Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Why do we have to know all this?”

“Beginning to bother you, Tim?”

“Some.”

“ ‘Because I am involved with mankind,’ ” he quoted.

“You’ll learn more tomorrow, I think. Get the chessboard.”

I did learn more the next day. I learned first to forget about Roy Teale. I had not recognized his name, but when I found him I saw that he was a man who had been at the funeral, as he might have been expected to be. I also learned, in the barbershop, that he was carrying on a truly passionate love affair, but with his own wife. He sat in a chair and grinned while two of the men ragged him about it.

I left, knowing what I had come to learn; if I’d stayed much longer I’d have had to get another haircut, and I scarcely needed one. I’d taken the car into town that day. It was colder than usual, and the snow was deep. I got into the car and drove to Thurman Goodin’s service station. Mr. Bane usually had me fill the car at the station a few blocks to the north, but I did want to see Goodin. He and Robert Hardesty were the only names left on our list. If neither had been the woman’s lover, then we were back where we’d started.

A high school boy worked afternoons and evenings for Goodin, but the boy had not come yet, and Thurman Goodin came out to the pump himself. While the tank filled he came over to the side of the car and rested against the door. His face needed shaving. He leaned his long hard body against the car door and said it had been a long time since he’d put any gas into the car.

“Mr. Bane doesn’t get out much anymore,” I said, “and I mostly walk except when the weather’s bad.”

“Then I’m glad for the bad weather.” He lit a cigarette, and inhaled deeply. “Anyway, this buggy usually tanks up over to Kelsey’s place. You had better than half a tankful; you could have made it over there without running dry, you know.”

I gave him a blank look, then turned it around by saying, “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you. I was thinking about that woman who was killed.”

I almost jumped at the sight of his face. A nerve twitched involuntarily, a thing he could not have controlled, but he might have covered up the other telltale signs. His eyes gave him away, and his hands, and the movements of his mouth.

“You mean Mrs. Avery,” he said.

His wife was her cousin, Mr. Bane had told me. So he should have been at her funeral, and now should have been calling her Rachel or Rachel Avery. I wanted to get away from him!

“I was at the funeral,” I said.

“Funerals,” he said. “I got a business to run. Listen, I’ll tell you something. Everybody dies. Fast or slow, old or young, it don’t make a bit of difference. That’s two twenty-seven for the gas.”

He took three dollars and went into the station. He came back with the change and I took it from him. My hand shook slightly. I dropped a dime.

“Everybody gets it sooner or later,” he said. “Why knock yourself out about it?”

When I told all this to Joseph Cameron Bane he leaned back in his chair with a sparkle in his eyes and the ghost of a smile on his pale lips. “So it’s Thurman Goodin,” he said. “I knew his father rather well. But I knew everybody’s father, Tim, so that’s not too important, is it? Tell me what you know.”

“Sir?”

“Project, extend, extrapolate. What do you know about Goodin? What did he tell you? Put more pieces into the puzzle, Tim.”

I said, “Well, he was her lover, of course. Not for very long, but for some space of time. It was nothing of long standing, and yet some of the glow had worn off.”

“Go on, Tim.”

“I’d say he made overtures for form’s sake and was surprised when she responded. He was excited at the beginning, and then he began to be frightened of it all. Oh, this is silly, I’m making it all up—”

“You’re doing fine, boy.”

“He seemed glad she was dead. No, I’m putting it badly. He seemed relieved, and guilty about feeling relieved. Now he’s safe. She died accidentally, and no one will ever find him out, and he can savor his memories without shivering in the night.”

“Yes.” He poured bourbon into his glass, emptying the bottle. Soon he would ask me to bring him another. “I agree,” he said, and sipped at his whiskey almost daintily.

“Now what do we do?”

“What do you think we do, Tim?”

I thought about this. I said we might check with persons in Harmony Falls and trace Dean Avery’s movements there. Or, knowing her lover’s name, knowing so much that no one else knew, we might go to the police. We had no evidence, but the police could turn up evidence better than we, and do more with it once they had it.

He looked into the fire. When he did speak, I thought at first that he was talking entirely to himself and not to me at all. “And splash her name all over the earth,” he said, “and raise up obscene court trials and filth in the newspapers, and pit lawyers against one another, and either hang him or jail him or free him. Ruin Thurman Goodin’s marriage, and ruin Rachel Avery’s memory.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

He spun quickly around. His eyes glittered. “Don’t you? Tim, Timothy, don’t you truthfully understand?” He hesitated, groped for a phrase, then stopped and looked pointedly at his empty glass. I found a fresh bottle in the cupboard, opened it, handed it to him. He poured a drink but did not drink it.

He said, “My books always sold well, you know. But I had bad press. The small town papers were always kind, but the real critics... I was always being charged with sentimentality. They used words like cloying and sugary and unrealistic. ” I started to say something but he silenced me with an upraised palm. “Please, don’t leap to my defense. I’m making a point now, not lamenting a misspent literary youth. Do you know why I stopped writing? I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone. There’s never been a reason to tell. I stopped, oh, not because critics were unkind, not because sales were disappointing. I stopped because I discovered that the critics, bless them, were quite right.”

“That’s not true!”

“But it is, Tim. I never wrote what you could honestly call sentimental slop, but everything always came out right, every book always had a happy ending. I simply wanted it to happen that way, I wanted things to work out as they ought to work out. Do you see? Oh, I let my people stay in character, that was easy enough. I was a good plot man and could bring that off well enough, weaving intricate webs that led inexorably to the silver lining in every last one of the blacker clouds. The people stayed true but the books became untrue, do you see? Always the happy ending, always the death of truth.”

“In Cabot’s House you had an unhappy ending.”

“Not so. In Cabot’s House I had death for an ending, but a death is not always an occasion for sorrow. Perhaps you’re too young to know that, or to feel it within. You’ll learn it soon enough. But to return to the point, I saw that my books were false. Good pictures of this town, of some people who lived either in it or in my mind or in both, but false portraits of life. I wrote a book, then, or tried to; an honest one, with loose threads at the end and — what was that precious line of Salinger’s? Yes. With a touch of squalor, with love and squalor. I couldn’t finish it. I hated it.”

He picked up the glass, set it down again, the whiskey untouched. “Do you see? I’m an old man and a fool. I like things to come out right — neat and clean and sugary, wrapped with a bow, and a smile for the ending. No police, no trials, no public washing of soiled underwear. I think we are close enough now. I think we have enough of it.” He picked up his glass once more and this time drained it. “Get the chessboard.”