Lawrence Block - The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

Another ho-hum exit notice, for every reader but Henry Bech. He knew what a deadly venom the deceased had harbored in her fangs.

“What’s happened?” Robin asked from across the table.

“Nothing’s happened,” he said.

“Then why do you look like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like a man who’s been told he’s won a million dollars but isn’t sure it’s worth it, what with all the tax problems.”

“What a strange, untrammeled imagination,” he said.

“Let me see the page you’re reading.”

“No. I’m still reading it.”

“Henry, are you going to make me stand up and walk around the table?”

He handed her the cream-cheese-stained obituary page. Robin, while the rounded points of her wide jaw thoughtfully clenched and unclenched on the last milky crumbs of her whole-bran flakes, flicked her quick brown eyes up and down the columns of print. Her eyes held points of red like the fur of a fox. Morning sun slanting through the big loft window made an outline of light, of incandescent fuzz, along her jaw. Her eyelashes glittered like a row of dewdrops on a spiderweb strand. “Who’s Deborah Frueh?” she asked. “Did you know her?”

“A frightful literary scold,” he said. “I never met the lady, I’m not sorry to say.”

“Did she ever review you or anything?”

“I believe she did, once or twice.”

“Favorably?”

“Not really.”

“Really unfavorably?”

“It could be said. Her reservations about my work were unhedged, as I vaguely recall. You know I don’t pay much attention to reviews.”

“And that Englishman last month, who fell in front of the subway train — didn’t you have some connection with him, too?”

“Darling, I’ve been publishing for over fifty years. I have slight connections with everybody in the print racket.”

“You’ve not been quite yourself lately,” Robin told him. “You’ve had some kind of a secret. You don’t talk to me the breezy way you used to. You’re censoring.”

“I’m not,” he said, hating to lie, standing as he was knee-deep in the sweet clover of Deborah Frueh’s extermination. He wondered what raced through that fat harpy’s mind in the last second, as the terrible-tasting cyanide nipped down her esophagus and halted the oxidation process within her cells. Not of him, certainly. He was one of multitudes of writers she had put in their places. He was three thousand miles away, the anonymous progenitor of Jason Johnson, Jr.

“Look at you!” Robin cried, on so high a note that her orange-juice glass emitted a surprised shiver. “You’re triumphant! Henry, you killed her.”

“How would I have done that?”

She was not balked. Her eyes narrowed. “At a distance, somehow,” she guessed. “You sent her things. A couple of days, when I came home, there was a funny smell in the room, like something had been burning.”

“This is fascinating,” Bech said. “If I had your imagination, I’d be Balzac.” He went on, to deflect her devastating insights, “Another assiduous critic of mine, Aldie Cannon — he used to be a mainstay of The New Republic but now he’s on PBS and the Internet — says I can’t imagine a thing. And hate women.”

Robin was still musing, her smooth young mien puzzling at the crimes to which she was an as yet blind partner. She said, “I guess it depends on how you define ‘hate.’ ”

But he loved her. He loved the luxurious silken whiteness of her slightly thickset young body, the soothing cool of her basically factual mind. He could not long maintain this wall between them, this ugly partition in the light-filled loft of their love match. The next day the Times ran a little follow-up squib on the same page as the daily book review — basically comic in its tone, for who would want to murder an elderly, overweight book critic and juvenile author — stating that the Seattle police had found suspicious chemical traces in Frueh’s autopsied body. Bech confessed to Robin. The truth rose irrepressible in his throat like the acid burn of partial regurgitation. Pushing the large black man who pushed a body that pushed Featherwaite’s. Writing Deborah Frueh three fan letters with doped return envelopes. Robin listened while reposing on his brown beanbag chair in a terry-cloth bathrobe. She had taken a shower, so her feet had babyish pink sides beneath the marble-white insteps with their faint blue veins. It was Sunday morning. She said when he was done, “Henry, you can’t just go around rubbing out people as if they existed only on paper.”

“I can’t? That’s where they tried to rub me out, on paper. They preyed on my insecurities, to shut off my creative flow. They nearly succeeded. I haven’t written nearly as much as I could have.”

“Was that their fault?”

“Partly,” he estimated. Perhaps he had made a fatal error, spilling his guts to this chesty broad. “Okay. Turn me in. Go to the bulls.”

“The bulls?”

“The police — haven’t you ever heard that expression? How about ‘the fuzz’? Or ‘the pigs’?”

“I’ve never heard them called that, either.”

“My God, you’re young. What have I ever done to deserve you, Robin? You’re so pure, so straight. And now you loathe me.”

“No, I don’t, actually. I might have thought I would, but in fact I like you more than ever.” She never said “love,” she was too post-Jewish for that. “I think you’ve shown a lot of balls, frankly, translating your resentments into action instead of sublimating them into art.”

He didn’t much like it when young women said “balls” or called a man “an asshole,” but today he was thrilled by the cool baldness of it. They were, he and his mistress, in a new realm, a computerized universe devoid of blame or guilt, as morally null as an Intel chip. There were only, in this purified universe, greater or lesser patches of electricity, and violence and sex were greater patches. She stood and opened her robe. She emitted a babyish scent, a whiff of sour milk; otherwise her body was unodiferous, so that Bech’s own aromas, the product of seven and a half decades of marination in the ignominy of organic life, stood out like smears on a white vinyl wall. Penetrated, Robin felt like a fresh casing, and her spasms came rapidly, a tripping series of orgasms made almost pitiable by her habit of sucking one of his thumbs deep into her mouth as she came. When that was over, and their pulse rates had leveled off, she looked at him with her fox-fur irises shining expectantly, childishly.

“So who are you going to do next?” she asked. Her pupils, those inkwells as deep as the night sky’s zenith, were dilated by excitement.

“Well, Aldie Cannon is very annoying,” Bech reluctantly allowed. “He’s a forty-something smart-aleck, from the West Coast somewhere. Palo Alto, maybe. He has one of these very rapid agile nerdy minds — whatever pops into it must be a thought. He began by being all over The Nation and The New Republic and then moved into the Vanity Fair/GQ orbit, writing about movies, books, TV, music, whatever, an authority on any sort of schlock, and then got more and more on radio and TV — they love that kind of guy, the thirty-second opinion, bing, bam — until now that’s basically all he does, that and write some kind of junk on the Internet, his own Web site, I don’t know — people send me printouts whenever he says anything about me, I wish they wouldn’t.”

“What sort of thing does he say?”

Bech shifted his weight off his elbow, which was hurting. Any joint in his body hurt, with a little use. His body wanted to retire but his raging spirit wouldn’t let it. “He says I’m the embodiment of everything retrograde in pre-electronic American letters. He says my men are sex-obsessed narcissistic brutes and all my female characters are just anatomically correct dolls.”