“Some people,” Hanks said, “are too fucking clever for their own good.”
“He didn’t try to forge Max’s handwriting. Just numbers, cryptic enough to make it look like Max didn’t want anyone to know what they meant. But Max was a calligrapher. He wrote numbers in the old style. He crossed his sevens.”
“That’s not all he crossed,” Hanks said.
“Darryl Wilder came to Los Angeles to kill you,” I said. “You and someone else he never got around to. You’re from Walpole, New Hampshire. On some bizarre level, you think you’re still in the closet. You like the closet, Ferris. You told me so, remember?”
He tried to move, groaned, and abandoned it. “If you’re going to stay over there, would you at least help me turn over? This might be a little more interesting if I could watch you as you tell it.”
“Watch your TV. You’re never going to walk through your house again, so you might as well take a final look.”
“And I’m not allergic to flowers,” he said.
“He read about you somewhere, or heard about you. You represented a new phase in his career. Somebody famous, a trophy kill. He probably came up to the gate one night-I’m sure you don’t answer ads in Nite Line any more than Max did-and he probably told you he wanted to be an actor. Henry said that still happens from time to time. He hadn’t counted on Henry, though. After a few days he made his move, and Henry stopped him. Is that right?”
“It seems I was wrong,” Ferris said. “I don’t know how this comes out.”
“When Henry had taken care of Wilder, tied him up and stuffed him in a cupboard or one of your dungeons or something, you began to think about putting together a deal. That’s what you do, remember? Henry said it best: ‘Agents don’t do anything. They get other people to do things. They’re not actors, they’re not writers, they’re not killers. Other people do the work.’ ”
“Henry said that?” He sounded hurt.
“Henry persuaded Wilder to tell the two of you what he was up to. Henry can be very persuasive. So you proposed a three-point deal. Point one. You didn’t call the police. Point two. You told Wilder about Max, probably making him out to be what he looked like from the outside, an old man who preyed on helpless young ones. Point three. You offered him something-money, or a movie career-to do his act on Max. A man even more famous than you are.”
“Just to keep you talking until Henry gets back,” Hanks said, “let’s say I promised him fifty thousand dollars. Could I have a drink of water?”
“So he placed the ad in the paper, just like he always did-you probably wrote it, even though you knew Max would never see it-and you told him where he’d be likely to meet Max. And Darryl took it from there. He put the ad in Max’s pocket-he wanted the credit for the kill-he used Max’s computer to write some letters I found on a computer bulletin board, he even wrote letters to Max, which Max never read. You probably wrote the letters from Max, too.”
“Your characters aren’t consistent,” Hanks said. “If Darryl was a compulsive, he would have to do things his way. The way he always did them. The act of writing to Max would have been important to him. That’s the way he did it before, right? So let’s say I arranged a meeting-just talking story here-and Darryl sort of got things going and then told Max he had to go back to, I think it was Nebraska, and he set himself up somewhere in L.A. and started writing letters to Max and sending them to a post office box for forwarding. And Max wrote back out of the inexhaustible goodness of his heart, asking Darryl to come back to Los Angeles so Max could help him do whatever Max thought he could help him do. If you really want me as the heavy, though, I might have drafted a few points for Darryl’s letters. Setting the bait, you might say.”
“And Max took the bait, and Darryl killed him, and-and what? You decided not to pay him?”
“If I’d offered him fifty thousand dollars,” Hanks said, “I might have rethought it. That’s a lot of money to pay someone who’s doing something he enjoys.”
“You’re used to dealing with actors.”
“If you’re suggesting that I usually do business with people who don’t kill for their jollies, I’ll concede that.”
“You thought you could get away with it. You must have figured he’d just disappear. After all, you had Henry to protect you, and you could put Darryl in jail. Or worse.”
He didn’t say anything. He seemed glued to the screen of the TV, but I could sense him straining to listen.
“But you didn’t know about the dog tags. You didn’t know he couldn’t leave without them. All you knew was that he was still here, still in Los Angeles, and that made you nervous. Did he phone you?”
A deep sigh. “It’s your story.”
“Let’s say you got nervous enough to decide to pay him. And when you found out about the tags, you decided you’d give them to him. At the wake. And all the time, you were acting like Max’s misunderstood friend, paying for his farewell party.”
He lifted a hand above the covers. “I said I’d pay for the wake before I learned anything about the tags.”
“Hell, Ferris, the wake was a chance to pay Darryl anyway, if he showed up. Or kill him. Have Henry kill him, I mean. You tried that once, didn’t you? Henry had orders to go into that apartment ahead of me. If he’d killed Wilder, would you have gone through with the wake? Or would you have begged off, saved a little money?”
“That’s a low blow.”
“I couldn’t aim low enough to hit you.”
The Yorkies were sensing Hanks’s agitation now, getting up and changing their positions on the bed. One of them jumped down, raised a leg, and started licking itself nervously.
“Stop that, Dolly,” Hanks commanded. “It’s disgusting.” He turned his neck, allowing me a view of his battered profile. His face was an unhealthy yellow, made more livid by the dark circles incised beneath his eyes. “And if I had done any of this feverish nonsense, why would I have done it? What did I have to gain? Have you taken it that far?”
Something moved behind me in the hallway. I kept my eyes on Hanks’s face. “Max left you. Max was the only person who ever left you. You tried to destroy him in the press when he quit the show. Then, after years without contact, you started trying to reach him. Maybe you had a fantasy of forgiving him. You have to have a lot of power over someone to forgive them. And he stiffed you. No response. No power, Ferris. After all those years of waiting, after all you’d done for him, after you condescended to fall in love with him, you couldn’t get Max Grover to pick up a telephone.”
“You think this was about power?” His position had to be uncomfortable, but he held it, the muscular neck rigid with effort.
“I think you’re about power, Ferris. I think it’s what keeps your heart beating. Orchestra conductors live to be older than anyone. They say it’s all that arm waving, but I think it’s the naked exercise of power.”
“Wait a minute.” His broad mouth stretched into a taut straight line and he closed his eyes, and moved beneath the blankets. The mouth opened just wide enough to emit a moan. Veins popped into relief beneath the yellowish skin, and then his upper lip lifted in a grimace, revealing his teeth, and I saw why he’d perfected the half-smile. His teeth were as false as George Washington’s. When he let his head fall back on the pillow, he was lying on his back. He opened his eyes and aimed them at me, as flat and opaque as buttons.
“Max sentenced me to death,” he said. His forehead and upper lip gleamed with sweat. Behind him, on the television screen, someone moved in the hallway outside the door. “After Max, there was nobody else for me. For years I lived with it. I had no choice, so it became one of the things I had to learn to live with. One of many. You have no idea, at your age, some of the things we have to live with.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”