Heir Apparent

by James, Terry

  The line went quiet. Again she told the kids to settle down, a little less patiently than the first time.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said. “I just wrote him a letter.”

  “You have nothing to be concerned about,” I assured her. “I’m just trying to get a little information.”

  “Well I’m not sure I can help you,” she said, her voice beginning to quaver. “We never actually met.”

  “It’s nothing to do with you,” I said. “I’m just trying to clarify something he mentioned to you in one of his letters. In the one dated August 2nd, 1998, you write that you’ll regret it if he, meaning Walter, doesn’t meet ‘him.’ I’m trying to find out who this ‘him’ is. You say, ‘Tell him everything. It’ll be such a weight off your chest.’ Do you recall who you were referring to there?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said after a long pause. “I’m just kind of in shock here. Give me a second.”

  “Take your time.”

  The sound went muffled for about ten seconds. She barked something at the kids. When at last she released the mouthpiece the space around her was quiet. She asked me if I could repeat what I had read. I read it again.

  “That was about his son,” she said when I had finished.

  At that moment, I was reaching for my glass. My hand never made it.

  “His son?” I said as if the connection wasn’t perfectly clear. “Are you sure about that?”

  “Absolutely,” she said a little too confidently, as if to make up for the slow start. “I remember it very well. He told me he had decided to try to make contact with a son that he and his wife had put up for adoption at birth. He was feeling very guilty about it. I always talked about my kids in my letters, and I think over the years it started getting to him. In that letter I was encouraging him to try to make contact.”

  “Do you know if he ever did?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” she said. “If he did, he never told me.”

  “Did he tell you his name?”

  “I don’t think he knew it himself,” she said. Then: “I don’t remember. It was a long time ago. I would have to go back and look at the letters.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that she might still have the letters.

  “I saved them all. God. I just can’t believe it. He was such a great writer.”

  I allowed her a few moments to persist in that belief, then said:

  “Is there any chance you could have a look through the letters again and see if there are any other references to his son?”

  “Sure I could,” she said. Then: “What exactly is all this about anyway?”

  So I gave her a brief account of the suicide, followed by a story I had started concocting about thirteen seconds ago.

  “In Walter’s will he named his biological son as legatee to his estate, which includes all future proceeds from his novels. He also named this son as the beneficiary of a substantial life insurance policy. The probate process requires that he be notified. We need a name.”

  She bought it.

  “Of course I’ll look,” she said. I gave her my number and asked her to call me if she found anything.

  After we hung up I sat there for a while massaging my right earlobe with my thumb and middle finger, seeing in my mind a man in a black suit and fedora standing on the porch of an old house in Sunset Acres, a gun in his hand. Motive? Abandoned at birth? Hardly justification for premeditated murder. Resentful of his father’s success? Unlikely. Trying to frame me? Why? A psychopath? Whatever the case, if this son really existed, I had a few questions I wanted to ask him myself. That wasn’t going to happen without a name.

  I considered various ways of asking Imogen outright, but in the end rejected all of them. She clearly hadn’t wanted me to know that she had borne a child. Her fury would be all too predictable. And I wasn’t feeling too charitable myself about her lying to me.

  As I reached for the bottle, a line of poetry started running through my head. Thoughts unsaid ‘twixt Life and Death. I poured myself a glass. My fruitful silence quickeneth. The glass paused halfway to my lips. I set it down. I got up and walked to the door and grabbed my hat and coat.

  27

  BUILT AT THE height of Brutalism, the County Public Health Building was a jumble of concrete blocks stacked four stories high, staggered side to side, streaked and stained filthy gray from decades of smog. As a symbol of the public health of the County, the building spoke volumes. All the floors above ground were presently vacant. Only Vital Records (pre-1980) was still here, down in the basement.

  It was around 12:15 when I pulled into the empty parking lot behind it. I cut the engine and got out and made my way over to the service entrance on the west side and pushed the intercom button. A few moments later a man’s voice I didn’t recognize said, “Yes?” in what I could only assume was an ironic parody of some English butler confronted with a stranger at an unpropitious hour. Either this fellow had a peculiar sense of humor or he was a bit daft.

  “I need to look at some records,” I said.

  “And you are?”

  “Eddie King,” I said. “I’m a private detective.”

  I heard a nasal snort, which may have just been him clearing his nose. A moment later the garage-style door slowly began to rise on its noisy chains and gears. When it had cleared the top of my hat, I stepped under it and into the enormous freight elevator. Nowadays it was the only way down. I pushed B. When the door had finished lowering, the elevator began its slow descent through the guts of the building.

  Going down to Vital Records always gave me the impression that I was descending into an old black-and-white movie. During the war the building, or rather the previous one, had housed the Army Intelligence Service Language School. The basement, in addition to serving as a bomb shelter, was the Pacific Coast Headquarters for analyzing and interpreting the Census Bureau’s information on Japanese Americans. That shameful collaboration helped put over a hundred thousand American citizens in concentration camps. It was at that time that the basement was outfitted with the banks of heavy-duty, gunmetal gray filing cabinets and all the other Army office furnishings that persist to this day. When that building was demolished to make way for this one, the basement wasn’t touched. They left everything down there exactly as it was. Everything was battleship gray: walls, desks, chairs, fans, lamps. Even the water dispenser and punch clock were gray. Everything being the same colorless shade and tone, it was difficult to pick objects out from the background. At times it seemed as though the filing cabinets stretched away into the distance. At other times you felt like the walls were closing in around you.

  As the elevator gently touched bottom, I raised the heavy gate at the opposite end and stepped out. A man I had not seen before was standing behind the counter. Only the knot of the maroon tie he was wearing under a charcoal sweater vest was showing, but amidst all that gray it stood out like a stoplight in heavy fog. He looked about ninety years old. In his youth he must have been very tall, for even his severe stoop couldn’t keep him under six feet. His face was striking: wispy gray hair parted ruler-straight atop a long, narrow cranium, a nose like the beak of a falcon, massive fleshy ears backlit by one of the bare bulbs in the low ceiling, oddly sensuous lips for a man, especially one his age, and the purest blue eyes I had ever seen, between which his bushy, permanently furrowed brows had gouged deep ravines. He could have been an old movie star from the silent era, or a retired five-star general.

  “Afternoon,” I said, approaching the counter. “Is Norman in?”

  “You look the part,” he said in a hoarse voice.

  “Excuse me?”

  He was gazing intently at my face, his heartbreakingly blue eyes darting here and there around my person.

  “Do I know you?” I asked.

  He smiled. There was something odd about this man. His disconcertingly blue eyes were only part of it. He reminded me of this actor my dad and I used to see all the time in these old sci-fi movies on TV on Sun
day afternoons, movies he had grown up with and wanted to share with me. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Atomic Kid, Creature from the Black Lagoon. This one actor, who reminded me of a praying mantis, always seemed to be in every film, always playing the weird doctor or the mad scientist. My dad and I used to bet each other whether or not we would see him in the movie, and sure enough, he was always there. We would kill ourselves laughing every time he appeared on the screen. There was something of that same quality of the demented scientist hiding behind a mask of normality in this man’s face.

  “Is Norman here?” I asked again.

  “He’s presently occupied,” he replied, still studying my face.

  I eyed him back for a while then turned and grabbed one of the manila cards from the side counter and filled it out. I handed the card to the old mad scientist. He barely glanced at it.

  “What’s your relation to the deceased?” he asked.

  “I’m a private investigator,” I said. “I’m working for the mother.”

  As if merely humoring me, he asked to see my identification. I pulled out my wallet and showed him my detective’s license. The ends of his long, bony fingers were bent with arthritis but otherwise admirably steady. Grinning to himself, he studied the license. He looked up at me.

  “I’m afraid this license has expired.”

  “It’s valid,” I said. “There’s a ninety-day grace period.” In fact, this was last year’s expired license, my current expired license having been lost with my other wallet when they blackjacked me.

  He handed it back to me. “Do you have a letter stating your business relationship with the deceased’s mother?”

  “All I want is to have a look at a few records, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You’ll need the letter before I can accept your application.”

  “Application?” We stared at each other. “Look, man. Can we cut the crap? I’ve been coming here for years. I’ve never had any issues.”

  “My my,” he said. “Tetchy tetchy.”

  “Send Norman over,” I said.

  “He’s busy at the moment.”

  “Just tell him Eddie King wants to say hello.”

  He sighed theatrically and shuffled away, carrying his wounded dignity across his bowed shoulders. He disappeared behind a bank of filing cabinets.

  A few minutes later Norman appeared. Norman was well past retirement age himself, but the County had retained him to administer the pre-1980 records. He camouflaged so perfectly with his surroundings, from his silver hair and sun-deprived skin, to his woolen tweed waistcoats and timeworn trousers, that I didn’t realize he was directly in front of me until I heard him say, in his usual cheerful way:

  “Eddie! What brings you down?”

  He snapped into focus. We shook hands.

  “Who the hell is that guy?” I asked in a low voice.

  “Name’s Whitner Bissell,” he said. “He was some kind of B-actor, had a lot of parts in the fifties and sixties.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I wish I was,” he said. “They’d had enough of him at the Natural History Museum, so they dumped him on me.”

  “What were some of the movies he was in?”

  “I think he was in The Manchurian Candidate.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “Do you know him or something?”

  So I told Norman all about my dad and those old sci-fi movies.

  “The Manchurian Candidate,” I said, shaking my head. “My dad was obsessed with that movie. He used to go on about how all that crazy brainwashing stuff really happened. That movie freaked me out.”

  “I never saw it,” Norman said. “The only one I’ve seen with Mr. Bissell in it is called A Double Life, from the late forties, I think. With Ronald Colman and Shelley Winters. He was the doctor in that one.”

  “Whit Bissell. I can’t believe it. We were always trying to find out his name, but they always cut away to a commercial before the credits finished. He must be like a hundred years old.”

  “I’m convinced he’s actually dead.”

  Whit Bissell. Working at Vital Records. I had to tell Dad.

  “I just wish he’d stick to sweeping the floors,” Norman said. “He’s a royal pain in the ass.” He glanced down at my card. “What do you got?”

  I handed it to him. He read it.

  “William Morris, eh? That’s an old-fashioned name.”

  “I’m after the birth certificate,” I said. “And if he’s dead, the death certificate.”

  “That name kind of died out in the fifties,” Norman said. “Death dates in the forties and fifties, we’ve got all kinds of William Morrises. But most of them were born in the late nineteenth century. Do you have a middle name?”

  “I’m not even sure about the first name.”

  “Give me a few minutes.” He took the card and made his way around the bank of filing cabinets and disappeared from sight. There was nowhere to sit, so I stepped over to the side counter and leaned my elbow against it. A little while later Whit Bissell came around the corner with a push broom and set about methodically sweeping the floor of the work area. He didn’t look my way. I watched him shuffle to and fro with his broom, making artful little jabs into the corners, shaking the dust and fluff over his growing pile, working his way stoically around his little black-and-white movie set. Plenty of other actors have met worse ends than this, I thought.

  At one point he looked over at me. A brief flicker of oddly touching vulnerability in his eyes told me he knew I knew who he was. He turned almost shamefully away. It was one of the saddest gestures I have ever witnessed.

  Five minutes later Norman returned.

  “It’s your lucky day.” He handed me the certificate. It attested to the birth of one William Joseph Morris, male, six pounds eight ounces, at Mercy Presbyterian Hospital, 11:20 a.m., March 24th, 1972. Attending physician, Chester Lee Wagstaff. I turned the certificate over. Above the baby’s inked footprints and the mother’s thumbprints were the mother’s and father’s names and dates of birth: Imogen Park Morris, June 11, 1943 and Walter Alexander Morris, December 7, 1941.

  “No death certificate on file,” Norman said, but my mind was elsewhere.

  As I turned to leave I looked up and saw Whit Bissell looking at me. He was leaning on his broom, his hands joined at the top of the stick.

  28

  I WAS HALFWAY to the Department of Social Services when Walter Morris’s date of birth began hovering before my eyes. Dec. 7, 1941. It seemed to be trying to tell me something. All my attempts to shoo it away were fruitless. It nearly made me run the red light at Roosevelt and MacArthur.

  Passing St. Luke’s, I recalled a certain passage in the Bible. I pulled an illegal U-turn at Pearl and headed down Harcourt back to the Regal Arms. A miraculous parking space was waiting for me directly in front of the door.

  I took the stairs two at a time up to the fourth floor. Without bothering to close the door I walked directly to the lamp table and picked up that old secondhand Bible the vagabond had sold me. I opened the front cover and read the inscription. To my son on your eleventh birthday. May you always be, above all else, a man of God. Love, Mother. December 7, 1952.

  I read it a few more times, just to be sure. Then, setting the Bible back on the table, I stepped over to the window and gazed out across the city, trying to get my mind around it. He must have picked some bum off the street and given him five bucks to pretend he was a Bible salesman. That was the easy part to comprehend. The real question was, Why? I could understand stealing my case files, but concocting this convoluted scheme to plant a Bible in my house—the Bible his own mother had given him on his eleventh birthday no less—that was pure insanity. Who knew what other demented little stunts he had pulled over the years. Of course it was possible that the Bible salesman was legit, that the date of birth was just another coincidence, that the Bible had belonged to someone else born on that infamous date. Possible, yes. But I was through giving a damn a
bout possible.

  Tossing the parking ticket into the street, I drove down to the Civic Center and parked in the employees’ lot on Garfield and made my way into the Department of Social Services Building and up the stairs to the second floor. It smelled of stale cigarettes and broken dreams. Those were the words Conway had used in King’s Ransom to describe the building. What did broken dreams smell like anyway? Probably moldy carpet. That day the Department of Social Services actually smelled like fresh paint. They were repainting the hallway on the second floor. Yellow ochre wasn’t much of an improvement on mint green.

  I asked the curvaceous brunette at the information desk which office handled adoption issues. She said number eight, down the hall, second to last door on the right. I thanked her and made my way down the hall.

  In the adoption office a man and woman in their early to mid thirties, a handsome couple, were sitting side by side on the orange plastic chairs provided for the discomfort of the public. They were both wearing rather somber overcoats. Perhaps the coats were intended to convey their solid, middle class values. In the woman’s lap, beneath her folded hands, lay a file folder an inch thick.

  They looked up at me and smiled, perhaps thinking I was someone they were waiting to see. I nodded politely and walked up to the counter that spanned the width of the room, behind which, in a cluttered workspace, sat three women at their respective desks: a heavyset black woman, a middle-aged Hispanic woman, and an older white woman. None of them looked up from their computer screens as I approached the counter, though it was all but impossible that they hadn’t registered my entrance. I waited. They feigned great absorption in their work. I took off my hat and made sure it made a sufficient thud as I set it on the counter to my side. At last the black woman looked up at me. She was wearing a fetching purple blouse.

  “Yes?” she said with about as much enthusiasm as a plumber called out on Christmas morning. The other two carried on with their labors.