Джон Макдональд - S*E*V*E*N

By then, of course, all the signposts were up. I made an appointment with Dr. Grenko and flew down and had a long talk with him. A very able man. Very human and very concerned. At first he did not think it could be possible. But the more he heard, the more uncertain he became.

A week later, on a warm Sunday afternoon, he met me at the Turner farm. He had left early in the morning and driven up with Norrie. She knew what was expected of her. She was to help us with the investigation of Paul’s death.

Grenko was very good with her. She had a childish earnestness about her. She was smaller than I had anticipated. One hundred pounds, probably. Almost pretty.

Grenko and I had worked out our little tableau, our clinical demonstration. It did not take long. I explained to her that we were trying to get a better line on Mike Henderson’s motives so that he could defend himself properly in a court of law. I stood on the shady bank beside the pool. Grenko took her ten feet away, beyond the replaced stone. He told her that he thought that Paul had probably said something to Mike which made Mike furious enough to kill Paul.

“Mike is very fond of you, Norrie,” I told her. “Maybe Paul insulted you somehow, said something bad about you in front of Mike.”

“But Paul wouldn’t have done that!”

“What if he said that...” I paused, continued. “You are a cheap slut. You wanted your honeymoon here because you were here two years ago, screwing some stupid kid, until Mrs. Turner threw you off the place.”

She was motionless, and her face had a slack remote look. Then she grunted and pounced. I heard her hands clap against the stone. She gave a cough of effort as she swung it up, and with eyes blazing, mouth agape, took two running steps and launched it at my face. I sidestepped it and it thudded onto the bank, rolled down, and splashed into the willow pool.

She was staring at the opposite slope, a hand shading her eyes. “Mike?” she said. She turned to Grenko. “That’s what he had to do, you know. When Paul said that, there wasn’t anything left for Mike to do but kill him. Everybody should be able to understand that. It’s not all that hard to understand? But I don’t know why he didn’t come back. I don’t know why he kept walking. I guess he was scared. Maybe he was ashamed, too. Because Paul and I loved each other very dearly. And we weren’t married long.”

What do you do with it? Where do you go when there isn’t any place to go? Those were the questions Grenko and I covered when I saw him again last week. We didn’t cover them. We went over them and around them and under them.

Who killed Paul? Norrie’s people killed him. Mush killed him. Mike killed him. Mabel Turner killed him. Hundred-pound girls can’t lift and throw rocks that size.

Grenko says the question is academic at best, because he is losing her. She is moving away from us all, into a world she can more easily endure. Contact is ever more tenuous and uncertain.

“And,” said Grenko with a kind of ironic despair, “she keeps getting prettier and prettier. Maybe one of these days she’ll be as pretty as her mother always wanted her to be.”

After knowing crazy Kaberrian seven years at least, last Sunday I got my first good look at him. In the park. I would have walked by the bench except he said, “Hey! You! Noonan!”

So I stopped and the way I looked at him made him laugh, and from the laugh I knew it was crazy Kaberrian sitting there in the sunshine with a girl in a green suit. The laugh was the same. Everything else had been changed. With that twelve or so pounds of shiny curly black hair chopped away and shaved away, underneath was a very ordinary-looking type person, like the uptown subways are full of five evenings a week, like come and take away things people don’t make a payment on.

Always he had all those odds and ends of clothes fastened with string, the jump boots, wrapped sandwiches stashed here and there, little signs pinned on about how to live, and always in a couple of pockets those plays of his, such a terrible mimeograph job nobody could read them but him. I had not seen him in months, and this type in the store-window suit and shined shoes was not the crazy Kaberrian I would never see again, I knew.

I put my nose level with his, five inches away, and shook my head and wanted almost to cry. “A sell job,” I said. “A fink-off. You squared it, huh, baby?”

So they both laughed, just as if there wasn’t any guilt at all, him and the pretty little basket in her green suit, and Kaberrian said, “Noonan. You got Buckley aboard?”

“Like forever.”

“Noonan, this is Ellie. Noonan, Ellie should meet Buckley.”

Buckley was napping in the side pocket. I got him out and he blinked in the sunlight. He is gold color. A truly Great Mouse, and she put her hand out and Buckley didn’t freeze up so I put him into her hand. No flinch, no baby talk, no kissing noises. She just said, “Hi, Buckley,” and stroked the top of his head with a thumb and gave him back and I put him back in his pocket and pretty soon heard the little crackling as he got going on one of the peanuts. So then the Ellie basket looked at her watch and gave Kaberrian a little housewifey smacko and went off, and he looked dreamy as he saw her depart, and it is worth admitting that she walked very girl in every way.

“Museum,” he explained. “Front desk. She drew the Sunday trick this week.”

I sat down beside him and said, with maybe a little creak in my voice, “What happened, Kaberrian? What happened to you?”

So he told me he got married. He told me they had an apartment, even. He told me he had a job. In a store. Selling high-fidelity schlock. Tape recorders certainly. Those years crazy Kaberrian spent trying to use tape recording to make accidental plays the way painters get accidental paintings, he learned enough he could tell Ampex which way to go.

It hurt me. So I explained how everybody has this terrible tendency to give up the fight, man. Square it out, and fink off, and start dying of conformity and plastic coffee. But when he started yawning I had the idea I wasn’t getting to him.

“So I know what happened, Kaberrian. So now tell me how.”

So he yawned again, looking sleepy, happy, and sold out in the park in the sunshine, and he talked about months and months ago in that walk-up pad he had on Twelfth Street, a room ten by twelve maybe, and so full of electronics one guest at a time was absolute tops, and then it had to be a very friendly guest. An empty room on each side of him.

“On the same day, Noonan, into one moves this Ellie bird, and into the other moves her buddy, this Geoffrey Freeman, playwright. It is always Geoffrey the whole name, and he has never got past a second act on anything but calls himself a playwright, by God.”

“The inner reality is the truth by which we—”

“Shut up, Noonan. What it is, I find out as soon as I breadboard me a rig with some sensitive induction mikes, is love. She will not exactly live in the same room with him, but she is the only one earning bread, and she pays both rents, cooks, cleans, everything. I think finally I got the play I’ve been looking for, on account of it is a comment on everything. You cannot believe how square is that little bird. She has such a deep belief in all the old-timey values, it could make you lie down and cry your eyes out for the pity of it all, or make you laugh yourself to sick. They do not get along so great. The playwright is using the little bird. If he finishes a play it will be crud, so the safest way is never finish one.

“I think that the fights are going to give me a stack of half-mil four-track thirty-six hundred feet tapes, I’ll have to scrounge the whole village to keep up, and I think that sooner or later they are going to say everything anybody can say about the lousy man-woman relationship. I am going to call the play Quarrel. I am going to edit so they are always answering each other on different levels. Nice resonance, Noonan, baby. The shape of it is he fakes up this hurt pride on account of being supported, and then she gets all humble, and then he calls her a peasant who can’t understand like the delicate fiber of his creative soul, and so on and so on. So I get me five ugly sessions, I think three in her pad and two in his. You know what? Halfway through number six I kill the tape. It is the same quarrel! Every time the same. A couple of little switches here and there. Not enough to matter. I tape onto tape and try editing and keep coming up with nothing. Speed changes, echo effects, nothing.