Heir Apparent

by James, Terry

  “I told you to stay out of it.”

  “What do you expect? I’m trying to find out how this guy ripped off my cases. That’s something you and Stiles might be interested in, isn’t it?”

  “That’s not what she said. She said you were snooping around while she was out of the room, asking all about her family, about the house, like you were casing the joint or something. That same night she thought she heard a prowler. She got up and made some racket, hoping to scare him off. The next morning she went into the study and noticed that some of her husband’s books were missing. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

  “First I murder the guy, then I go back and steal his books? This is getting better by the minute”

  We turned east onto 4th.

  “If you really think he was murdered,” I said, “maybe you should lay off me and read the rest of his books. There’s enough dirt on every big cheese in the city to have them all fried.”

  “I’m not warning you again, King,” Hicks warned me. “The next time I hear you’re anywhere near that woman I’ll haul your ass in for sexual harassment.”

  I yelped with laughter. “Now it’s sexual harassment! Hell, you might as well throw treason in there while you’re at it.”

  I looked out the window. We were stopped. We were back in front of Sam’s Joint.

  “We’re not done with you, King,” Stiles said, eyeing me in the mirror. “Not by a long stretch.”

  Hicks got out and opened the back door. I stepped out. He put his hand on my shoulder paternally and looked me in the eye.

  “There’s blood in the streets,” he said. “It’s up to your knees.”

  There was a new odor coming off of him, one I hadn’t detected before. The sour stink of fear. He got back in the car, and they drove off. I stood there on the sidewalk for a while, gazing at the receding tail-lights of the squad car. It turned right on 3rd and disappeared.

  Sam was counting the night’s take when I stepped through the door.

  “I was about to lock you out,” he said.

  “I’d never leave without my hat.”

  His eyes zeroed in on my limp, the predatory gaze of the old boxer casing his opponent’s body for the slightest sign of weakness.

  “Foot bothering you again?”

  “That bastard was heavier than he looked.”

  “Why don’t you see my bone guy?”

  “I’ve got someone.”

  I sat down on the stool in front of him and took Drop Dead Date out of my back pocket and pretended to take up where I had left off. Sam glanced at the cover without breaking his rhythm.

  “You ever read this guy?” I asked casually, knowing full well that Sam didn’t read anything thicker than the morning Metro.

  He shook his head. I waited for him to finish counting. I turned to the page I had marked, read a little to myself, and chuckled.

  “Here, listen to this,” I said and started reading aloud. “‘Her name was Rita. Only it wasn’t a her. Under that dress she was a strapping dark Filipino by the name of Rudolph Pacpaco. But Eddie King didn’t know that. He thought he was taking home the Queen of Siam. Some nights in this lonely city a man doesn’t care if the thing beside him in bed is a woman or not, so long as it’s warm and doesn’t break the bank.’”

  I glanced up and studied Sam’s face. If he was feeling any contrition, he certainly wasn’t showing it.

  “Sound familiar?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Ring any bells?”

  “Does what ring any bells?”

  “The broad, Rita.”

  “I thought it was a story.”

  “It is.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Rita, the broad I told you about.”

  He squinted a little.

  “Not that one who … ?”

  “The same.”

  He smiled. “I’ll be damned. Someone put him in a book?”

  I held the cover up for him. He squinted at it, perplexed, for a few seconds.

  “You wrote this?” he asked.

  “No, Sam, I didn’t write it.”

  “That’s your name there, ain’t it?”

  “The other guy’s the writer.”

  He studied the cover again.

  “You know him?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Sam nodded.

  “Can’t say as I knew him. You want me to ask around?”

  “You’re not following me, Sam. Don’t you remember when I told you about this broad?”

  “Sure I remember. I’d never seen you so busted up over a broad. What, you think she bumped him off?”

  “Sam, listen to me. You’re the only one I told. Get it?”

  He looked confused.

  “Spit it out, man,” he said. “Stop pulling your punches.”

  “Who did you talk to?”

  “Your private life is your business, Eddie. Believe me, I’ve heard plenty crazier stories than that. What would I tell anyone about it for?”

  “I don’t know. For a laugh.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “You just did,” I said. “That story about the drunk.”

  “You know that ain’t the same.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t even know the guy.”

  We stared at each other for a while.

  “You swear you didn’t tell anyone?” I said. “Not even your wife?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  I could see he was hurt, his dignity wounded, the old fighting spirit coming out as he thwacked the bar with his towel.

  “You’re the only one I told,” I said again.

  “So what? There’s plenty other ways people find out stuff. Maybe someone saw you with her. Maybe the guy blabbed about it. Scoring with a private dick.”

  I smiled.

  “Look, Sam. How long have I been coming here?

  He shook his head.

  “A good fifteen years, I’d say,” I said. “I’ve always considered you a friend, someone I could trust.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “I’ve talked about a lot of my cases with you, haven’t I?”

  “Some damn peculiar ones at that.”

  “Remember that little problem you had with your liquor license?”

  His brow tightened. “That’s a low blow, Eddie.”

  “I’d like to think that if you had something to tell me you would.”

  “I don’t have a goddamn clue what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Sam. You talked to that writer.”

  He straightened up, his old ribs and shoulders tightening with indignation.

  “No one calls me a liar.”

  “I’ve told you everything, Sam. Everything. You could have written those books yourself from all the stories I’ve told you.”

  “You’re on Queer Street, Eddie. Start from the beginning and tell me what’s eating you. I don’t like seeing you this way.”

  “I want to know who the hell betrayed me.”

  “What happened?”

  “Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve said? This half-ass writer got to someone close to me. He stole my cases and passed them off as novels. He made a living off of me. Now the cops think I bumped him off.”

  Sam picked up the book and looked at it a little more carefully. He read the back cover. He opened it and read a few paragraphs. He set the book back down, frowning.

  “Wasn’t me, Eddie. You know me better than that.”

  I picked up the book and skimmed through it until I found the scene at Sam’s Joint. There wasn’t nearly as much description as I remembered there being. I showed it to Sam. He read it and grinned.

  “Imagine that,” he said. “My joint in a novel.” He read a little more. “What’s he say about me?”

  “Nothing, in this book. It’s one of the other books where he introduces you.”

  “What’s he say?”

/>   “It’s all hardboiled nonsense.”

  “Bring it in next time.”

  “Yeah, I’ll do that.”

  I put on my hat and stood up.

  “Forget about it,” he said, as I made my way to the door. “The guy’s dead. Throw in the towel.”

  I waved goodnight with the back of my hand and stepped out.

  12

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON I drove back out to Sunset Acres to have another chat with the Morris widow.

  “I figured you’d be back,” she said, as one does to a dogged bill collector. Without further comment she stepped aside. Her dress, if no longer black, was as Quakerish as before. A knitted cream afghan hung loosely from her shoulders.

  The living room, like the widow herself, had a less funereal aspect than it had on my first visit. For one thing, the curtains were open, the strong afternoon sunshine dispelling much of the Victorian gloom. It was still oddly chilly, but the outlandish fire was no longer blazing in the hearth.

  “Did you find the rest of the novels?” she asked, leading me back to that crazy couch.

  “Yes,” I set my hat beside me, avoiding her eyes for a spell.

  She adjusted her dress and shawl as she took her seat and turned her attentive chin my way.

  “So?” she said. “Mr. King, isn’t it?”

  I ignored the sarcasm.

  “You have nothing to fear from me, Mrs. Morris,” I said. “I’m a nice guy, really. But I have to ask you again, do you have any idea where your husband got the material for his books? The plots. The stories. The names of the characters.”

  “I don’t know why you persist in asking me that question.”

  “Because every one of them is based on one of my cases.”

  She indulged me with half a smile.

  “You want proof?” I said, exasperation stealing into my voice. “I can bring my files here and we can go through every one of them side by side with the novels.”

  Her smile broadened ever so slightly. There was something intriguing about her face which I hadn’t noticed, at least consciously, the first time. I sensed a sly intelligence about it, as if she were practiced at withholding herself from the moment in order to form a clearer picture of it at her leisure. Whether this was something in her eyes, her mouth, or perhaps not issuing from her face at all but rather from the totality of her body language, I couldn’t say. Coupled with this, definitely emanating from her slate-blue eyes, was what struck me as a great capacity for tenderness. These conflicting impressions, along with the knowledge that she had called the police on me, left me off-balance, not sure whether I was being coldly appraised, empathized with, or both simultaneously.

  “What exactly do you want from me?” she asked.

  “Did Mr. Morris keep the rough drafts of his novels? Any notebooks? Research notes? Interviews? Anything at all related to his process?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t suppose you would allow me to have a look at them.”

  She gave it some thought before saying no.

  “Look,” I said. “I have no intention of taking legal action, if that’s what you’re worried about. I just want to know who it was, who his inside person was. I’m sure you can appreciate that. Someone was still helping him as late as last year, or the year before, whenever he was writing King’s Gambit. For all I know this person might go and find some other writer to sell or give my confidential records to. I can’t have that going on. My clients trust me, pay me, to be discreet. If they wanted their private affairs made public they would have gone to the police. Some of these people I’ve had to associate with, sometimes my own clients, are not nice people. If it turns out that any of them has already found out that all his dirty laundry has been aired in a novel, well, I don’t know any other way of putting it—some of these men are killers. Frankly I’m surprised it hasn’t …” I stopped myself short.

  She turned from me and gazed abstractly into the empty hearth, gently rubbing the knuckles of her left hand with the fingers of her right, as if lost in some old memory. I leaned forward, bracing my elbows on my knees. I studied the floor. She turned her face to me. I sat back.

  “He was so happy,” she said quietly, as if to herself. “He was finally working on the book he had been dreaming about all his life.” She smiled a little. “His masterpiece. That’s how we always referred to it. It was all in his head, he said. A beautiful novel. Something he could be proud of, that he could put his own name to. He could quit hiding behind Baxter Conway.”

  She went quiet again, and my attention was drawn to the sound of a clock ticking somewhere in the room, some heavy old grandfather judging by the deep timbre of the tocks. Strangely, when I was only half listening to it it seemed to be slowing down, and yet when I focused on the silence between the ticks and the tocks it was the usual interval.

  “What do you mean, ‘hiding’?” I asked her.

  “It’s not easy to bare your soul to the public, Mr. King. But that’s exactly what great art has to do. Walter wanted his own name on a book he could be proud of.”

  “How far along was he on it?”

  “It’s not that simple. You have to understand that he had to work out everything in his head before committing anything to paper. That was the way he worked, even on the King novels.”

  “I thought you said he was finally working on this masterpiece.”

  “Yes,” she said. “In his head.”

  “So how was this different? If it was still just in his head?”

  “It was different.”

  “How?”

  “It just was,” she said. “Walter was a very sensitive man. You wouldn’t get that impression from the Eddie King novels, but he was. He could go into raptures over a piece of music, or the beauty of a sunset, or even the smell of a broiling steak. He was an artist at heart. A romantic. Words always fell short of what he was actually feeling.”

  Again she turned her eyes towards the empty hearth, and I saw such sadness in them that I couldn’t help feeling cruel for coming here a second time when she clearly had more important things on her mind than plagiarism. I placed my hand on my hat, resolved to put this business out of my mind until I had given the woman some time to grieve. I was about to say as much when, still staring into the hearth and speaking with a touch of irony in her voice, she preempted me.

  “It was never Walter’s ambition to be a detective writer.” Then, turning to me with an apparent need to unburden herself: “It started as an innocent challenge. We were on vacation in Mexico, in the hotel room one night. I had picked up a cheap mystery to read. He read a few pages of it and scoffed at how poorly written it was, saying he could write ten times better than that. I said it wasn’t as easy as he thought, making up those plots. He accepted the challenge and wrote the novel in about six months. That was Guttersnipe. He submitted it to some publishers under Baxter Conway, not wanting his own name associated with such lowbrow entertainment, and one of them, to his astonishment, accepted it. Sales were good enough to get him thinking he could quit his job and take up writing full time. He was so unhappy at the office. Writing gave him a feeling of liberation, of starting over. He wrote the next two novels very quickly. They also did well, establishing the series as a viable enterprise. He was finally able to quit his job. He knew then that it was all or nothing. He had to make it work.”

  I removed my hand from my hat.

  “Things were going well until All but the Chorus, the fifth book,” she said. “That was when he began to fear he might never break free from Eddie King.”

  Every time she said my name in reference to that character, I felt strangely hollow, as if the air had been sucked out of my lungs, stripped of one of the oxygen molecules and pumped back in.

  “We had become dependent on the income from the books,” she went on. “He wrote a literary novel, but he couldn’t get it published. So he returned to Eddie King. He was so miserable working out those plots. He couldn’t stand that part. To him it was al
l so contrived, so unrealistic. Once he had solved the puzzle, he was fine, but until then he was impossible. A real ogre. Every year it got a little worse, the dread of starting another Eddie King novel. Every time he finished a book he sank into a deep depression. It could last for weeks, sometimes months. The dream of the masterpiece only grew stronger with each passing year.”

  “What makes you think he was really working on this masterpiece this time?” I asked.

  “Because he told me,” she said. “About three weeks ago he came to me one morning and said, ‘I’ve got it. I’ve got the novel.’ You should have seen his eyes, Eddie.”

  That caught me off guard, the sweet, almost yearning tone of familiarity in her voice, the acknowledgment at last of my own reality.

  She went on, oblivious to my reaction. “It was as though he had glimpsed El Dorado. He always got excited when he had finally worked out the puzzle of one of the King novels, but this was different. He looked like a man who had come home after a long exile. At last he was free of Eddie King. I begged him to tell me what it was about, but he said he wasn’t ready. He needed to keep it to himself until he had it all worked out and was well underway. He was always superstitious about talking about a novel before he had it under control. Maybe superstitious isn’t the right word. He didn’t want any input, however well-meaning. It had to be his own baby.”

  “So that’s why you told the police you thought he’d been murdered?” I said. “When they asked you about the note?”

  “What?” She turned and gave me the strangest look, as if she couldn’t fathom who I was or how I had come to be there on her sofa.

  “When the police asked you about the typewritten note,” I repeated. “What did you tell them?”

  Her senses gradually returned.

  “I told them I didn’t know what it meant,” she said. “I still don’t.”

  “But you knew Eddie King was the name of his detective and you didn’t tell the police.”

  “It never crossed my mind that they wouldn’t know,” she said. “The pride of an author’s wife, I suppose.”

  A long silence followed, neither of us looking at each other but certainly mindful of the space between us. When I sensed her growing impatient with our interview, I asked her if she still believed her husband had been murdered.