Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘Damn! I missed it!’ whispered the cameraman, staring at the equipment in his hand.

‘Nothing, however,’ Pardew continued, beginning to move slowly about the room, gazing first at one of us, then another (Scarborough and Benedetto, grunting, set the windowpanes down against the table), ‘is ever so straightforward as it seems on the face of it. We have facts, yes, a body, a place and a time, and all this associative evidence we’ve so painstakingly collected — but facts in the end are little more than surface scramblings of a hidden truth whose vaporous configuration escapes us even as it draws us on, insisting upon itself, absorbing our attention, compelling revelation.’ He peered abruptly up at the guy in the chalkstriped pants and undershirt, who was wiping his face with the towel but now stopped. ‘Yes, compelling! ’ Pardew repeated, raising one bony index finger, and the man stepped back a step. ‘Deduction, I am convinced, is linked au fond in an intimate but mysterious relation to this quest for the invariant, the hidden but essential core truth, this compulsive search for the nut.’ Dolph, who had just picked one up from the bowl, put it back. ‘It is, at any rate, my main desire,’ the Inspector went on, continuing his rounds, followed now by the TV cameraman, ‘and in pursuit of it, I had to ask myself’ — and now, pausing for effect, taking a contemplative puff on his pipe, he glanced up at my wife (her hand tightened on my arm, I clasped it, he watched this) — ‘ why? Eh? Whatever possessed — and I choose my words with care — whatever possessed our perpetrator, or perpetrators’ — he squinted briefly up at me, then turned to the others — ‘to commit this foul deed, this useless insolent vanity? I ask you!’ He had, moving on (my wife’s hand had relaxed and dropped away: ‘Were those once mine, Beni?’ she whispered over her shoulder), stopped in front of Regina, who, startled, shrank back, cronelike, in her bedsheet. ‘Was it fear? Jealousy? Moral outrage? Cupidity?’ Regina made a little squeaky noise and shook her head. Beni was whispering something to my wife about the inexpressible gratitude of his pudenda. ‘Well, I hope they were clean,’ she said. Pardew cocked his head up toward the rest of us. ‘Of course, all crime — even fraud, perfidy, indecent exposure, excessive indulgence’ — he was staring at each of us in turn, as the cameraman panned past the gaping faces — ‘all crime is at heart a form of life depreciation, a kind of psychic epilepsy, and so, in a real sense, there is always only one motive. Nevertheless …’ He gazed off, drawing meditatively on his pipe, then pinched the back of his neck under the white scarf. He studied his fingers and, smiling faintly, pressed a thumbnail against the pad of his index finger. ‘I was reminded,’ he said around the pipestem, brushing his hands together (‘They take an empty fist as containing something real,’ Hoo-Sin was murmuring to Janny, ‘and the pointing finger as the object pointed …’ ‘ Really?!’ ), ‘of a curious case I had some years ago in which the murderer, as it turned out, was an unborn fetus. The victim was its putative father, who in a drunken rage had struck the pregnant woman several times in the stomach. The fetus used the only weapon at its command: false labor. It was a wintry night, the man was heavily inebriated, there was a terrible accident on the way to the hospital. The woman, who survived for a time, spoke of maddening pains en route, and it seems likely she grabbed the steering wheel in her delirium or lashed out with her foot against the accelerator. Was the fetus attacking its assailant or its host? This was perhaps a subtlety which, in its circumstances, escaped it. Certainly it achieved its ends, and though it could be argued that it had acted in self-defense, it seemed obvious to me that the true motive, as so often, was revenge. ’ He paused to let that sink in, striking a fresh match to his pipebowl. ‘The strawberries are starting to go soft,’ my wife whispered. ‘In any event, we’ll never know. Prosecution was impossible because the fetus — a harelip — was stillborn. But the point—’

‘Wait a minute,’ Dolph interrupted. ‘You trying to suggest Ros was killed out of revenge?’ Pardew watched Dolph without expression, holding the match over his pipebowl. ‘I dunno, I just can’t see that, not Ros.’

‘Nor can I,’ said Pardew, looking around for some place to drop the match; he chose one of the potted plants Scarborough had lined up around the cavemouth. ‘No, revenge is a noble passion, an instinctive search for order, the effort to restore a certain balance in the universe. Our murder here tonight seems much more sinister than that: a search for disjunction, a corrupt desire to disturb, distort — a murder committed perhaps out of curiosity or impudence’ — my wife, watched by a frowning Pardew, stifled a yawn (‘Sorry,’ she murmured) — ‘or even love, which is well known for its destructive powers. No, what reminded me of the Case of the Vengeful Fetus was the sense that the motive here was not merely irrational, it was pre rational, atavistic, shared by all, you might say, and thus criminal in the deepest sense of the word. Once I recognized this, my task was eased. It was simply a matter of recalling certain ancient codes, making the obvious associations, then following the discretionary principles of professional criminalistics. Whereupon our crime was, for all practical purposes, solved.’ He nodded toward his two assistants, and they fanned out, blocking the two doorways, cutting Fats off from one, Bunky’s boyfriends from the other. ‘Yikes,’ someone said. The TV guy lowered his camera, looked around as though for an exit. Suddenly it wasn’t amusing anymore. ‘Who …?’ Howard shrank back toward the far window, Michelle seemed to offer herself up. Earl Elstob was trying to close his lips around his buckteeth as though to draw a curtain. The Inspector, spotlit from above, watched all this, hands in pockets, pipe in mouth, as though, silently, weaving the final strands of his web — then, glancing toward Fred and turning his back, he jerked his thumb toward the rest of us. ‘ Now! ’ ‘Ah, shit,’ Charley groaned, slumping a bit, and Fats whimpered: ‘Hey, wait a minute, anybody seen Bren?’ Fred, hand on holster, pushed past him (he yipped reflexively), headed in my direction. Ours, rather: my wife tightened her grip again. ‘It’s all right,’ I muttered huskily (others were ducking, stumbling back) — and so it was: Fred broke past us in pursuit of Vachel, who, squeaking in alarm, went scrambling behind pots and props. ‘It’s a frame-up! I been skunked! ’ he screamed, shoving the pedalcar in Fred’s direction. Fred went crashing, but Bob had joined him in the chase and now tackled the dwarf cleanly (Charley in confusion cheered him, and Regina wheezed, falling back: ‘God! I thought it was going to be me!’) near the back wall. Vachel, greasy with petroleum jelly, slipped a foot free, brained the cop with the fireplace poker, and took off running, but by now Fred was on his feet again and had him in a bearhug: Vachel’s little legs churned in midair, going nowhere. Bob, enraged, holding his bloodied head, staggered toward them. ‘ Let me go, you shitheads! ’ Vachel shrieked, feet and fists flying. ‘ You can’t do this to me! ’ ‘Pop him one on the gourd there, Bob!’ Fred grunted, hanging on desperately, and Bob, leaning into it on his short leg (‘Oh dear,’ my wife said, wincing), brought his stick down so hard that it did indeed sound like he’d crushed a pumpkin. ‘Shit,’ Quagg sighed from the floor, ‘there goes our show,’ and Fred, now holding the unconscious Vachel under one arm like a duffelbag and picking up his hat with the other, said: ‘Whew!’