Small Town

eight

“John, if you’re home, it’s Roz. Come to think of it, it’s Roz whether you’re home or not, but are you?”

She was in the middle of another sentence by the time he got the phone to his ear. “I’ve always liked that construction,” he said. “ ‘If I don’t see you before you leave, have a nice time.’ And if you do see me before then, should I have a lousy time? Odd use of the conditional, if you think about it.”

“Or even if you don’t.”

“Damn,” he said. “I did it myself, didn’t I? And in the same paragraph.”

“You’re sounding chipper, John.”

“I am? Maybe it’s the music. It’s pledge week on the jazz station, so I switched to classical.”

“What are you listening to?”

“Ravel,” he said. “Pavane for a Dead Infant. What’s so funny?”

“You’re making this up, right?”

“Yeah. I don’t know what the hell I’m listening to, Mozart or Haydn, one of those guys. And if I’m sounding better, it’s probably not the music. Maybe I’m just getting used to being under house arrest.”

“You’re not getting out?”

“Not really. I did have a visitor the other day. Well, two of them. Maury Winters came over, and he brought along a private detective who’s going to track down the real killer.”

“Oh?”

“It sounds like OJ, doesn’t it? Searching the golf courses of America for the real killer of Nicole and Ron. This guy, though, all he’s likely to find is the next drink in the next gin mill, judging from the red nose and the matching breath. The idea is she went out right after I left and dragged somebody else home, which strikes me as not impossible, and maybe somebody saw her. It’d be nice if a witness turned up, but so far nobody has, so this joker’s on the payroll to go look for one. And, since she picked me up in a bar, my guess is that’s where he’ll go looking, and there are enough bars in the neighborhood to keep him busy.”

“Maybe he’ll come up with something.”

“Maybe he will. I’m inclined to belittle him, but maybe that’s just me. The guy’s a retired cop, twenty years on the job, and the fact that he likes his booze doesn’t necessarily mean he’s inept.”

“But you don’t have a lot of faith in the process.”

“I can’t say I do, no. I think he’s just going through the motions.”

“The detective?”

“Well, sure, but that’s what they do. No, what I think is Winters is just going through the motions in hiring him, hoping to stir up something that’ll muddy the waters. But as far as finding the guy, I think he thinks the guy’s already been found.”

“What makes you say that, John?”

“Impression I get. The cops quit looking once they got to me, and I think Winters figures they got it right. I suppose it’s natural. What percentage of his clients are innocent of the crimes they’re charged with? I don’t mean how many get acquitted, I mean how many genuinely didn’t do it?”

“That’s true for any criminal lawyer, isn’t it?”

“That’s my point. And it shouldn’t interfere with his ability to present the best possible defense. Still, you’d think he’d ask me.”

“Ask you?”

“If I did it. That’s the damnedest thing, Roz. Nobody asks.”

“Nobody?”

“Well, aside from the cops, hoping I’d fall on the floor and confess. Nobody else. Not even Karin. She wanted to know if I was planning to skip to Brazil, but other than that she didn’t seem to care if the man she bailed out was guilty or innocent.”

“She knows you couldn’t have done it, John.”

“You figure?”

“Of course. Anybody who knows you knows that much.”

Her words, delivered in such a matter-of-fact manner, moved him profoundly, and for a moment he was unable to speak. Then he said, “That’s very good to hear, Roz.”

“Well.”

“Just for the record, I didn’t do it.”

“I know that.”

“But you’re wrong about one thing. I could have.”

“How’s that?”

“Anyone could have,” he said. “Anyone’s capable of it.”

“Of murder.”

“I think so, yes.”

“Well, there’s a sobering thought,” she said. “Even thee and me, eh? God knows there’ve been times I felt like it. When that Carmichael cunt managed to work things out so that she stayed and I got the ax, I’ll admit I had fantasies about killing her. I mean I thought about it, I ran it through my mind, but there was never a chance it was going to be real. And, of course, getting out of that rathole was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“And me.”

“That and bringing Hannah back from China, and how could I have done that if I was serving twenty-five to life? So I’m certainly glad I didn’t screw it up by letting Lesley Carmichael have it with her monogrammed Tiffany letter opener.”

“Was that how you fantasized it?”

“That was one of several ways. But it was never real, and I honestly don’t think I could ever do anything like that. I’m tough as an old boot, sweetie, and God knows I’ve got a temper, but it never gets physical. I never even throw things. Some women throw things, did you know that?”

“Fortunately,” he said, “most of them can’t hit what they’re aiming at.”

“I wonder if dykes throw things. All those games of softball, they could probably knock your eye out at thirty paces.”

“The women who fling glass ashtrays at me,” he said, “tend to be at least nominally heterosexual. I know what you mean, though, having fantasies and knowing that’s all they were. But there was a time when it was more than a fantasy.”

“For you, you mean?”

“For me.”

“I don’t suppose Lesley Carmichael was the designated victim?”

“No, I didn’t even get pissed at her, actually. I’d figured they were going to drop me sooner or later. No, this was earlier. I was thinking about killing my wife.”

“Jesus, the way you said that.”

“How did I say it?”

“Like you were thinking of going to a movie, or taking a tai chi class. So, I don’t know, dispassionately?”

“Well, it was a long time ago.”

“And you were really thinking about it? Like, thinking of doing it? Does Karin even know? I guess not, or she might not have been in such a rush to post your bail.”

“It wasn’t Karin.”

“Hello? How many wives have you had, sweetie?”

“Two. I got married right out of college.”

“I never knew that.”

“Well, it’s not a secret, but it doesn’t come up all that often. It was over in less than a year, and not a moment too soon, let me tell you. We fought all the time, and neither of us wanted to be married, and least of all to each other. Nor did we have a clue how to get out of it. I swear I don’t ever want to be that age again.”

“I think you’re safe.”

“We were driving somewhere flat. I want to say Kansas, but it could have been anywhere in the Great Plains. Were we on our way to visit her parents? No, we’d already been to see them, they lived in Idaho, he ran a family-owned lumber mill. Her father, that is. Her mother baked her own bread and smiled bravely. You can imagine what a good time we had there.”

“And then you were in Kansas.”

“Or someplace like it, and in a motel for the night, and we’d been at each other’s throats all fucking day. And the thought came to me that I was going to have this bitch around my neck for the rest of my life. And there was this voice in my head: Unless you kill her.” He frowned. “Or was it Unless I kill her?”

“Honey, it only matters if you’re writing it. An inner voice, who cares if it’s speaking in the first or second person?”

“You’re right.”

“Only a writer...”

“I guess. Point is I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. Here was this impossible situation, and only one way out of it.”

“Aside from walking out the door, which didn’t occur to you.”

“It absolutely didn’t, and don’t ask me why. All I knew was I was stuck for life unless she died.”

“You’re not even Catholic.”

“No, and neither was she. Don’t look for this to make sense. In my mind it was ‘til death us do part, and that was beginning to seem like a splendid idea. Here we were, in the godforsaken middle of the country, on our way to a teaching job I was going to take in western Pennsylvania. They were expecting a married guy, but if I wasn’t married I didn’t really have to go there at all, did I? I could tell them my plans changed and thanks but no thanks, and I could come to New York, which was what I’d wanted to do in the first place.

“And nobody knew me in New York, and if I ran into anybody I knew I’d tell them the marriage didn’t work out, that Penny left me and never said where she was going. Of course her parents wouldn’t know where she was, and they’d get to wondering, but I had that figured out, too. I’d beat them to the punch by calling them with an address for them to give to Penny when they spoke to her. In case she wanted to get in touch, I’d say, sounding like a man with a broken heart.”

“Wouldn’t they eventually go to the police?”

“I suppose, but it would just be a missing person, not a homicide, and nobody would know where to look for her. They certainly wouldn’t have any reason to start digging in a cornfield in Kansas.”

“You were going to bury her in a cornfield?”

“I figured that was perfect. If you pick a recently plowed field, and go do your digging at night when nobody’s around, all you’d have to do was make sure you dug deeper than they plow. The body could stay there forever.”

“You had it all figured out.”

“I couldn’t fall asleep. I sat there in that piece-of-shit motel room while she was lying there asleep with her mouth open—”

“Which is always attractive.”

“—and I thought about killing her. I didn’t want to make anyone at the motel suspicious, so I had to avoid getting blood on the sheets, anything like that. I thought about strangling her or smothering her with a pillow, but suppose she put up a fight? What I settled on was I’d knock her out first by hitting her on the head. There was a tire iron in the trunk I could use, and if I wrapped a towel around it there’d be less chance of breaking the skin and causing bleeding.”

“This is getting awfully real, John.”

“Well, how real was it? This was twenty-five years ago, more than half my life. I can remember being in that room, working it all out in my mind, but how accurate is that memory? And how close did I come to flat out doing it?”

“Did you go out to the car for the tire iron?”

“No,” he said, and frowned. “Hold on, I think I did. Jesus, this is weird. I remember it both ways.”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Hang on here a minute.”

“What?”

“John, I read this story.”

“Yeah, I wrote about it. Turned it around some, the way you do, but that’s where the story came from. The Yale Review turned it down and then Prairie Schooner bought it. I’m surprised you remember it.”

“How would I not remember it? I published it, for God’s sake, it was in Edged Weapons. Give me a minute and I’ll come up with the title.”

“ ‘A Nice Place to Stop.’ It was the motel’s slogan. In the story, that is, but either I made it up or it was some other motel’s slogan. It seemed to fit the story, but I’m not sure it’s the best title I could have come up with.”

“It’s not bad. In the story—”

“In the story the guy does go out for the tire iron, and he wraps the towel around it and swats her good, and then he realizes he can’t go through with it. Strangling her, like he planned to do. And it dawns on him that he can just leave, he’ll give her all his money and the car and say goodbye and hit the road, and what can she do? So he waits for her to wake up and he’s going to tell her all this. He’d like to just split and let her figure it out for herself when she comes to, but he knows he’d better wait and tell her.”

“But he can’t, because she’s dead.”

“Right, the blow with the tire iron was enough to crack her skull and kill her, towel or no towel. So now he has to go through with it and bury her in a field the way he planned, and he does, knowing it’s all unnecessary.”

“And he gets away with it, doesn’t he?”

“Well, we don’t know that,” he said. “He’s still free and clear at the end of the story, but maybe that’s just because they haven’t caught up with him yet. But even if he gets away with it, what we get is that he’s not really getting away with anything after all, because he’s got her wrapped around his soul the way the Ancient Mariner had the albatross around his neck.”

“Right.”

“Maybe the title’s better than I thought.”

“Yes, I see what you mean. When did you write this one, John?”

“Not right away. Maybe a year, two years after the divorce, I started running it through my mind and it started to turn into a story. And of course I changed tons of things, and the guy in the story wasn’t me and the woman wasn’t Penny. But that’s why I remembered going for the tire iron, and also remembered not going for the tire iron. One memory was from life and the other was from the story.”

“Writers are strange people.”

“You’re just finding this out?”

“No, but I keep forgetting, and people like you keep reminding me. Oops, there’s a call I have to take. Will you be around for a while?”

“Where would I go?”

“Nowhere for the next hour or so, okay? I’ll get back to you.”

How close had he come to killing Penny?

It wasn’t hard to remember the story’s immediate origin, not where it came from but the spark that got him to write it. He was in New York, living in this apartment, and he was seeing someone new, a trainee copywriter at an ad agency. He’d decided he was getting more involved than he wanted to be, and made plans to tell her that he felt they should both be seeing other people. The person he thought she should probably be seeing was a trained psychotherapist, but he didn’t figure he had to tell her that part.

He didn’t look forward to the whole business, but at least it was early days for the relationship, and he’d be wise to nip it in the bud before he found himself married to her, and looking for ways to get rid of her.

Like, Jesus, that insane moment in the motel room when he’d actually contemplated killing Penny. And just suppose he’d taken the fantasy one step further, suppose he’d gone out and come back with a tire iron...

From there his imagination just ran with it. Striking the blow, Jesus, he’d regret it immediately, and the minute she came to he’d — but wait a minute, suppose she didn’t?

The story was essentially complete in his mind by the time he sat down and started putting it on paper, but it morphed and evolved as he wrote it, the way they always did. Once it was done, though, all it needed was a word changed here and there and a fresh trip through the typewriter and it was done. He sent it out and it came back and he sent it out again and it stuck.

He thought of that blond bitch from the DA’s office, had an Italian name. Fabrizzio? Hadn’t wanted him out on bail, wanted him stuck in a cell at Rikers.

Would she think to read his books?

Well, if she didn’t somebody else would. “A Nice Place to Stop” was just another story, a little more violent than most, maybe, but violence was often present in his work, and he’d already found himself wondering what the prosecution would try to do with that, and what a jury would make of it. People in the business knew to separate the writer from the writing, knew that the author of a sweet little juvenile book about cuddly bears and talking automobiles might indeed be a plump grandmother who smelled like cookie dough, but could just as easily be a grizzled old drunk with tattoos and a bad attitude. But were jurors that sophisticated?

They might be, here in New York, where everybody was an insider, at least in his own mind. Still, it would be easier all around if they didn’t happen to know the precise origins of “A Nice Place to Stop.”

He went to the refrigerator, gnawed at a slice of leftover pizza, took out a beer, hesitated, put it back. Sat down again and booted up the computer, opened the thing he’d been working on when — Christ, a million years ago, it seemed like — when those two refugees from the Jehovah’s Witness Protection Program had turned out to be cops.

He read some, scrolled down, read some more. Shook his head.

Nothing wrong with it, really, and he sort of saw where he was going. But it felt like something he’d been working on in another lifetime. He was the same person who’d written these pages, he was in fact the same person who’d written “A Nice Place to Stop,” the same person who’d stood in that motel room and contemplated — hell, call a spade a spade, forget contemplated — who’d planned murder.

The same person throughout, but he felt further detached from the writing on the screen than from that ancient short story. He frowned and tried to find his way back into it, writing a sentence to follow the last one he’d written. He looked at it, and it was all right, it fit what preceded it. He took a breath and let himself find his way, batted out a couple of paragraphs and stopped to look at them.

Nothing wrong with them. Still...

He went to the fridge, reached for the beer, put it back, checked the coffeepot. There was a cup left. Cold, but so what? He took it back to his desk and closed the file, opened a new one. Without really thinking, he let his fingers start tapping keys.

Fifteen minutes in, MS Word asked him SAVE NOW? He clicked the Yes box, and, when asked for a title, keyed in Fucked If I Know and clicked to save what he’d written under that title. Not quite in the same league with “A Nice Place to Stop,” and maybe he should call this one A Nice Place to Start, and maybe it was. But Fucked If I Know was okay for the time being, and God knows it was accurate.

He reached for the coffee, found the cup empty. Couldn’t even remember drinking it.

He put his fingers on the keys, went back to work.

Roz said, “Give me a reality check, will you? It wouldn’t be for a couple of years yet, but do you think I ought to enroll Hannah in Hebrew school?”

“You’re a lapsed Catholic,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’re thinking of converting to Judaism?”

“No, why would I do that? I rather enjoy being a lapsed Catholic.”

“And Hannah’s Chinese,” he said. “But you said Hebrew school.”

“Right.”

“Well...”

“If I don’t send her,” she said, “isn’t she going to feel left out? She’ll be the only Chinese kid in Park Slope who doesn’t have a bat mitzvah.”

He said, “Is that from some comic’s routine? Did Rita Rudner try it out on Letterman last night?”

“I’m serious,” she said. “At least I thought I was serious. Is it really that ridiculous?”

“What do I know? I don’t live in Park Slope.”

“Well, I’ve got a few years to think about it,” she said. “How come you picked up before the machine? I thought you were screening your calls.”

“Phone calls haven’t been a problem lately. Maybe my fifteen minutes of fame are over.”

“Don’t count on it, honey.”

“No,” he said, “I guess not. When the case goes to trial is when it starts in earnest. Unless they catch the prick before then, and then the phone’ll really start ringing off the hook. Not just reporters wanting to know how it feels to be vindicated, but the department head from the New School saying of course they’ll want me back in the fall, plus all the old friends I haven’t heard from, telling me they knew all along I was innocent. Jesus, I sound like a cynical bastard, don’t I?”

“Actually,” she said, “you sound like your old self.”

He flexed his fingers, looked at the computer screen. He’d been at a natural stopping place when the phone rang, and had picked up without really thinking.

“My old self,” he said. “That’s pretty interesting.”

“Not that the John Blair Creighton we all know and love can’t be a cynical bastard. And ironic. Didn’t Kirkus comment on your almost diabolical sense of irony?”

“Devilish, actually, but that’s close enough.”

“Devilish is better, it sounds more playful. Well, ironically enough, you old devil, this may not be an entirely bad thing.”

“How’s that?”

“I know what you’re going through, to the extent that it’s possible for anyone but you to know it, and I don’t want to minimize it, but—”

“But there’s a bright side? I’d love to know what it is.”

“Well, don’t take this the wrong way,” she said, “but all in all it’s not a bad career move.”

He got a cigarette going and smoked it while she talked. She’d had a phone call from an editor at Crown, where his most recent book had been published. Sales had been disappointing, and his editor was no longer with the publisher, had in fact jumped ship before his book hit the stores, which certainly hadn’t helped his cause. It was the second book in a two-book contract, and Crown had had no further interest in him, or he in them, truth to tell, but this editor, whose name he didn’t recognize, had called Roz to talk about something else entirely.

“And then it just happened to occur to her to ask about you. I represented you, didn’t I? She thought she remembered that. And of course they’d published you, and people there had good feelings about your books, in spite of the fact that sales hadn’t been what any of us had hoped for, quote unquote.”

“Jesus wept,” he said. “They want me back?”

“There was no reprint sale on either of the two they published,” she said. “No paperback, trade or mass-market, and this fact popped into my head, and I said, you know, I was glad she’d called, because I’d been meaning to call her to get rights reverted on the two books, considering that they’ve long since gone out of print.”

“And?”

“And I got some hemming and hawing, and the reluctant admission that they’d had some recent interest in both books from a mass-market publisher. So I vamped a little myself, and admitted with some reluctance that you were hard at work on a major project, and that they should hold off on any reprint sale for the time being. She was on that like a pike on a minnow, John. As your loyal publishers, of course they want your new book, and of course they realize on the basis of my description that it’s clearly a more commercial venture—”

“How did you describe it?”

“I didn’t. Major project is what I called it, and how descriptive is that? I know it’s tacky, John, but in addition to being the designated suspect in a murder case, you’re also a hot ticket. Now I know that right now writing, or even thinking about writing, is the last thing you feel like doing, but hear me out, okay?”

He leaned back, blew a smoke ring. “Okay,” he said, amused.

“You could use a few bucks, sweetie. I don’t know what Maurice Winters charges, but he’s got to be billing at a base rate of six or seven hundred dollars an hour, and it doesn’t take long for that to add up. And didn’t you say something about a private detective?”

“Yeah, and the guy’s bar bill alone...”

“The point is it would be good if you could make some serious dough, and all of a sudden it looks as though you can. Soon as I got done with your new big fan at Crown, I made a few well-considered phone calls to a few top people here and there.” She named some names. “I got interest and enthusiasm from everybody I talked to,” she said, “and they didn’t even bother trying to conceal it.”

“And nobody found it unacceptably crass to cash in on a book by an accused murderer?”

“No. You think I’m being crass, John?”

“No, not at all.”

“You’re my client,” she said, “and you’re on the spot financially, along with whatever else you’re going through. If you can get a big transfusion of cash, it’s got to take some of the pressure off.” She stopped herself for a moment. “On the other hand,” she said, “it’s not as though I’m going to waive my commission. If you make a fortune I make fifteen percent of a fortune, so I’m very much acting in my own interest here, as well as yours.”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

“Makes the world go round, or so I’m told. One way to look at this, life handed you a lemon and we’re opening a lemonade stand. Can I tell you what I want to do?”

“By all means.”

“I want to get back to all these nice people who say they can’t wait to hear more from me, and I want to put a package into play involving your next two books plus your backlist titles, the ones we control the rights to. I’ll tell them I’m going to run an informal auction, but I’ll be open to a really solid preemptive offer, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I get one that’s good enough to take.”

“How good would it have to be?”

“High six figures. That surprise you?”

“No,” he said, “not the way you’ve been talking. Ten minutes ago it would have surprised the shit out of me. Now it seems perfectly logical, in a cockeyed kind of way.”

“Cockeyed’s the word for it. Sweetie, before I start selling something, it would help to know if I’ve got something to sell. I’m sure writing’s the last thing you feel like doing, the last thing you even think you’d be capable of doing, but it might get you through the days. At the least it’ll give you something you can do without leaving the house, and it might even be therapeutic, and... what’s the matter, did I say something funny?”

“Funnier than Hannah’s bat mitzvah,” he said. “After I got off the phone with you, I started writing.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Scout’s honor. Hold on a sec.” He went to the Tools menu, selected Word Count. “Eight hundred and eighty-three words,” he said, “and where would we be without computers? A few years ago I’d have said I was on the fourth page, but now I can apprise you of my progress with pinpoint accuracy.”

“That’s great, John. You went back to work on the book? That shows you can write, and if you’re really into that book, well, you should stay with it, but...”

“But what?”

She took a breath. “I don’t want to tell you what to write, John. That’s something I never want to do. But if you were ever going to write a book with more deliberately commercial potential...”

“Now would be the time for it, huh?”

“From what you showed me of the book you’re working on, now there’s nothing wrong with it and a lot that’s right with it, and it could certainly work as the second book in a two-book deal, but right now...”

He said, “Roz, that’s not what I was just working on. I looked at it, I felt completely out of touch with it.”

“Oh.”

“So I started something new.”

“Just now, we’re talking about.”

“Right.”

“That you’ve got eight hundred words done of.”

“Eight hundred and change.”

“And does it have, how to put it, commercial elements? I know it’s early to say, but is there any way it could be described as a thriller? Literary of course, anything you write is going to be literary, which is all to the good, but would it, uh...”

“Tie in with my present circumstances?”

“Thank you. Would it?”

“Remember the story we were talking about? ‘A Nice Place to Stop’?”

“Of course.”

“Well, that’s it.”

“The story expanded to novel length,” she said thoughtfully. “I can see how that might work. Flashbacks to give you more of a sense of who the characters are, and—”

“No, that’s not it. The novel’s not an expansion of the story, it starts with the story. Only I’m rewriting the story, of course, in fact I just plunged right in without even re-reading the story, because I have a very different perspective on the characters now. I mean, look how many years it’s been since I wrote the thing, plus all the time since the incident that inspired it.”

“Of course.”

“It starts with the story,” he said, “and he knocks her out with the tire iron, and then changes his mind, but it’s too late. So he does what he planned on doing, buries her deep and lights out for the territories, except he’s in the territories, and what he lights out for is New York.”

“And it’s how he gets pursued and caught?”

“He gets away with it.”

“And?”

“And I don’t know what happens,” he said, “because I’ll find out by writing it, but it feels as though I do know what happens, all of it, except not on a conscious level. But it’s all down there waiting for me to dig it out.” He leaned back in his chair. “Anyway, I’m what, eight hundred words in? I’ll be covering old ground for the first several thousand words, but it’s all preface to his life in New York, and what it’s like for him to create a life founded on having gotten away with murder. How that’s empowering in certain ways and constraining in others. I guess sooner or later it all has to come back and bite him in the ass, but just what bites him and what part of his ass gets the tooth marks, well, I’ll wait for the book to tell me that.” He took a breath. “So? What do you think?”

“What I think,” she said, “is that Maury Winters isn’t going to have to worry about getting paid.”