“Do you know,” I asked him, “if Iverson or anyone else at the Central Falls Police Department mentioned me to him by name?” Tyndale lit a cigarette. “No,” he said, “but I'm pretty sure no one there did.”
“Why not?”
“It would have been unprofessional. When you're building a case-even one that dies as fast as this one did-every name the perp doesn't know or even might not know becomes a poker chip.”
Any relief I might have felt was short-lived.
“But the guy would have to be pretty dumb not to know. Unless, that is, he mailed the photos to every publisher in New York. Think he might have done that?”
“No,” I said dismally. “No other publisher in New York would have responded to his query letter in the first place.”
“I see.”
Tyndale was up, clearing away the styrofoam coffee cups, making those end-of-the-party gestures that meant he was hoping I'd put an egg in my shoe and beat it.
“One more question and I'll get out of your hair,” I said. “The other photos were obvious fakes. Pififul. How come they look so bad and these other fakes look so damn good?”
“Maybe Detweiller himself set up the 'Sakred Seance' photos and someone else-Central Fall's answer to Tom Savini, say-made up the 'sakrifice victim. ' Or maybe Detweiller did them all and purposely made the other ones look bad so you'd take these more seriously.”
“Why would he do that?”
“So you'd stub your toe just the way you have, maybe. Maybe that's how he gets off.”
“But he got arrested in the process!”
He looked at me, almost pityingly. “Here's a guy who's in a bar, Mr. Kenton, and he's got these cigarette loads. So just for a joke, he loads up one of his buddy's cigarettes while his buddy's in the john or picking out some tunes on the juke. Seems to him like the funniest idea in the world at the time, even though the buddy's sense of humor only begins when a load explodes in someone else's cigarette, and the guy doing the loading now should know it. So the buddy comes back, and pretty soon he gets to the loaded pill. Takes two puffs and kabang! Tobacco all over his face, powder-burns on his fingers, and he spills his beer in his lap. And his buddy-his previous buddy-is sitting there on the next stool, just about laughing himself into a hemorrhage. Do you see all that?”
“Yes,” I said reluctantly, because I did.
“Now the guy loading the cigarette was not a feeb, although I got to say that in my own personal estimation a guy who thinks loading another guy's cigarette is funny is a little bit deficient in the sensa-yuma department. But even if his sensa-yuma starts with some guy getting the shit scared out of him and spilling his beer all over his balls, you'd think a guy who wasn't a feeb would be at least interested enough in keeping his teeth inside his head not to do it. Yet they do. They do it all the fucking time. Now, being a literary man—” (He obviously didn't know about Gash Me, My Darling, Ants from Hell, and the forthcoming Flies from Hell, Ruth)
“-can you tell me why he goes ahead, and ends up picking his teeth up offa the bar on account of he might be able to hawk the fillings?”
“Because he has no sense of futurity,” I said dismally, and for the first time, Ruth, I felt as if I could really see Carlos Detweiller.
“Huh? I don't know that word.”
“He doesn't know-isn't able to see ahead to the outcome.”
“Yeah, you're a literary man, all right. I couldn't have said it that good in a thousand years.”
“And that's my answer?”
“That's your answer.” He clapped me on the shoulder and led me toward the door. “Go home, Mr. Kenton. Have a drink, a shower, and then another drink. Watch some TV. Get a night's sleep. You did your duty as a citizen, for Christ's sake. Most people would have just tossed those pictures aside... or saved them for their scrapbooks. That sounds weird, but I'm a police-type guy, not a literary-type guy, and I know that some people do that, too. Go home. Forget it. And content yourself with this-if the guy's book is as bad as you said, you just sent him one hell of a rejection slip.”
So I did just what he said, m'darling-went home, had a drink, had a shower, had a meal, had another drink, watched TV, went to bed. Then after about three hours in the rack with no sleep-I kept seeing that picture, with the slit in the chest and the dripping heart-I got up, had about three more drinks, watched a John Wayne movie called Wake of the Red Witch on TV (John Wayne looks a lot better in a GI helmet than he does in a diving helmet, I want to tell you), went to bed again, and woke up with a hangover.
It's been a couple of days since all of this went down, and I think-think-that things are beginning to return to normal, both at Zenith House and inside my head. I think (think) it's over-but it's going to be one of those Incidents that haunt me all my life, I guess, like the dreams I used to have as a kid in which I stood up to salute the flag and my pants fell down. Or, even better, there was the time Bill Gelb, my illustrious co-editor at Zenith, told me about. He said he told this joke to a guy at a cocktail party: How do you stop five black guys from raping a white chick? Answer: give them a basketball. “I thought the guy I told it to just had a good tan until he threw his drink in my face and walked away,” Bill said. That's the kind of story I could never tell on myself, which may be one of the reasons I haven't lost all of my respect for Bill, although he's a bigoted, lazy, horse's ass. All of which is to say I feel sort of like a horse's ass... but at least it's over. If all of this seems to make me a hysteric-someone who would eagerly testify at the Salem witch-trials-please write and break our engagement soonest... because if that's the case, I wouldn't marry me either.
As for me, I'm sort of clinging to what Tyndale said-that I acted in good faith as a citizen. The one thing I'll not do is send you the photos, which were returned to me today. They might give you the sort of dreams I've been having-and those dreams are definitely ungood. I've come to the conclusion that all special effects wizards must be frustrated surgeons. In fact, if Roger gives me the okay, I'm going to burn them.
I love you, Ruth.
Your adoring horse's ass,
John
from the office of the editor-in-chief TO: John Kenton DATE: 2/2/81
MESSAGE: Go ahead and burn them. I never want to hear about Carlos Detweiller again.
Listen, John-a little excitement's fine, but if we don't start some action here at Zenith, we're all going to be looking for jobs. I've heard that Apex may be hunting buyers. Which is like looking for dodo birds or pterodactyls. We've got to have a book or books that will make some noise by this summer, and that means we better start looking yesterday. Start shaking the trees, okay?
Roger
interoffice memo FROM: John TO: Roger RE: Tree-shaking
What trees? Zenith House exists on the Great Plains of American publishing, and you damned well know it.
John
from the office of the editor-in-chief TO: John Kenton DATE: 2/3/81
MESSAGE: Find a tree or find a job. That's all there is, sweets.
Roger
February 4, 1981 Mr. John “Judas Priest” Kenton Zenith Asshole-House, Publishers of Kaka 490 Avenue of Dog-Shit New York, New York 10017