Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

I got the board. We played, and he won, and my mind spent more of its time with other pawns than the ones we played with now. The image grew on me. I saw them all, Rachel Avery, Dean Avery, Thurman Goodin, carved of wood and all of a shade, either black or white; weighted with lead, and bottomed with a circlet of felt, green felt, and moved around by our hands upon a mirthless board.

“You’re afraid of this,” he said once. “Why?”

“Meddling, perhaps. Playing the divinity. I don’t know, Mr. Bane. Something that feels wrong, that’s all.”

“Paddy from the peat bog, you’ve not lost your sense of the miraculous, have you? Wee folk, and gold at the rainbow’s end, and things that go bump in the night, and man a stranger and afraid in someone else’s world. Don’t move there, Tim, your queen’s en prise, you’ll lose her.”

We played three games. Then he straightened up abruptly and said, “I don’t have the voice to mimic, I’ve barely any voice at all, and your brogue’s too thick for it. Go up to the third floor, would you, and in the room all the way back, there’s a closet with an infernal machine on its shelf — a tape recorder. I bought it with the idea that it might make writing simpler. Didn’t work at all; I had to see the words in front of me to make them real. I couldn’t sit like a fool talking at a machine. But I had fun with the thing. Get it for me, Tim, please.”

It was where he’d said, in a box carpeted with dust. I brought it to him, and we went into the kitchen. There was a telephone there. First he tested the recorder, explaining that the tape was old and might not work properly. He turned it on and said, “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” Then he winked at me and said, “Just like a typewriter; it’s easiest to resort to formula when you want to say something meaningless, Tim. Most people have trouble talking when they have nothing to say. Though it rarely stops them, does it? Let’s see how this sounds.”

He played it back and asked me if the voice sounded like his own. I assured him it did. “No one ever hears his own voice when he speaks,” he said. “I didn’t realize I sounded that old. Odd.”

He sent me for bourbon. He drank a bit, then had me get him the phone book. He looked up a number, read it to himself a time or two, then turned his attention again to the recorder.

“We ought to plug it into the telephone,” he said.

“What for, sir?”

“You’ll see. If you connect them lawfully, they beep every fifteen seconds, so that the other party knows what you’re about, which hardly seems sensible. Know anything about these gadgets?”

“Nothing,” I replied.

He finished the glass of whiskey. “Now what if I just hold the little microphone to the phone like this? Between my ear and the phone, hmm? Some distortion? Oh, won’t matter, won’t matter at all.”

He dialed a number. The conversation, as much as I heard of it, went something like this:

“Hello, Mr. Taylor? No, wait a moment, let me see. Is this four-two-one-five? Oh, good. The Avery residence? Is Mrs. Avery in? I don’t... Who’m I talking with, please?... Good. When do you expect your wife, Mr. Avery?... Oh, my!... Yes, I see, I see. Why, I’m terribly sorry to hear that, surely... Tragic. Well, I hate to bother you with this, Mr. Avery. Really, it’s nothing... Well, I’m Paul Wellings of Wellings and Doyle Travel Agency... Yes, that’s right, but I wish... Certainly. Your wife wanted us to book a trip to Puerto Rico for the two of you and... Oh? A surprise, probably... Yes, of course, I’ll cancel everything. This is frightful. Yes, and I’m sorry for disturbing you at this—”

There was a little more, but not very much. He rang off, a bitter smile on his pale face, his eyes quite a bit brighter now than usual. “A touch of macabre poetry,” he said. “Let him think she was planning to run off with Goodin. He’s a cold one, though. So calm, and making me go on and on, however awkward it all was. And now it’s all ready on the tape. But how can I manage this way?”

He picked up a phone and called another number. “Jay? This is Cam. Say, I know it’s late, but is your tape recorder handy? Well, I’d wanted to do some dictation and mine’s burned out a connection or something. Oh, just some work I’m doing. No, I haven’t mentioned it, I know. It’s something different. If anything ever comes of it, then I’ll have something to tell you. But is it all right if I send Tim around for your infernal machine? Good, and you’re a prince, Jay.”

So he sent me to pick up a second recorder from Jason Falk. When I brought it to him, he positioned the two machines side by side on the table and nodded. “I hate deception,” he said, “yet it seems to have its place in the scheme of things. I’ll need half an hour or so alone, Tim. I hate to chase you away, but I have to play with these toys of mine.”

I didn’t mind. I was glad to be away from him for a few moments, for he was upsetting me more than I wanted to admit. There was something bad in the air that night, and more than my Irish soul was telling me so. Joseph Cameron Bane was playing God. He was manipulating people, toying with them. Writing them, and with no books to put them in.

It was too cold for walking. I got into the car and drove around the streets of the town, then out of the town and off on a winding road that went up into the hills beyond the town’s edge. The snow was deep but no fresh snow was falling, and the moon was close to full and the sky cluttered with stars. I stopped the car and got out of it and took a long look back at the town below, his town. I thought it would be good right now to be a drinking man and warm myself from a bottle and walk in the night and pause now and then to gaze at the town below.

“You were gonelong,” he said.

“I got lost. It took time to find my way back.”

“Tim, this still bothers you, doesn’t it? Of course it does. Listen to me. I am going to put some people into motion, that is all. I am going to let some men talk to one another, and I am going to write their lines for them. Do you understand? Their opening lines. They wouldn’t do it themselves. They wouldn’t start it. I’ll start it, and then they’ll help it play itself out.”

He was right, of course. Avery could not be allowed to get away with murder, nor should the dead woman’s sins be placed on public display for all to stare at. “Now listen to this,” he said, bright-eyed again. “I’m proud of myself, frankly.”

He dialed a number, then poised his index finger above one of the buttons on the recorder. He was huddled over the table so that the telephone mouthpiece was just a few inches from the recorder’s speaker. The phone was answered, and he pressed a button and I heard Dean Avery’s voice. “Goodin?”

A pause. Then, “This is Dean Avery. I know all about it, Goodin. You and my wife. You and Rachel. I know all about it. And now she’s dead. An accident. Think about it, Goodin. You’ll have to think about it.”

He replaced the receiver.

“How did you...”

He looked at my gaping mouth and laughed aloud at me. “Just careful editing,” he said. “Playing from one machine to the next, back and forth, a word here, a phrase there, all interwoven and put together. Even the inflection can be changed by raising or lowering the volume as you bounce from one machine to the other. Isn’t it startling? I told you I have fun with this machine. I never got anything written on it, but I had a good time fooling around with it.”

“All those phrases — you even had his name.”

“It was good of you to call. And the tail syllable of some other word, happen, I think. The two cropped out and spliced together and tossed back and forth until they fit well enough. I was busy while you were gone, Tim. It wasn’t simple to get it all right.”