Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘Yes, but everybody—’

‘And feces, which we haven’t yet identified’ — he sniffed meditatively — ‘as well as oil and alcohol stains, what might be lipstick, the usual. Or so we thought. But then, under the microscope, we discovered a fleck of old blue paint and a—’

‘Blue?’

He smiled flickeringly. Bob, watching us, scratched out a note. ‘Mmm, or green, gray, something like that, and a touch of rust. Curious, isn’t it? Of course, blood, paint, rust — just a pair of dirty shorts, you might say. But we found something else. Look: do you see that hole? Well! You’ll agree, only one instrument could make a perforation like that! If we find the weapon that did it, we’ll have our … our perpetrator …’

I knew there was something I should be doing, or saying (at my feet lay a photo of Ros on her back, dressed in a pith helmet and gunbelt, and sucking off a tiger that crouched over her, lapping at her sex with a huge rough tongue — how did we do that? I couldn’t remember, but I did remember the one we shot with Ros as the tiger: that one scared me to this day …), but before I could get my thoughts in order (some vague sense of entrapment: I was trying to play back the recent exchanges), Fred came back in behind me with a fresh sandwich and Howard: ‘We caught him with his thumb in the old pudding,’ Fred reported around a half-chewed mouthful, and the Inspector raised his brows at me as though to say: Haven’t I just told you so?

Howard, sagging flabbily in Fred’s grip — shirttails out, broken glasses hooked over one ear and the tip of his pink nose, thin gray-blond hair falling loosely over his brow like a lowered scrim — held his stained finger up in front of his nose, trying to focus his weak eyes on it. ‘Something … spesh …,’ he mumbled and put it in his mouth. Fred clipped him ferociously behind the ears, kicked him in the belly as he hit the floor.

‘Stop!’ I protested. ‘You’ve got to understand — he just lost his wife—! ’

Fred whirled round on me, whipping out his nightstick, sandwich clamped in his jaws, Bob unsnapped his holster, elbow crooked behind his back. ‘All right, all right,’ said Pardew, ‘that will do!’ The cops eased up, their hunched shoulders dropping, backs straightening, though they continued to watch me with narrowed eyes. Howard gurgled miserably into the carpet at my feet, his horn-rimmed spectacles crushed once and for all beneath him. Poor Howard. I understood what the others could not: that there was nothing mischievous or prurient about what he had done, that for him it was simply a matter of aesthetic need. He was an art critic. A good one. He had to know.

On a signal from Pardew, Bob and Fred hauled Howard to his feet and dragged him, weak-kneed and drooling, over to their work area. ‘The important thing,’ the Inspector was saying, his finger in his nose, ‘is to keep your eyes open, to miss nothing, not just to look, but to see — true percipience is an art, but you must work at it, it’s the first thing you learn in this game.’ He fished a long string of mucus from his nose like a snail from its shell and laid it in my handkerchief. His two assistants were taking caliper measurements of Howard’s head and face. ‘I’ve solved crimes with my ears, my mouth, even my toes and the seat of my pants, but mostly I’ve solved them up here. In the old conk.’

‘Well, he’s got the thick lips and swollen eyelids, all right,’ Fred was saying, putting the last of the sandwich in his mouth and mumbling around it, ‘but the hair’s too thin and the jaw’s not right.’

‘How about bumps?’

‘It’s a little like sorting out the grammar of a sentence,’ the Inspector went on. He was studying the string of mucus in my handkerchief. ‘You have the object there before you and evidence at least of the verb.’ He folded the mucus into the handkerchief and handed it back to me. ‘But you have to reach back in time to locate the subject. I say, locate—’

‘Ah, you can keep it, I have—’

‘ Take it! ’

‘What about the left one?’ Bob was asking, and Fred, chewing, said: ‘Definitely different from the right.’

‘It — he is what I came in here to tell you about,’ I said, and wiped my hands on my shirt. Fred had grabbed a hank of Howard’s hair and jerked his head forward: ‘Crikey, look! He’s wearing somebody’s flopper-stoppers!’ ‘Fucking weirdo.’ Fred plucked a strand of hair, scraped some dirt from Howard’s ear, made him spit on a glass slide, while Bob scratched away in a notepad, muttering to himself. ‘It’s about his wife, you see — she’s up in the bathtub, we just—’

‘ One thing at a time! ’ The Inspector rapped his briar pipe smartly against the ashtray. ‘ We’re scientists here, not sightseers! ’

‘Say, speaking of your old chamber of commerce,’ Fred put in over his shoulder (they had pulled Howard over to the inkpad and roller and were undoing his pants), ‘you got a real problem up there!’

‘I know. There’s a plumber—’

‘Come on, apeshit, stand up straight!’ Bob growled, kneeing Howard in the butt.

‘Or if sightseers,’ the Inspector added thoughtfully, fitting the empty pipe into his mouth, ‘then sightseers of a very special kind.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Is that a hernia scar?’ Bob asked.

Fred leaned closer. ‘Looks like it.’

‘I mean, sightseers not of place, but of time.’ Pardew picked up some watches from the pile and began laying them out in single file. ‘We tend to think of time as something that passes by,’ he said around his pipe, ‘a kind of endless flow, like a river, coming out of nowhere and going into nowhere, with space the theater in which this drama of pure process is acted out, as it were.’ When he ran out of room on the desk, he added five or six watches at a forty-five degree angle to the last one, turning it into a kind of checkmark. ‘But what if it’s the other way around? What if it’s the world that’s insubstantial, time the immovable stage for its ghostly oscillations? Eh?’ The checkmark had become an arrow. From my perspective it was pointed from right to left.

‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ said Fred, ‘that ain’t the one in the photos.’

‘And if it’s a stage,’ the Inspector continued, picking up a large gold pocketwatch and pointing to its face, ‘ if it’s there in its entirety, the script all written, so to speak, a kind of cyclorama which seems to move only because we, like these hands here, move through it, then it should be possible, if we could just overcome our perceptual limitations, to visit any part of it, including the no-longer and the not-yet! ’ He was jabbing at these places on the watch, and it brought to mind a play Ros was in called Vanished Days , the one in which, having poisoned her husband, she descended the stairs to receive the news of his death. ‘This idea first came to me — and you can imagine the potential consequences for criminalistics! — when I was working on the case of the West Indian omphaloclast, wherein I ran into the problem of the exact — what are you smiling about?’

‘I’m sorry. I was thinking of …’

‘You wouldn’t think it was funny if you’d been one of his victims!’

‘No …’ At the first rehearsal, she’d come bouncing down the stairs and crossed over to the guy who’d brought the news, reached into his pants, and given him a twist that had sent him yowling and stumbling into the wings. ‘No, no, Ros!’ the director had shouted. ‘You’re supposed to grab up the clock and wind it!’ Or such at least was the legend. One of them …