Heir Apparent

by James, Terry

  “They’re novels, Mr. King,” she replied. “Works of fiction. Not investigative journalism. You don’t seem to appreciate the distinction.”

  “I’m fully aware of the difference,” I said. “But there’s the niggling little fact that every one of those books is based on one of my cases. Those women are real people.”

  “A curious coincidence.”

  “He used my name, Mrs. Morris. That’s no coincidence.”

  “Please, call me Imogen.” She took a leisurely sip of tea and sat there with a smile of perfect contentment. She seemed to be enjoying herself. “How many cases do you typically work on in a year?” she asked.

  “That’s irrelevant.”

  “Walter published one book a year.”

  “One book that just happened, every time, to be one of my cases?”

  “There’s no copyright on reality, Mr. King,” she stated amiably. “Or on a name.”

  “It’s more than just a name,” I pointed out. “It’s my office address, my home address, my case files, my car. Everything.”

  She set her cup gently on the saucer and looked at me. We sat in silence for a while, appraising one another. Then I asked again:

  “Why blue-eyed blondes?”

  She took another sip of tea before answering.

  “If you must know, she was Walter’s fantasy. His eyes always riveted on women like that. So I gave it to him. A little gift, you could say. It helped keep the spark in our marriage.”

  As she said this her eyes misted over, and despite my frustrations with her, I couldn’t help feeling guilty for pressing her so hard.

  Apart from the ticking and tocking of the unseen clock, the silence was absolute. It really was peaceful in that house. So cool and quiet and spacious. It was hard to believe that anyone living there could have spent his days dreaming of murder and vice.

  At length she asked again how my weekend had been. It took me a moment to recall anything about it at all. Then, with the image of the gravity-defying cigarette ash, it all came crashing back into my consciousness.

  “I went to see my mom,” I told her. “Big mistake. I don’t know why I always give in to the guilt.”

  “She’s your mother.”

  “That doesn’t mean I have to like her.”

  “Don’t say that,” she said, seeming genuinely hurt that a man could talk about his mother this way. “Someday she won’t be here and you’ll wish she were.”

  “You can’t have a meaningful conversation with her. You can’t have a conversation at all. She doesn’t shut up. It’s just this endless stream of consciousness, most of it negative. She drives me mad.”

  “She loves you very much.”

  I shrugged doubtfully.

  “Do you have any siblings?” she asked.

  “No. Only child. All the pressure’s on me.”

  “You’re the center of her world.”

  “I don’t want to be,” I said. “It’s a miserable one. She’s got emphysema and smokes menthol cigarettes. She doesn’t give a damn. She moved up here to be closer to me, thinking I’d be out there every Sunday for dinner, go to church with her. She never should have sold the old house. She had friends down there. Good memories. A community. She bought this awful thing out in Merino that cost twice as much. She got ripped off. Now she’s all alone up here, miserable, angry at me for not driving out there every week to see her. She calls me expecting me to go out there and do stuff for her: fix her air-conditioner, do yardwork. I can’t just drop everything I’m doing and drive all the way out there to rake leaves. The gas alone is twenty bucks. She can’t accept that I have a life of my own. She’s not interested. Never asks a single question. All the stuff I’ve seen, all my freaky cases, you’d think she’d be fascinated to hear about it. No. She’d rather watch Days of Our Lives.”

  Mrs. Morris was gazing at me with discomfiting empathy. I couldn’t believe I had just said all that, to her, the woman whose husband had blatantly ripped me off.

  “What about your father?” she asked.

  “Dad?” An ironic little chortle bubbled up from my depths, and before I knew it I was off again. “He makes Mom look like Mother Theresa. Completely paranoid. I’m not talking your garden variety paranoia. I mean really and truly neurotic. Aliens trying to abduct him. The government has him under constant surveillance. The moon landing was faked. Every conspiracy theory out there, he believes it. Too many drugs in his youth. He worked on offshore oil rigs. I don’t know what it’s like now but all they did in those days was smoke dope and drop acid. Three weeks he’d be out there, stranded on a platform in the ocean with a bunch of other guys. He’d be home for a week then out there again. It wrecked his brain. He’s been trying to sue the CIA for the last twenty years.”

  She took a sip of her tea, a certain restrained pursing of her lips suggesting that perhaps I wasn’t showing my father sufficient respect.

  “Are you still in touch with him?” she asked, lowering her cup to her lap.

  “I call him every now and then,” I said, “just to see how he’s doing. He’s got all kinds of health problems: diabetes, gout, bad teeth. I haven’t seen him in five years.”

  “That’s awful,” she frowned. “Is he getting help?”

  “He’s on disability,” I said. “He’s covered. He’s got nurses. I can’t deal with him. It’s too painful seeing him like that. When I was a kid, I thought he was the coolest dad alive. He was funny. He was creative. He played guitar and made these crazy metal sculptures out of junk.”

  The next thing I knew, tears were rolling down her cheeks. What had I said? She lowered her head, making a valiant effort to preserve her dignity. The way she was holding her cup in her lap, as if to catch the falling tears, put a knot in my own gorge. I looked away.

  “I’m sorry,” she said when she had collected herself. The words were hardly out of her mouth before she broke down again, this time even worse. I couldn’t just sit there doing nothing. I got up and went to her chair and kneeling beside it took her hand in mine and told her it was okay, she was going to be all right, to just go ahead and let it all out. She nodded and tried to give me a smile, which only brought on a fresh torrent of tears. It was hard to take. “You’re very sweet,” she said at one point, patting my head.

  “Listen,” I said when the worst of it was over and she seemed to be settling down again. “I’ve got a suggestion.”

  19

  SHE GAVE ME the small bedroom at the end of the hallway upstairs. It was simply furnished with a single bed, a three-drawer unfinished deal dresser, a plain wooden chair, and a full-length mirror on the closet door.

  I felt instantly at home as I hung my suits in the closet, arranged my socks and underwear in the drawers, set my grooming kit atop the dresser. Despite its size, the room felt very spacious thanks to the views through the windows. One overlooked the back yard in all its wild verdure. Even from the second story the giant old eucalyptus trees blocked out the world beyond, giving one the impression that the house stood alone in the woods. The other window faced the row of identical brown shingle rooftops with their aqua-blue air-conditioner boxes and red barbecue grills in eerily flawless back lawns.

  The agreement we had come to wasn’t exactly what she had envisioned. I told her I would stay out there with her for one week, at my basic security detail rate. I wouldn’t take on any other cases. She would have one hundred percent of my attention. I acted as if I were making a sacrifice.

  Ironically, I have never slept better than I did on that bed. The mere sight of the bedspread, a thin but surprisingly heavy white chenille embroidered in a dense honeycomb motif, smoothed and tucked to perfection each morning by Mrs. Morris, was enough to bring on a wonderful fairytale drowsiness. It was always deliciously cool to the touch, no matter how hot the day or night. I awoke invigorated every morning to the purling song of the strawberry finches, a haunting little minor refrain at the end of a two-note glissando, conjuring a strange, sweet feeling of loss. H
ow was it possible, I thought, after all the beatings I had taken, all the abuses I had willingly put my body and soul to, all my brushes with death, that I was lying in this heavenly luminescence, feeling as fresh and pure as a newborn babe? If not for the tantalizing smells of a full cooked breakfast wafting in from under the door every morning, I might never have got up at all. I hadn’t awoken with such an appetite since I was a teenager. I flung off the covers, put on my robe, and headed down the hall for my shower, where I worked those seven taps like the foreman of Hoover Dam. Mrs. Morris’s soaps were all of the marbled seashell and peach pit variety, the sort you find at boutique bed and breakfasts in the wine country, perfumy and quick to lather away to nothing against a man’s hairy hide.

  After my shower it was down the stairs and into the kitchen to greet Mrs. Morris, who was usually busy preparing our breakfast. “Sleep well?” she would ask, cracking an egg on the edge of the skillet or slicing through a loaf of freshly baked bread. “Like the dead,” I had the presence of mind not to say, though I came close on more than one occasion.

  Leaving her to finish her work, I would proceed into the conservatory attached to the back of the house, where the Herald would be awaiting me on the glass-topped, wrought-iron table. Originally an herbarium, the conservatory was a magical space, a giant kaleidoscope of white cast-iron and glass, no two panes exactly alike in size or shape or degree of translucency. Some were as fogged with age as the storm-blasted panes of a seacliff cottage. Others were scalloped or fluted or otherwise molded for dazzling diffusions. Though none of the panes were colored per se, if you concentrated on any single one of them long enough you began to notice all the subtle complexions of the spectrum—tints of blue, shades of green, washes of yellow—only apparent in juxtaposition with the pane adjacent. Through this lattice of light the back yard was transformed into an impressionistic painting in dreamy green and gold.

  It was in here that Mrs. Morris and I spent our leisurely mornings, drawing breakfast out for hours, talking about all sorts of interesting things. She was very well-read, effortlessly making references to Spinoza or Socrates or some other great thinker in the course of our conversations. She gravitated towards philosophical questions. Is man redeemable? Are we all truly capable of murder? What is the purpose, from an evolutionary perspective, of evil? Ironically, given my notorious cynicism, I was usually the one taking the more optimistic point of view.

  Only after persistent prodding did I learn that she had gone to St. Mary’s College, where she had studied to be a schoolteacher—until she realized she wasn’t fond of children. What she really liked was books.

  “I was working as a librarian at the Sunset Acres Public Library when I met Walter,” she told me one morning. “He came in nearly every week for books on a dizzying array of subjects: musicology, combustion physics, Greek mythology. I was always eager to see what this curious young man who never wore a hat despite his premature balding would check out next,” she smiled. “More often than not we didn’t have what he wanted and I would have to place an order for the book, ostensibly for the improvement of the holdings, but secretly because I found him intriguing. Without saying or doing anything in particular, he had a way of dominating the room. I would watch him standing at one of the shelves in the back corner, absorbed in some esoteric monograph, and it always seemed as though he was in the center of the library and that everyone was staring at him. But it was only me.”

  By her account, it was their shared love of books that eventually brought them together.

  “One day I got up the courage to ask him what he did for a living, and to my surprise I learned that he managed the inventory of an import business. Considering his reading habits, and the hours he spent in the library, I had assumed he was in some intellectual line of work—a journalist or a lawyer. It only made him more alluring that his eclectic tastes had nothing to do with his job. After that, every time he came in he made a point of asking me what I was reading. Later he told me he started keeping a journal of our conversations, taking note of my reading preferences, extrapolating the hidden aspects of my personality from them.”

  My ears perked up at this.

  “In the end he wooed me with a first edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” she said with a mischievous grin. “We were married three months later.” After the honeymoon she quit her job. “The expected thing to do in those days.” She was also expected to begin having children, which, she said without any apparent regret, never came to pass.

  To my queries about the house, she narrated the long history, starting with Walter’s great great grandfather, a German-speaking Pole named Jozef Moroz, and ending with Walter himself. Walter had spent the first ten summers of his life out at the old house—the happiest days of his life, he would always say. For a city boy, it was magical spending entire days exploring the countryside, playing with the kids of the migrant laborers, learning to play the parlor piano. But once he reached puberty he lost all interest in country summers. The girls were in the city. Memories of the old house, of those idyllic summers with his grandmother and grandfather and great Aunt Zyta, always prevented him from buying a house of his own. No other house could survive the comparison.

  Desperate to keep the house in the family, Walter eventually struck a deal with his aunt to buy it himself, allowing her to go on living in it for as long as she liked. She lasted a few more years before the upkeep became too much for her, and she moved to an apartment in the city. The house sat empty for four years before Walter moved in.

  “Imagine my reaction when I first saw this place,” Mrs. Morris marveled. “Some bachelor pad. The developers tried every tactic short of arson to drive us out, but somehow Walter always managed to fend off the vultures.”

  To my questions about her own family, Mrs. Morris’s response was a matter-of-fact “All gone.” She had had an older sister, but she had died some years ago. Nor did she seem to have any friends. I would have expected old family friends to be dropping by to check in on her, but not a single person came around, not even the neighbors. It seemed that she had so completely devoted herself to Walter that she had long since given up interacting with the world.

  Although she spoke freely of Walter and their time together, Imogen (as she insisted on me calling her now that I was a guest in her home) steered clear of any mention of his death. It was obvious to me that she didn’t really believe he had been murdered. The lack of any effort to seek justice was proof enough of that. Nor was she in the state of shock and debilitating grief that I have seen all too often in the survivors of violent crime. It wasn’t that she didn’t succumb to emotion now and then, swallowing her grief and turning away in silence until the wave had passed. I didn’t doubt that in her own stoical way she was suffering. But on the whole, and I can’t say exactly why, she struck me as someone who had been widowed for a long time, someone who had made peace with her loss long ago and was determined to get on with the business of living.

  Rather than give me any insights into the man behind the books, her reminiscences only seemed to obscure Walter Morris further. I often found myself standing before the photograph in the hallway upstairs, trying to get a better sense of him. But the more I studied that dull, bureaucratic face, a face rendered familiar in its very forgetability, the more I wondered what exactly besides their shared love of books Imogen had ever seen in him. Apart from his study, there were very few traces of Walter’s existence in the house, and those suggested that he had not been physically robust: the cushions for his lower back on both his dining room chair and the chair he used in the conservatory, his fleece-lined slippers, his nose-hair clippers, and other dainty male grooming apparati in the bathroom. If the punctuality of our meals, established by long habit, was any indication, Imogen had waited on him hand and foot, protecting him from the outside world so he could do nothing but write. The various old tools and work tables in the basement, which I periodically ventured into to retrieve more firewood, clearly pre-dated Walter’s occupati
on of the house. The gun cabinet was down there, housing two Browning 20-gauge shotguns, a few boxes of shells, a hunting vest and cap, but frankly I found it hard to picture that plump, bespectacled man out in the woods with a shotgun in his hands.

  Every now and then, drawn as ever by the solemn mystery of death, I would step into Walter’s study, close the door, and stand there quietly contemplating a bullet ripping through his brains. Why me? I had to ask myself. Why, out of all the private detectives in the city, had he chosen me? Was it purely random, or was there some mysterious and ultimately unknowable link that bound us? Day after day, year after year, he sat at his desk for hours on end, pretending to be me. If what Imogen had said was true, that he had struggled for years to break free from the Eddie King novels, then couldn’t a claim be made that his obsession with me had ultimately killed him? He couldn’t see beyond me. His life was never going to be as exciting as mine. He would never be the one staring down the barrel, knowing that the only thing between him and the grave was the quickness of his wits. He would never be the one sifting through all the evidence to arrive at the one shining solution. In that sense, yes, I had killed him. I may not have pulled the trigger, but the hand of Eddie King was all over that gun. It was no mere coincidence that he had used a snubnose .38 and signed his suicide note, Yours truly, Eddie King. To my mind, that said it all. As sad as it was, I couldn’t help feeling a little flattered. How many people can honestly say they kept a writer employed for more than a decade fantasizing about their life? The blood stain on the chair only made it all the more poignant. More than once I searched for the bullet, at one point pulling every single book from the shelves, but it was nowhere to be found.

  “There’s something I’ve been wondering about,” Imogen said one of those sunny mornings over breakfast. “Please don’t take offence.”