Heir Apparent

by James, Terry

  “Don’t worry,” I assured her. “I have a thick skin.”

  “All those people who get killed in Walter’s novels. By your account, it’s all true.”

  I nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

  “Forgive the impropriety, but …”

  “No, it’s fine,” I spared her the discomfort of having to spell it out. “Sometimes you’re put in a situation where you have to use lethal force in self-defense.”

  She gazed out into the sunlight for a while, then turning her attention back to me, said:

  “But something like six people are killed in Blood City alone.”

  “The Dawson case,” I nodded. “Yeah, that was a bloody one. All those people had serious dirt on each other. None of them trusted each other. They were ruthless people who would stop at nothing to get what they wanted.”

  This provoked a broad smile from her, as if she were remembering some delicious private joke. I asked her what was so funny.

  “Oh nothing.”

  “Come on.”

  She hesitated, then said: “That’s the blurb on the back of the book.”

  “What is?”

  “‘They were ruthless people who would stop at nothing to get what they wanted.’”

  “Is it?” I said, making light of it despite the annoying insinuation that somehow I was the cliché and not that claptrap on the back of the novel. That insidious stuff has a way of burrowing deep inside your brain and taking root there.

  She grinned at my obvious annoyance. I took a long drink of my orange juice.

  “What about that poor man who was killed with a golf club?” she asked.

  “John Trabe,” I said, nodding at the memory. “He had it coming.”

  She grimaced. “How do you deal with it?”

  “After a while you just get numb to it,” I explained. “It’s like looking at a side of beef or something. The first two or three corpses you see, sure, it gets to you. But you get used to it, like anything else. You realize that all you’re seeing is the body, not the person. The person is dead and gone. A lot of times the person was dead long before his body met its demise.”

  By the time I realized that this might be rather insensitive, it was already out. But if it pained her at all, she didn’t show it. Leaning closer, she rested her fingers atop the table.

  “So you believe we have a soul that goes on living after the body dies?”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. I’ve never been a fan of metaphysical speculation. “How can we know? Do you believe that?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said forthrightly.

  Whether this was a lifelong conviction of hers or something born of Walter’s death, I chose not to inquire. We usually lingered over breakfast well past ten o’clock, after which she would clean up the dishes then take to her sewing upstairs. I had no idea what she was making but I could hear the whump-whump-whump of the old treadle throughout the day as I lay in bed or sat out in the conservatory, rereading the novels.

  It was a completely different experience reading them in the house where they had been written (if not conceived). For one thing, they were funnier. Perhaps I had been softened by all of Mrs. Morris’s little ministrations, the way she always seemed to anticipate my every desire, reaching for the decanter a millisecond before it occurred to me that I could use another drop of orange juice, serving me the last piece of French toast just as my eyes were settling on it. Whatever the case, I hadn’t really noticed before how witty Walter’s Eddie was—much wittier than me. He, or perhaps I should say Walter, was a master of the devastating one-liner in the face of man’s stupidity. What had struck me before as just plain ridiculous now seemed genuinely funny. Relaxing in a cozy home just like any other reader, away from the stresses of the job, I had to admit that the books were amusing. I could see how Midwesterners might get addicted to them. Even so, I never felt comfortable reading them in Mrs. Morris’s presence. It looked too much like the baseball player who claims indifference to the sports writers, only to secretly devour every word they write about him.

  Looking back on it, it strikes me as remarkable how the strange and decadent habits of others seem perfectly ordinary once they have become your own. While seldom as lavish as our goose repast, dinner was by any common measure always an extravagant affair. It was a rare evening that our main course wasn’t some kind of wild fowl—guinea hen, quail, duck—all supposedly shot by Walter, whom she said had taken up hunting a few years back in an attempt to alleviate the aching sacroiliac of his sedentary life. The big industrial freezer in the cellar was full of plucked birds. Mrs. Morris clearly enjoyed pampering and indulging me, and who was I to refuse, seeing how happy it made her? “There you are, Eddie,” she would sweetly say as she spooned the Brussels sprouts or beets onto my plate, and a warm wave of contentment would roll through me. And while her inner ear stayed perfectly tuned to my physical needs, she would effortlessly take up the conversation we had left unfinished at breakfast, the theme of which, unilluminated by the cleansing morning sunlight, usually acquired a more somber tone at dinner.

  After dinner and all the cleanup it entailed, Mrs. Morris liked to spend the rest of her evening reading in front of the fire. Inspired by the holiday spirit that those dinners put me in, I took to building the fire for her while she worked away in the kitchen. A few strips of sloughed-off eucalyptus bark under one of the pine logs, already cut and stacked in the cellar (another one of Walter’s physiotherapies,) were enough to kindle a cheering blaze. If from a purely calefactive perspective there wasn’t any call for a fire, the interior of the house, particularly the living room, did seem drafty at times, not so much a physical chill as a certain spectral nip in the air, more a factor of the musty tawdriness of everything than of any chilling brushes with Walter’s ghost.

  Initially reluctant to impose upon her solitude, I soon gave in to her repeated entreaties to join her in the living room in the evening. And there she and I would sit, in perfect silence save the crackling fire, reading our respective books. She was working on a volume of Gerard Manley Hopkins poetry. I grabbed one of the volumes of the Great Books of the Western World series from Walter’s study. Volume 54: The Major Works of Sigmund Freud. Interesting stuff. Some of it, at least.

  Sometimes I would glance up from my book and marvel at how content we seemed in each other’s silent company. Other times I was struck by how graceful she looked in the firelight, the soft orange glow smoothing away her wrinkles, rouging her pale cheeks, adding a touch of scarlet to her lips, much as she must have appeared to Walter when he first laid eyes on her. Then again, there were times when a flicker of awareness of how bizarre all this was would ignite my wine-soaked brain.

  20

  THERE IS ONLY so much tea and polite conversation a man can take, no matter how restorative. After six days of self-indulgence that felt like a month, I began to get bored. If I was to stay on with her, as she so earnestly implored when she handed me my pay, I would need to start doing some work. With the office rent due next week, and no other jobs in the pipeline, I figured I didn’t have much choice.

  Seeing firsthand what dire shape the house was in, I took it upon myself to attempt some basic upkeep. The first thing I tackled was the groaning pipes. After two days of sleuthing, I identified the culprit: a shot ballcock in the cold water tank. That the house even possessed a cold water tank in this day and age was a testament to how little touched by the hands of progress it was. Although the water came from the county mains, the pressure to distribute it came solely from the tank in the attic. When you flushed the toilet or ran the sink, particularly from the upstairs bathroom tap, the force of the influx of fresh water set the old ballcock vibrating against the aperture of the outlet, which when transmitted over the length of the pipes sounded something akin to a mid-octave A-flat on a French horn awash with saliva. To fix it I had to climb bodily into the tank, holding my flashlight between my teeth, and dismantle the old ballcock, a feat which, given the instabili
ty of my light source and the insufficiencies of the available tools, was no small accomplishment. Finding a replacement also called upon my investigative talents. After three hardware stores in two towns, I was eventually referred to Alfred Sawyer’s salvage yard in Margaritaville, a forty-five minute drive into the blistering inland. The old man took one look at the ancient contraption encrusted with limescale and escorted me out through a labyrinth of the most amazing assortment of unclassifiable junk I had ever seen, into a tin shed where he rooted around in the drawers of an old dresser until he found a fairer twin of the offending item. The cost of the replacement: $2.50. He wouldn’t take a penny more.

  With that small victory behind me, I felt emboldened to tackle a bigger challenge: repainting the exterior of the house. Initially Imogen wasn’t too keen on the idea, but escorting her outside and showing her the state of the wood where the sun had baked away the last paint job, I explained that if it wasn’t repainted soon, the house was going to rot around her. When that didn’t sufficiently alarm her, I pointed out that if she intended on selling the house in, say, the next five years or so, a new paint job could easily double the asking price. Any talk of selling the house was anathema to her, but after sleeping on it she deferred to my good judgement, on the condition that she pay me my standard per diem. I wouldn’t hear of it, pointing out that I was eating better than I ever had, but she refused to back down, claiming that she had already prevailed far too much upon my generosity. Which, of course, was nonsense. I was there of my own free will, and I told her so.

  It was our first argument. Immediately afterwards I felt the pleasant inner glow of filial belonging, something I hadn’t felt in many years. Whereas my arguments with Mom always had a sour, hopeless tinge to them, leaving me feeling edgy and deflated, this minor discord between Imogen and I had arisen out of genuine respect for one another, out of competing conceptions of honor. Having glimpsed in her eyes an intimidating determination to have her way, it was a pleasure to relent.

  Nothing in detective work can compare with the visceral pleasures of scraping brittle paint from long-suffering wood: the crisp crackling sound it makes when the blade plows beneath it to unveil the naked grain, the flakes fluttering silently down, blanketing the ground like colored snow. At the end of the day, when you step back and see what you have accomplished, you can’t help but feel a burst of pride. Hours passed in the blink of an eye. No sooner would I get out there on the ladder than Imogen would poke her head out the door and call me in for lunch, which, thankfully, was a lighter meal, usually consisting of a baguette on a plate of mixed cheeses, olives, and dried fruit. Where she produced this daily cornucopia from was a complete mystery to me, as she hadn’t once ventured out of the house since I had arrived. After lunch I would nap for half an hour up in my room. (It turned out that I was sleeping in Walter’s nap room, which he had used when he needed a break from ‘writing.’) I particularly relished those siestas, the feeling of the cool threadwork of that chenille bedspread against the soles of my hot, tired feet. Then it would be back out to scrape away the rest of the afternoon, daydreaming of nothing more than the gorgeous dinner that awaited me.

  Miraculously, despite standing on a ladder all day, my feet felt better than they had in years. Whether it was the Molten Snow, which I was applying religiously twice a day, my improved diet, something homeopathic in cowslips, or simply the general atmosphere of leisure that brought about the change, I had no idea. Nor did I care. I was just happy to be free of that incessant ache. Pleasantly fatigued, I would call it a day around 5:30, go up for my second shower, then, freshly attired in my slacks and shirt—she lent me a pair of Walter’s old overalls for my chores—it was back down the stairs and into the dining room to find the table set, the warm shards of chandelier light glinting in the silver, the wine already poured.

  It wasn’t until Friday afternoon of that second week, on the pretext of needing to get at the frames of the dormers, that I managed to climb back up to the attic and go through all the boxes again. I did find in two of them (Blinded by the Sun and All but the Chorus) some notes and outlines I had overlooked the first time. The notes were mostly in the form of questions and ruminations, with the occasional random image or phrase dashed off in the margin: “What if instead of finding the tarp in the hedges, K finds a scrap of it in the front flogo of Lucy’s car?” “Perhaps they meet at the beach and proceed from there to the gambling den.” “Why doesn’t K just go directly to the source?” That sort of thing, written on the back side of the page in question. The outlines, on separate sheets of paper, were simple numbered lists of the key events of the novel. These were written in pencil, and it was clear where he had erased lines numerous times to shuffle things around, as if he were actually making it all up as he went along.

  The lack of apparent evidence of a crime does not by any means negate its existence. Either Walter had not kept written records of his pilfered knowledge, which implied a prodigious memory, or he had prudently destroyed them as soon as they were incorporated into the novels, probably thinking (correctly) that sooner or later I was going to stumble onto one of his books and come looking for him.

  I closed the boxes back up and stood before them for a while, considering my options. A faint scent, slightly sweet, slightly smoky, somewhere beneath the smell of dust and wood and musty cardboard, kept drifting in and out of my nose. It evoked a strange feeling of mild dread, but I couldn’t quite place the source of it. It smelled a bit like barbecued meat, but that wasn’t it, as there was a sharper edge to it, something singed. I walked over to the window at the front of the house and stood there for some time gazing out into the hazy suburban afternoon.

  21

  THE NEXT MORNING, around eleven o’clock, while I was up on the ladder scraping the north face of the house, an orange Chevy Nova with two white racing stripes running down the center pulled up in front of the driveway. A plastic Virgin Mary dangled from the rearview mirror. Out of the car stepped a squat, middle-aged Mexican woman who at first glance bore a striking resemblance to Ramona.

  I watched her make her way up the driveway. I was waiting for the moment when at last this woman’s unique facial features would overcome the distortions of my elevated perspective, revealing her in all her non-Ramonaness. That moment never came. The closer she got to the porch, the less probable it became that this woman could be anyone but Ramona.

  “Ramona?” I said with what little remained of my faith in the innate goodness of mankind. I was still holding out the possibility that the woman would turn towards my voice with mild perplexity and politely correct my error.

  She looked up. Two beats of silent bewilderment. “Mr. King?” More puzzled silence, then: “What are you doing up there?”

  At that moment it seemed a truly profound question, requiring the whole of my mental faculties to produce a satisfactory response. In the end, “What are you doing here?” was all I could muster.

  “I come here to clean and shop for Mrs. Morris.”

  At which point I climbed down the ladder and, lodging my scraper in the front pocket of my overalls, walked resolutely towards her.

  “You clean here?” I said, astonished that she could be so guileless. “For Mrs. Morris?”

  “Yes.”

  I stood there waiting for the guilt to start dawning across her face, but she betrayed nothing. I asked her a few more questions—How long had she worked for Mrs. Morris? Did she know that Mr. Morris had been a writer? Had she ever seen any of his books?—all of which she answered predictably, even having the presence of mind to ask a few herself.

  “I better get inside,” she said at last, stepping up onto the porch.

  I snapped: “Let’s cut the crap, Ramona.” She turned back, a rosy blush spreading up her neck and into her cheeks. Of course she had to go on pretending she didn’t know what I was talking about, her blush draining away to a nervous pallor, asking me if she had broken something in the office, if she had accidentally left the door unlocked
, thinking she could just weasel out of the clutches of truth.

  “Look,” I said, exasperated with the charade. “Maybe you didn’t realize the gravity of what you were doing. Maybe you just thought you were helping Mr. Morris with a few scraps of paper that no one ever looked at. I know Schwartz doesn’t pay you much, and that Mr. Morris probably convinced you it was perfectly innocent, but that doesn’t excuse what you did.”

  She was on the verge of tears now.

  “Mr. King, I didn’t do nothing.”

  “Whatever.” He who argues with a fool is a fool, Mom always says—me apparently being Fool #1.

  She gave me another few seconds of her best wounded look then said, with downcast eyes: “I have to go in now.”

  I scraped away the rest of the morning with the small satisfaction of knowing that at least I wasn’t insane. Still, it is hard to feel proud when the solution walks right up to you and slaps you in the face. It takes all the pleasure out of being right.

  “Did you say something to Ramona?” Imogen asked at lunch. “She was positively distraught.”

  “I did.”

  “What did you say?”

  I popped an olive into my mouth and, allowing her a little time while I chewed it to appreciate the magnitude of what I was about to say, said: “Ramona is the cleaning lady at the Mandrake Building.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Eddie,” she tossed her napkin onto the table.

  That wasn’t the response I was expecting. I thought she would be at least a little relieved to have this nagging conundrum finally cleared up, if only for my sake.

  “You don’t have the slightest proof.”

  “She’s been cleaning my office for twelve years,” I said. “It’s obvious. What more proof do you need?”

  “You really are a heartless sonofabitch.”

  I may have smiled, but those words pained me more than any sucker punch ever had. She turned and left the dining room. I ate a few more bitter olives then returned to my scraping.