not like you have a ton of friends.”

  “Thanks. I can always count on your honesty. I actually called about something else. I was wondering if you had anything on a guy named Gordon Fletcher. His card says he’s the founder, president, and CEO of Fletcher Enterprises. Big money. A mansion in Palladian Hills. He’s got a child bride named Heidi who looks like something out of the Ziegfeld Follies. He fed me a line about her two-timing him, had me tail her to every damn thrift store in the city. Today I follow her to a fleabag hotel in the Silage, only to discover that her mid-day rendezvous is Fletcher himself. He claims he was testing me for some other job.”

  “It’s you, man,” Rob laughed. “You’re a freak magnet.”

  I gave him the address in Palladian Hills. He told me he would see what he could dig up.

  I sat for some time in silent contemplation, then I opened the desk drawer and pulled out the bottle and the glass and poured myself a drink. Mid-sip, the telephone rang. It rang again. I let it ring six more times before I answered it. I had a sneaking suspicion it was Mr. Fletcher.

  “Hey, Ed,” Rob said. “I got some info on your guy Fletcher.”

  “Already?”

  “That’s what they pay me the big bucks for. Fletcher Enterprises is a conglomerate, everything from agribusiness to global investment services. He’s the CEO and majority stock holder. He’s fifty-six years old, born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Got his start selling orthopedic shoes door to door. He’s on the boards of various other corporations. He owns a good chunk of the city, his most prominent property being the Cooper Building. The list of civic bodies and clubs he’s a member of is too long for me to bother reading out to you, but one of the more interesting ones is the House of Proteus. Around the time Nicanor Stigmatias was juicing the railroad barons for the deeds to Shepherd Hill he, Stigmatias, established a local chapter of an old boys’ club called the House of Proteus, one of these secret societies like the Masons. It dates back to nineteenth century Germany, where it was a trade guild for North Sea shipbuilders, but the members claim it goes all the way back to ancient Greece. You don’t join it. You’re chosen. Once you’re in, there’s no way out other than death. All the members are assigned a Greek name that they only use when they’re together. They’re big on the gods. They believe that the ancient Greek gods are alive and well and still working their mischief on us. No one knows where their lodge is, or if they even have one. They’re rumored to have a wild bacchanalian orgy once a year, out in the woods somewhere, but of course no one outside the circle has ever seen it.”

  “How the hell do you know all this?”

  “Wikipedia.”

  I took a drink. It went down hard. We spoke for a few more minutes about the uncertain future of our profession, then I thanked him and hung up.

  That evening, back at home, I finished King’s Ransom and started Drop Dead Date. Halfway through it Eddie King picks up a hooker and takes her back to his place. The scene is no more than a punctuation mark at the end of the chapter, a bit of mood music before the plot takes over again on the next page. All of a sudden my head jerked up as if from a dream. My blood turned to acid as the face of my betrayer resolved in the air between me and the opposite wall.

  11

  SAM’S JOINT WAS tucked away down the dead end of Curtis Street, the one-block alley between the back of the warehouses south of the canal and the fenced-in no man’s land around the freeway on- and off-ramps. It was an easy six block walk from my apartment. This proved handy on nights when I needed a good soaking.

  I got there around one thirty, half an hour before closing time. I always felt when I walked through the door of Sam’s Joint that I was right where I belonged. It was a dim and dirty little place, frequented by dim and dirty little people. Dozens of framed photographs of Sam in his glory days (arms raised in sweaty victory, smiling and shaking hands with the legends, gloves up, head tucked, eyes brimming with confidence) decorated the peeling plaster and wood-paneled walls.

  It was a quiet night, five or six men at the tables, three at the bar, each man softly luminous in the darkness, as if lit by some internal source. Nothing was playing on the jukebox. The lamp above the pool table shone coldly on the barren baize.

  “Mr. King!” Sam affectionately hailed me, as he always did, as I made my way to the bar.

  Sam had been in his late sixties, so it seemed, for the past two decades or so. Halfway to his mouth his nose veered left and dead-ended in a fat pink bulb capped by the rind of a thousand glancing blows. His eyebrows were a crinkled parchment of scars. He talked from the back left corner of his mouth, with a voice that sounded like a street brawl between a bullfrog and a meat grinder. The world for Sam was a million-round match between the big man and the little guy, and though he knew the fight was fixed, he never stopped believing that if only the little guy could muster up the guts he could knock the big man out of the ring. He got his news from the trashiest papers and believed every word of it. Every cop was on the make, every politician a stooge, every foreigner a leech on the system. In short he was a proud, honest,
beaten old man. He was the last person I would have thought capable of selling me out. But who knows what a man will do when he’s against the ropes?

  I stepped up to the bar and parked myself on a stool. I set my hat on the bar.

  “Still fighting the good fight?” Sam asked, as he always did, and set to pouring me a generous glass of Old Grand-Dad.

  “I wish,” I replied and took a big swallow.

  Two of the men at the bar I knew. The third I had never seen before. He was passed out, his face dissolving into the woodgrain.

  “Hey, Sophocles.”

  That was Jack, the typesetter at the Evening Herald. He was two stools down, a sheet or two to the wind. He raised his empty glass to me.

  “Socrates, Jack,” I said. “Socrates.”

  Next to him was Fred, who only seemed to work when the census rolled around. Jack and Fred tried to snare me into their diatribe against the government. I drank my drink and grunted and nodded as necessary. My thoughts were elsewhere. Even as they spidered through my mind it seemed as though they were not my own but the tailings of so-called wisdom mined from time immemorial. Could it be, I wondered, that my mind was as riddled with clichés as Walter Morris’s novels?

  “Boys,” Sam said, pointing to the passed-out drunk at the end of the bar. “That there is the greenest green there is.”

  We all looked at the drunk. Sam launched into the story of this man, John, who had just lost his wife to his best friend. John’s sad fate—it could be distilled from Sam’s account of the story that John had told him six whiskey sours ago—was to lose all that mattered to him to his best friend. In short he had spent his entire life envying the man, at first in secret, later openly. Somehow this had never endangered the friendship, had in fact strengthened it, for both men believed that God—they were religious if not spiritual men—had assigned them their respective roles for a reason. John accepted his envy the way a man born blind accepts his dark but noisy world, less as an encumbrance than an invitation to exploit his other faculties. In John’s case he poured all that was good in himself into being a good husband. He was a wife’s dream: sensitive, caring, liberal with money. In regards to marriage, and marriage alone, he was envious of no man. Naturally, this was the one thing his bachelor buddy envied in him. It was only a matter of time before this unnatural balance between the two friends was upset, and all of the envy restored to the man to whom it properly belonged. It seemed John’s wife found him painfully boring and could not resist the effortless charisma of her husband’s best friend, whom she had spent many a night and day condemning as arrogant and childish. The story ended at the only place it could, with John discovering his wife and his best friend in his own bed earlier that afternoon.

  What troubled me about this story, more than the poor bastard’s misery, was the fact that Sam was telling it at all. It wasn’t like him to gossip about his customers, especially when they were right there in front of him, however unconscious. It was out of character.

  After Sam’s story, Jack and Fred said they had to hit the road, leaving only Sam and I and the drunk in the bar.

  “Kick that bum out for me, will ya,” Sam said a few minutes later. “He’s down for the count.”

  I got up from the stool and went over and shook the guy. He almost got an eye open. I caught him by the underarms and yanked him to his feet. He wasn’t too interested in helping me out. I draped him over my right shoulder. As I neared the door the chronic plantar fasciitis in my right foot flared up, a stabbing pain right up the middle of my sole. I winced through it and carried on out the door and slumped him unceremoniously against the wall. “Sonofabitch,” I muttered to the pain, lifting my foot and swiveling it around in the brisk night air. I could see my podiatrist shaking his head. He kept insisting that I take some time off. Easy for him to say.

  Probably in anticipation of his present state, the man had put his wallet in his front right trouser pocket. I pulled it out. It had a picture of a kid in it. I took a look at his license, removed two of the three one-dollar bills, returned the wallet to his pocket and hoisted him back over my shoulder. I limped with him down to the corner and stood there busting my back for ten minutes before a cab came along. I slid the drunk into the back seat and gave the address to the driver. He made a stink about it. I gave him another two bucks on top of the drunk’s and told him to dump him in the yard.

  High above the warehouses the concrete underbelly of the freeway curved out into open space. Not a single star was visible in the sky above it. At this hour the freeway traffic was light downtown, the occasional sound of a car or rig passing overhead as quiet as midnight surf. But for the occasional taxi or squad car, the surface streets were dead, not a soul but me out there on the sidewalk’s cheerlessly sparkling mica. The silence down here at night was altogether different from the blunt silence of suburbia. This silence was as sharp as Occam’s razor. Suddenly a strange weightless sensation came over, as if the soles of my shoes weren’t quite touching the ground. I looked down. My feet were firmly on the ground. I wondered if I wasn’t coming down with something. I hadn’t been quite right since the binge.

  Just as I was about to turn and go back into the bar to have it out with Sam, a city squad car pulled up beside me. The passenger’s window rolled down. It was Hicks.

  “Well well, if it isn’t Mr. King,” he said. He was chewing bubblegum. Stiles seemed to be rubbing off on him. Even from ten feet away I could smell the artificial sweetener mingled with his cop breath (coffee, bile) as he smiled and moved his wad of gum around from one cheek to the other.

  “What now?” I said.

  He glanced across to Stiles then back at me. “We need to have us a little talk.”

  “What about?”

  “Get in.”

  “What’s the charge?”

  “No charge. Yet.”

  “Then if you don’t mind,” I said, “I’ll be on my way.”

  “Get in. We’re going for a ride.”

  I looked around, figured I was in no shape to run, with nowhere to run to, so I opened the door and got in. Stiles eyed me in the rearview mirror as he slowly pulled out onto the street.

  “Why’d you do it, King?” Hicks said without turning around, the muscles of his jaw expanding and contracting as he chewed his gum. Stiles was chewing his own wad. Between both of them, the car reeked. Not only of all those cop smells, but of the even viler smell of murderers and rapists.

  “This is getting old,” I said.

  Hicks shook his head. He was disappointed in me. He turned on the overhead light. A moment later he held up a paperback copy of Guttersnipe.

  “I didn’t think you guys could read,” I said.

  Hicks put on a pair of black plastic drugstore reading glasses. The touch of erudition they lent him only exaggerated his sadism. He opened the novel and flipped aggressively through it until he came to the scene he was looking for. The pages were marked up with a yellow highlighter. He cleared his throat and, still facing forward, began reading aloud:

  “‘Hicks was on the take, padding his nest with whatever he could skim off the top of the sludge pool … It was his old nemesis, Randy Hicks. Appropriate name, Eddie said to himself. Three hicks from the sticks rolled into one …’”

  Hicks turned a few pages. “‘Hicks was a certain kind of mean cop who would sooner run over a limping dog than wait for it to cross the street … He had a reputation for an itchy trigger finger, especially in the Silage …’” He turned more pages. “‘His waist size was higher than his IQ … Hicks was the one man on the squad who could be depended on to breathe down Eddie’s neck. Stiles was his lapdog …’”

  He lowered his glasses to the end of his nose and turned around and stared at me.

  “I told you it wasn’t exactly flattering,” I said.

  “That’s not the best part,” he said. He pushed the glasses back up his nose and returned his attention to the book. He flipped through some more pages until he came to the one he was
seeking. He read:

  “‘It was Spooks Flannagan. And behind him was Detective-Lieutenant Randy Hicks, with a briefcase full of money … Hicks fired three times into the Mex’s back. The Mex fell to the ground and lay there drowning in his own blood. Hicks walked up to him. “That’s the last time you cross that border, greaser,” he growled and fired the killing shot into the back of the Mex’s head.’”

  Hicks lowered the book, removed the glasses, and remained facing forward as he spoke. We had finally made it to the end of the block. Stiles took a lazy right and we continued coasting west down 3rd Street.

  “You, me, and Stiles,” Hicks said. “We were the only ones there that night.”

  “You think I like it any more than you do?” I said. “Those are my cases. I’m on every page.”

  “You’re a sick and twisted individual,” Stiles remarked.

  “What are you worried about?” I said. “It’s a novel. Not exactly admissible evidence. If you really want to cover your ass, get proactive: sue the publisher for libel.”

  “There isn’t any Baxter Conway, is there?” Hicks said.

  “Of course there isn’t, Einstein. That’s the pseudonym. Walter Morris is the writer. Was, at least. I told you all that myself.”

  “Yeah, pretty convenient,” Stiles said. “Save it for the jury, King. You’ll be writing the next one from prison.”

  It took a few seconds for that to sink in. I laughed.

  “What?!” I laughed again. “You think I wrote this garbage?!”

  No reply. I looked back and forth between the backs of both of their heads. “You have to be joking.”

  They weren’t.

  We coasted along in silence for a while, turning right again when we reached the end of the block. We continued coasting north on Jefferson.

  “We got a call a couple days back from the Morris widow,” Hicks said. “Said some nutcase calling himself Eddie King, wearing a black suit and black fedora, paid her a visit, asking all kinds of questions. Spooked her half out of her wits.”

  “That old bird, spooked? She’s living in a haunted house.”