“What book?” I groaned obtusely.
The small one wiped sweat from his face and smeared it on his pants. “Let’s not play games, Mr. Dean. You did considerable work editing The Handbook of Crime for Terry Dean.”
“Harry West,” I said.
“What?”
“The Handbook of Crime was written by Harry West, not Terry Dean.”
“The guy who took a dive off the harbor bridge,” the chin said to the thin lips.
“Blaming it on a dead man because he can’t corroborate your story is a little too convenient. I don’t like it.”
“Do you have to like something before it becomes fact?” I asked, and before they could respond, I said, “Excuse me a minute.” I could feel my lunch coming up for air. I grabbed a bowl and threw up into it. A long silver thread of saliva connected my lower lip to the edge of the bowl.
“Listen, Dean. Are you going to make a statement or not?”
I motioned to the bowl and said, “I just made it.”
“Look. There’s no need to be hostile. We’re not charging you with anything, we’re just making some preliminary inquiries. Could you tell us how exactly you edited the book? Where did you and Terry meet?”
“Your brother isn’t the most educated man in the world, Mr. Dean. There must have been a lot of spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and the like.”
I looked over to my mother, who was staring out the window in a sort of trance.
“We’ve looked into it. Editors work closely with their authors.”
“Did your brother have any accomplices? We’re investigating some new crimes.”
I said nothing, but I too had read the small print in the newspapers. Just like artists, murderers are seduced by the dazzling, unexpected fusion of originality and success, and one or two would-be criminals had taken to plagiaristic copycat killings in the months after Terry’s arrest, but they lacked spark and innovation. When the Australian chess champion was found with the bishop and two pawns lodged in his throat, the nation gave it scant attention, not least because the wannabe vigilante hadn’t realized that chess is a game, not a sport.
Observing that I was in no state to answer their questions, one of the detectives said, “We’ll come back when you’re feeling a little better, Mr. Dean.”
After they left, my father shuffled down the hallway in his pajamas and paused at the door, looking from me to my mother and back at me, with a look on his face that I couldn’t quite read, before shuffling off again. For the record, I did not see the look as something sinister, and for all his bitterness and resentment toward me, I was still his son in a way. I never gave too much weight to his infamous list, nor to the possibility that his madness had taken him to a place where he could actually, willingly do me harm.
The following morning I heard my mother’s voice calling me in a half whisper, half gurgle, and when I opened my eyes, I saw that my suitcase was now fully packed and sitting by the door with my brown boots beside it, toes pointing into the corridor. My mother, with her paper-white face, was peering down at me. “Quick. You should go now,” she said, staring at me fixedly, but not at my eyes- at some other point on my face, perhaps my nose. “What’s happening?” I croaked, but she just pulled the sheets off the bed and tugged at my arm with surprising force. “Time to go, Marty. You go catch the bus now.” She kissed my sweaty forehead. “I love you very much, but don’t come back here,” she said. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t. “We came a long way together, Marty. I carried you, remember? But I can’t carry you this time. You have to go on your own. Come on, get a move on. You’re going to miss the bus.” She cupped her hand around the back of my head and gently eased me upright.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
We heard footsteps in the hallway, the floorboards creaking. My mother threw the sheets over me again and leapt into Terry’s bed. My father’s face appeared at the door, and he saw me still half propped up in bed.
“Feeling better?” he asked.
I shook my head, and when he left, I swiveled my head to see my mother’s eyes closed; she was pretending to be asleep.
Later I had only a vague, fleeting memory of all this, but the residual feeling remained, a feeling like walking into the middle of a Harold Pinter play and being asked immediately by a tribunal to explain it or be executed. My mother, for her part, seemed to remember none of it, and when I brought it up she told me I had been laid up all night in a crazy fever, babbling like a lunatic. I didn’t know what to believe.
Then things went from worse to cataclysmic.
It was hot, 104 degrees. A blazing southerly wind blew through the open window. I tried to eat some vegetable soup my father had made. My mother brought it in. I drank only two spoonfuls, but I couldn’t hold it down. I reached for the bowl and threw it all up. My head hung over the bowl and I left it there, staring stupidly into the kaleidoscopic face of my own vomit. There, in the spew, I saw perhaps the most horrifying thing I have ever seen in my entire life, and since then I’ve seen dogs sawn in half.
This is what I saw:
Two. Blue. Pellets.
That’s right, rat poison.
That’s right, rat poison.
I struggled for a while to figure out how I may have inadvertently swallowed them myself. But having not put one foot out of bed since my illness began, I just had to rule it out. That left only one answer. My stomach tightened like a vise. I’m being poisoned, I thought. He, my father, is poisoning me.
Let’s not beat around the bush: human feelings can be ridiculous. Thinking back to that moment, to how I felt at the realization that my stepfather was slowly murdering me, I did not feel anger. I did not feel outrage. I felt hurt. That’s right. That this man who I’d lived with my whole life, the man who married my mother and was for all practical purposes my father, was maliciously poisoning me to death hurt my feelings. Ridiculous!
I dropped the bowl so the vomit spilled onto the carpet and dribbled down the cracks in the floorboards. I looked and looked again, each time confirming that I was not hallucinating, as my mother had assured me the previous night.
My mother! What was her part in all this? She obviously knew- that was why she wanted me to escape, a desire that ended abruptly when she feared that if the murderer knew I was fleeing, he would abandon his languid plan on the spot and just take a knife to my guts or a pillow to my face.
Christ! What a pickle!
Keeping your calm while your stepfather tries to kill you is quite impossible. Watching your murderer scrunch up his face in disgust as he silently cleans up your vomit may have its darkly comic elements, but it’s also just so damn chilling, you want to curl into a fetal position and remain there until the next ice age.
I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I was consumed by a perverse curiosity to see what he’d do. I should say something, I thought, but what? Confronting your own assassin is a tricky business; you don’t want to trigger your own murder just for the sake of getting something off your chest.
“Next time, try to get it into the bowl,” he said blandly.
I said nothing, just stared at him as if he’d broken my heart.
When he was gone, my rational mind came home. What the fuck was I going to do? It seemed sensible, as the intended victim, to remove myself from the scene of the crime, so as to avoid the crime. Yes, it was time to test the theory of superhuman strength being bestowed on people in life-threatening situations. Because my body was no use, I was counting on my will to live to get me out of this Shakespearean family drama. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and got to my feet, using the side table for balance. I winced through the pain as my stomach contracted and twisted horribly. I went for my suitcase and noted it was still packed from the episode the night before. My feet struggled into my boots, and with great effort I began to walk: when you haven’t worn footwear in a while, even sandals feel as heavy as cement blocks. Trying to sneak out without a sound, I crept down the hallway. I could hear arguing from the living room. They were both screaming, my mother crying. There was the sound of breaking glass. They were fighting, physically. Maybe my mother had confronted him about his plot! At the door, I put down the suitcase and headed for the kitchen. What else could I do? I couldn’t leave my mother in my father’s psychotic hands. My course was clear. I had to kill my father (by marriage).