by James, Terry
“There wasn’t any.”
He sat back and looked at me thoughtfully.
“I understand that you’re featured in his novels.”
“You understand wrong.”
He pulled his phone out again and brushed his fingertips over the surface. Again he turned it around so I could see it. This time it was a photograph of the front cover of Blinded by the Sun.
“Eddie King,” he said. “That’s you. Isn’t it?”
“No, the bag of bruises you’re talking to is Eddie King. That’s just words on a page.”
“Is it? Your office address. Your apartment address. Your case files. Are you telling me that none of that has anything to do with you?”
“No, I’m telling you that he was secretly copying my files for more than a decade. He was stealing from me.”
He nodded, humoring me, and set his phone in his lap, where it had no intention of staying for long.
“And when did you learn of this?”
“The day after he died.”
He studied me, nodding earnestly.
“You never knew of the existence of these novels before then?”
“No.”
“How did you find out about them?”
“I went to the library.”
“Why? Had someone told you something?”
“Your former colleagues were good enough to show me the suicide note while accusing me of murder. I got the name Baxter Conway from the obituary and went to the library to see what I could dig up on him. I like to know about the people I kill.”
“And that’s when you discovered that his novels were based on your cases?” he asked. I never thought I could miss Hicks and Stiles. As dumb as they were, at least they knew how to respond to biting wit.
“Yes.”
“You had never met Walter Morris before this?”
“I never met him, period.”
He sat for a moment, thinking, the manner of which was to look downward with a slight pout to his lips, gazing at his phone, that great repository of Everything.
He looked up: “Sorry to keep on about this, but what proof do you have that he was stealing from you?”
“Ramona Quintana,” I said.
“And who is she?”
“A cleaning woman at the Mandrake Building. She’s been there for twelve years. She also happens to be the Morris’s maid.”
He tapped the screen of his phone for ten seconds or so then returned his full attention to me.
“And what was her role?”
“She has the master key. Either she was giving him access after hours or taking the files out herself and copying them.”
“What proof do you have?”
“Educated guess.”
“So if, as you claim, Walter Morris was stealing his ideas from you, working from your files, what are you doing living with his widow?”
Now we were in business. He was of the cobra school: disarm your prey with an enchanting smile, then strike when they least expect it. I had underestimated him, which was precisely his intention.
“I’m not living with her,” I said. Rather, those were the words I spoke, but they were no match for the guilty strain in my voice. His venom was already at work.
He stared at me for about five seconds: “I’ve just come from speaking with her. She claims you have been living there.”
“I’ve been doing some work for her.”
“So you’re not living there?”
“I’ve been crashing there for the past few weeks,” I said. “If that constitutes living there, so be it.”
He scratched the back of his neck. There wasn’t an itch within miles of it.
“Why have you been sleeping there, if I may ask?”
“Gas is expensive.”
He stared at me.
“What kind of work are you doing for her?”
“Home improvement.”
He did smile at that. Granted, it was only at the outer corner of his eyes, but a smile nonetheless. He was catching on.
“Is this one of your trades?” he asked.
“No. She hired me for security. I got bored, so I decided to do some repairs. You’ve seen the place.”
He was quiet for a while, then, sitting back in his chair in a way that suggested we were old pals, he said:
“For some reason Chief Greeley has the impression that you’re a good guy. He doesn’t think you killed Walter Morris. He read Hicks’s and Stiles’s report. He believes it was suicide. There’s no apparent motive.” He paused, then said: “At least there wasn’t until you started living with the Morris widow.”
“I’m not living with her.”
“He’s giving you the benefit of the doubt. It’s up to you to cash in on it. We can do it here or I can take you in. It’s your choice.”
I gave this some thought. From a purely economic standpoint it made more sense to finish my recuperation in jail. If nothing else, the television programming was bound to be current. The problem with jail isn’t the cell, it’s who you’ve got to share it with.
His existential itch had migrated to my right forearm. I scratched it and said: “I initially went out there just to ask her some questions. I wanted to know how my stuff had ended up in her husband’s novels.”
He sat up: “And what did she say?”
“Not much at first. I went back a few more times, trying to get some answers. She was reeling from his death. She was frightened. She didn’t seem to have any family or friends. I indulged her until she began to trust me enough to let me look at the rough drafts. She was nervous, as you might expect of a woman who believed her husband had been murdered under her nose. She made an offer to employ me for a week for around-the-clock security. I accepted. I figured she knew more about her husband’s novels than she was letting on, and I saw it as an opportunity to take a look around the place.”
“What did you find?”
“Nothing. Until Ramona Quintana showed up for work one morning.”
“When was this?”
“Last Thursday, I think.”
“A week ago?”
“Yes.”
He tapped the screen of his phone a few times.
“So even after you realized that Ms. Quintana may have been involved with Morris in copying your cases you stayed on out there with Mrs. Morris. Why?”
“I wanted to paint her house.”
He stared at me blankly.
“Forgive me if I’m missing something here,” he said, “but it just doesn’t add up that a week after the only lead you’ve come up with you’re still living out there with the widow of the man whom you claim was stealing your files for twelve years to write his books from. What am I missing?”
“Everything.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means logic is overrated,” I said. “Most of the time I don’t know what the hell I’m looking for until I’ve found it.”
He stared at me: “You know she has changed her story and now claims it was suicide after all.”
“It was.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“The guy was a writer. The gun was in his hand.”
“So where’s the bullet?”
“Ask Hicks and Stiles. They were the first responders. While you’re at it, ask them where they were yesterday around eleven o’clock.”
He sat back and studied me for a few moments.
“Are you suggesting that they had something to do with your assault?”
“No, I’m actually accusing them,” I said. “When did they lose their jobs?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss that.”
“Well, look into it. The last time we spoke, in their squad car, Randy was reading to me from a well-thumbed copy of Guttersnipe. He was convinced that I had either written the novels myself or was Walter Morris’s informant. Stiles made some threats. Hicks was particularly burned up about the depiction of him on the Jesús Rivera shooting.”
“You were there that night.”
“Yes.”
“Who else?”
“No one, as far as I know.”
He stared at me for a while, then looked down at his phone and did the finger-flutter across the screen.
“The whole squad is reading those books,” he said, glancing up. “Everyone thinks you were either his collaborator or you wrote them yourself, that Walter Morris is as much a pseudonym as Baxter Conway.”
“That’s quite a sophisticated thought for a bunch of cops,” I said.
He ignored that.
“What about this person who allegedly showed up at the Morris house a few weeks before his death?” he asked. “The man in the black suit and fedora.”
“Exactly. What about him?”
“None of the neighbors have any recollection of anyone of that description in the area until you showed up. They all assumed I was asking about you.”
“And I’m sure you made great efforts to disabuse them of that notion.”
He twisted his neck to the right. It popped. He torqued it back to the left with a similar result.
“What other jobs are you working on?” he asked.
“None.”
He stared at me. “You’re not working for Fletcher Enterprises?”
I stared back.
“I was issued a warrant to search both your office and your apartment,” he said. “There were two checks in your trash can from Fletcher Enterprises. Dated a week apart. I called and spoke to Gordon Fletcher. He claims you are working for him.”
“Did you ask him what the job is, because I’d like to know myself.”
“He’s paying you, isn’t he?”
“He’s trying to.”
“Are you claiming that you have never worked for him?”
“I tailed his wife for a week. When it turned out he was the Sancho I told him to get lost. He insisted he was just testing me for some other job. I told him I wasn’t interested. What can I do if the man likes throwing his money in my trash can?”
He fiddled with his phone some more.
“There was a letter on your desk from someone named Kathy Jerrell, addressed to Walter Morris. I read it.”
“Busy day. Did you read the part where she’s encouraging him to come clean to me?”
“What makes you think she was talking about you? It could have been anyone. A family member, a friend he had a dispute with.”
“His only family is a sister, and he didn’t have any friends.”
“Have you attempted to make contact with Kathy Jerrell?”
“No.”
He tapped away at his phone.
“In Hicks’s and Stiles’s report they claim that your gun had been discharged within twenty-four hours of their questioning you.”
“That’s correct.”
“Was it?”
“Apparently so.”
He looked at me.
“Did you fire your gun?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? Either you fired it or you didn’t.”
“I have no recollection of firing my gun.”
He stared at me for a while then lowered his eyes to his phone.
“Where were you between two and three o’clock on the afternoon of December 7th?”
“In my apartment.”
“Were you alone?”
“No.”
He raised his eyes.
“Who was with you?”
“A sad girl high on coke.”
“What’s her name?”
“Brandy. That afternoon, at least.”
When he was finished fiddling with his phone he stood up and slid it into his front pocket. He artfully restored the chair to the wall and returned to my side.
He gave me a mildly pitying look. It was the same look I used to get from Doug Truax in sixth grade. Doug was a flawless boy and knew it. He occasionally took pity on me and picked me to be on his kickball team. I went to his house once and fell in love with his mother.
“If you want my advice,” Detective Gallo said, “don’t go back there.”
He was out the door before I could think to ask him to please find someone to turn off the TV.
24
“OH, EDDIE,” SHE gasped at the sight of my face as I made my way over and onto the porch. The next thing I knew her arms were wrapped around me. It was such a spontaneous overflow of emotion, I was startled. To be that missed, that concerned about, was a complete novelty for me. Tentatively at first, then wholeheartedly, I hugged her back. Until that moment I hadn’t really begun to grasp what I had just been through. I still wasn’t convinced it was over. Even lying drugged up in the hospital, force-fed daytime television, my nerves had been as tense as barbed wire. Somewhere in the back of my mind was the fear that whoever had done this to me might come back to finish the job. Only in Imogen’s embrace did I finally begin to relax.
She stepped back and looked at me, her eyes shiny with restrained tears.
“What in God’s name happened?” She pulled me inside and closed the door. “I was so worried.”
I smiled apologetically. “Someone decided there were some gaps in my education.”
Clutching my left elbow she tugged me into the living room. I limped along beside her over to the sofa. Once she was sure that I was relatively comfortable, she said: “I’ll put on the tea.”
“I could use something stronger.”
“I would say so.”
She went to the china cabinet and came back with the cut-glass brandy decanter and matching glasses. She set the glasses on the table and poured a couple of fingers of the spirit into each of them. I downed mine in one swallow, painkillers be damned.
“I was so worried,” she said. She was perched on the edge of the seat cushion, her eyes riveted to my battered face. “Why did you go off like that without telling me?”
I hesitated, then said, a bit sheepishly: “I didn’t want an argument.”
“Oh, Eddie, you know I didn’t mean it about the irises.”
I poured myself another glass of brandy.
“It wasn’t about the irises.”
“What then?”
“I honestly don’t remember.” As I raised the glass to my lips I suddenly felt that there was no place in the world I would rather be at that moment than right where I was, on that musty old sofa, having a brandy with Imogen Morris. Despite everything, I felt ridiculously happy.
“Who did this to you?” she said with a serious lust for vengeance in her voice.
“I don’t know. I can’t remember anything. They blackjacked me as I stepped into my apartment, before I even had my hat off.”
“Then what?”
It hadn’t been my intention, but before I knew it I was telling her all about my stay in the hospital, including my insurance travails. She wanted to know everything. It wasn’t enough to say that I had been tortured by 1980’s television. She wanted details. Which shows? Why couldn’t I turn off the TV? Days of Our Lives, Hollywood Squares. She got it all. When something wasn’t clear she asked me to back up and explain it again, step by step.
“He was here,” she said as I started to tell her about Detective Gallo. “He was asking a bunch of questions.”
“I know,” I said. I refrained from mentioning what he claimed had been written on the chalkboard. I didn’t see the point of inflicting unnecessary guilt on her. But perhaps more than that, I wanted to keep that look in her eyes. She was gazing at me with such pride, such admiration, that I couldn’t help feeling that despite doing nothing but getting whacked on the head I actually was some kind of a hero.
“All I wanted to know was if you were all right,” she said, “and he wouldn’t tell me anything, not even which hospital you were at. He wanted to know when you had first come here. Had Walter and I ever met you before? Was I sure that Walter had actually written his novels? Can you imagine? He was insinuating that you had written them, the most absurd thing
I’ve ever heard. I assured him in no uncertain terms that my husband was the author of his novels, that I had typed every one of them myself from his notebooks. I told him that you had never even heard of the novels until recently. He had been around to the neighbors and found out that you were staying here, helping me with the house. He wanted to know what you were doing here. Had you coerced me? Had you blackmailed me? He even had the gall to suggest that you and I … I can’t even repeat what he said. You’ll be happy to know I told him all about Ramona. I told him that if he wanted to know the truth then go talk to Ramona Quintana.”
“You didn’t need to do that,” I said.
“It’s the truth, isn’t it?”
I made no reply. Suddenly I came over very drowsy. The mixed cocktail was starting to do its work.
“You’re safe now,” she said.
She must have known what I was about to say, even before I did, because her face clouded over before the words had left my mouth.
“I won’t hear of it,” she said. “You’re staying here tonight.”
“Imogen …”
“Don’t argue. I know you. You don’t have a thing to eat in your apartment. You’ll just go there and mope around and start drinking and wish you had stayed out here. Now, you’re going to stay here tonight and have a proper dinner. That’s all there is to it. We’ll see how you feel tomorrow. If you insist on leaving, I won’t stop you.”
It was no use. I gave in, reiterating that it would only be this one night. Her evident relief was mixed with vexation that I could even conceive of leaving without staying for dinner. For a good ten seconds she couldn’t look at me. Instead she looked down at her brandy glass, which she was holding in her lap.
“I’ll go and get dinner started,” she said to my drooping eyes. “You just stay there and rest.”
That was fine by me. A few minutes after she had gone into the kitchen I nodded off. When I awoke, the table was set, wisps of steam rising from a platter of roasted quail. She called me over and I took my habitual seat, wiping the grogginess out of my swollen eyes.
“You know what kept me going when I was lying in that hospital bed,” I said, knowing how much it would gratify her, as she ladled gravy onto my plate. “It was your dinners.”