Стив Хокенсмит - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 6, June 2006

“He took Elizabeth away from you,” I said when he trailed off. “She seems to be a levelheaded girl. Was it all fun and games with her? Or was it the money?”

Dean smiled a twisted smile at me. “When he met Elizabeth, David professed to change. On the surface, he changed or he wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes with her. She thinks people should do constructive work, so he gave benefit performances of his magic show, using Elizabeth as a pretty stage prop and attention diverter. He contributed his racing purses to her favorite charities. He stopped chasing the local talent here in Hollywood, flew to Vegas for that, instead. He even talked about establishing a foundation for medical research at U.S.C. But someone killed him first.”

“Did you know many of his friends?”

“Elizabeth was kind to her ex-fiancé. I was invited to most of their parties. Sure, I knew a lot of David’s friends. Why?”

“Ever meet one called Max?” I asked softly.

The effect was electric. Dean Ness almost dropped his pink daiquiri. His eyebrows rose half an inch and his mouth fell even more.

“The police asked me that. They inquired about a Max Rome or Nome or Mone, something like that. Who in hell is he? Did Elizabeth mention him to you?”

“No, but the police think she knows who he is. I don’t think she does. But I hoped you would.”

“Never heard of the silly weirdo, except from the police and you.”

A phone rang in another room and while Ness answered it, I studied a silver-framed photograph of Elizabeth Anderson prominently displayed on an end table. It was inscribed, “Ever my love, Liz.”

“Ever is a relative term,” Dean Ness said over my shoulder when he returned. “That was my eternal-love-until-she-met-something-better on the phone. Elizabeth wants you to come to dinner at her apartment at eight o’clock sharp, tonight. I was not invited. I told her you’d be there, chum.”

“I might have had something else planned.”

“When ten million dollars invites you, you couldn’t possibly,” Dean Ness said with a sour little smile. People persist in seeing the world through their own eyes, I reflected, as I left him brooding in a corner of his elegant apartment.

I phoned Beverly and gave her my apologies for the dinner we had planned to have together, then called Elizabeth Anderson at the unlisted number she had given me and asked her where she lived. She hadn’t had the ten million long, but already was assuming that everyone knew where she was. It turned out to be a quiet little floor of a large apartment building, where she prepared me a simple meal of corned beef hash topped with a poached egg, then launched into a series of probing questions about my visit to the police. She apologized profusely for the size of the spread she was living in, saying that David had insisted that she start living in style before they were married. They had leased it before his death.

“You really don’t know anything about Max Nome,” I said, and she shook her head and started weeping again. “Maybe you don’t, girl, but your body knows him. I saw the readings from you polygraph test. Your blood pressure, pulse rate, and galvanic skin response all react to that crazy name. Don’t worry about it. If it’s as close to the surface as those readings indicate, I’m sure we can find it’s meaning.”

She mixed me a double margarita and we walked down into a sunken conversation pit that had been dug out of the huge expanse of her livingroom floor.

“Tell me about the relationship between Dean and David and you. Were the two of them close friends at one time?”

“Very close. They worked together at Cal State as lecturers, shared an apartment in Santa Monica. Dean was the well-to-do one, then, and David the poor relation from the boondocks. They’re second cousins, you know. They had no idea that David was going to inherit all of that money. When David had his shower of gold from a forgotten uncle in Washington, he moved out and started being the international playboy and jet-setter. Dean quit his job as an economics instructor and went to work instead as a stockbroker. I came into the picture then, met Dean at a party, almost got engaged, then ran into David a few months later. It may sound very corny, but it’s true. I was swept off my feet by David. He was Sir Galahad and Lancelot and James Bond and the Count of Monte Cristo all rolled into one.”

“What was he like? I never met him, you know, but I’ve heard strange tales about him.”

“They’re probably all true. David delighted in surprising and startling people. I don’t know exactly how he did everything, how he gathered the information, but he made it a point to find out little things about people before he met them, their birthdays, high schools, phone numbers, anniversaries, everything he could, then he’d spring these little isolated facts on them in casual conversation or while doing an impromptu magic display, and surprise everybody. I went to a party in Westwood with him and he told all the people in the room what their mother’s maiden names were. He told me later he got the information from a credit bureau at a few dollars a head. Another time, he had a dinner in his apartment and served each one of his guests, all fourteen of them, his favorite entrée and dessert. He wouldn’t tell me at first how he managed to do things like that, but I found out later it was just hard work and drudgery. He would get the information and memorize it. When I became his stage assistant, I helped him with the lists and it was pure rote memory. But to the uninitiated, it was a miraculous thing. It really surprised and mystified them.”

When she offered me another drink, I declined for two reasons. One was, I wanted to be able to climb out of that conversation pit. The first margarita had been that strong, and my head was buzzing. Secondly, I felt I had been given a clue to the mysterious Max Nome, and I wanted to break away from this beautiful, distracting girl and try to sort out our conversation mentally before the clue faded away. I left her abruptly and drove directly home, trying furiously to concentrate on what had been said, to review it so it would not die in my memory. All I managed to do at first was to give myself a headache.

I stayed up until one, jotting down everything I could recall, but it was no use. There was something buried in the mass of unrelated trivia, but I couldn’t pull it out through the tequila fumes. I staggered to bed in a sleepy stupor, grimly thinking that if only I could have borrowed David Landmaier’s fantastic memory, I could easily have dredged up the answer to the Maxnome riddle and then some.

Then began one hell of a night. It commenced with a lulu of a nightmare in which I was pursued down some very dark and twisting streets by a faceless, ghostly monster brandishing a bloody kitchen knife and yelling “Maxnome” at me in eldritch howls.

I awoke in a cold sweat, hoping that it would be at least six in the morning so I could get out of bed. I found it was only three fifteen. Trying desperately to go back to sleep, I was annoyed by an inane and idiotic phrase that began marching through my brain, back and forth like a huge saw. I tried to tell myself that clinical psychologists were supposed to be impervious to such nonsense, that people came to see me for help with silly problems. This line of reasoning failed to help, and the phrase continued to saw back and forth through my aching brain tissue.

Max Nome has pneumonia, that was the silly phrase. I tried to ignore it, disprove it, forget it, or destroy it, but it would not leave my poor, tortured brain. I finally sat up, turned the lights on, and tried to reason it away. I was using therapeutic technique on myself!

I told myself firmly that I was a fool to ignore the phrase. According to standard, classical doctrine, my unconscious was trying to tell me something important, and the only road back to sanity and sound sleep was to work out what it was trying to tell me. The unconscious is a devious and tricky thing, I reminded myself. Theoretically, it seldom comes out into the open and states anything directly. Instead, it persists in sneaking up on meanings in a misleading and wily manner.