John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

Craine’s fingers tightened on the edge of the letter; his cheek muscles tensed. The sender’s handwriting was like a pinched, self-pitying female yawp. He could see her, not at all as he’d dreamed her — big, soft mouth slightly trembling, murderous wet eyes.

Tom Meakins gazed down at the hospital parking lot, undecided as to just what expression he should wear. His wife, Margaret, wrote fierce, illiterate, and God-filled letters to the Southern Illinoisian about Women’s Liberation. It led, she claimed, to promiscuity. “Could be,” Meakins had said when Craine had asked him what he thought. As for Royce, he sat in his chair, big-jawed, big-shouldered, clowning with his gun as usual, waiting for the coffee in the yellow percolator on the table by Hannah’s door, and waiting for Craine to give him his day’s assignment. Though it was hot in here — hot and dry, full of hisses and sudden sharp clunks (the office was steam heated) — Royce had his heavy leather jacket on. The front was unzipped and his work shirt was open to show off his iron medallion — some kind of religious medal — and curly, silver hair.

Craine reached over for his Scotch glass, then paused, lowered his eyebrows, and changed his mind, rereading. “In the Yellow Pages you’re the only detection agency in Carbondale that advertises male and female operatives,” the letter said, “and for this reason I’ve chosen your organization. I might mention that after personally shadowing your agency’s activities for several weeks, I’d like to know just where you keep your alleged female operatives.”

Craine sucked at his teeth and glanced up at Hannah.

“Go on,” she said. She was interested, pleased with the oddity of the thing, watching him with slightly narrowed eyes.

He read: “Someone is trying to murder me, as they murdered the lady across the street from our house in Evanston. I enclose a clipping that will tell you the story. It was a man, some stranger I never saw before.” Something tingled in Craine’s mind — déjà vu — but he couldn’t get hold of it. “I saw him running away, and he must know this, because he’s now here in Carbondale. He’s the psychopathic murderer of those women, I have reason to believe. I’ve seen him, in fact — same jacket, same crew-cut hair. Possibly those murders are intended to obscure the one he’s really concerned about — myself. So I desperately need your female operative’s help. I say female operative because, besides the known superiority of female intelligence, the murderer was a male, and studies have shown that male detectives are sympathetic to male criminals, especially in sex-related crimes. Although I would like to employ a female operative, I know better, however, than to come to your office in person and be sold a bill of goods about how a male operative is what I really need. I know your kind, believe me! Rather than be subjugated to such undignified treatment — all too common in this world (notice how the media have virtually suppressed the very fact of these horrible murders!) — I suggest the following. If you agree to my conditions and will not go against my human rights and will issue me a female operative (if in fact you have one!), no questions asked, then walk to your window and nod. I’ll be watching, though of course you won’t see me. If you do not agree, please return my check in the enclosed self-addressed envelope. I also enclose a retainer, which I hope is enough.” The letter was signed, “Sincerely, E. Glass.”

Again Craine looked up, and Hannah placed on the desk before him a newspaper clipping and a cashier’s check, drawn by an Elaine Glass on the Carbondale First National Bank, for five hundred dollars. No self-addressed envelope, Hannah said, had been enclosed.

“Jesus’ Peter,” Craine muttered.

“The check’s legitimate,” Hannah said. “I talked to Mr. Renfro. Tried to get a description of the woman’s brought it, but the teller that sold it to her didn’t come in today. Sick with the ’flu.” From the way she said ’ flu , eyes wide and skeptical, it seemed that she suspected the teller of malingering, or suspected some more wicked, more ancient evil, of which Charles Renfro at the bank had dared not speak. “I got his phone number at home,” she said. Craine looked at her blankly. She stood with her head tipped, ready to pick up the receiver on the phone, and the present clicked back.

Craine dramatically waved his pipe and ducked his head, dismissing the suggestion. He was in a calm panic, like the eye of a tornado. He was feeling … He winced as if trying to get it clear and ran one wrinkled, leathery hand through his flat, dead, dyed-black hair. Far wearier than usual, he concluded.

“What do you think?” Hannah asked.

Meakins was still looking mournfully out at the parking lot, probably trying to locate those spying eyes. Royce, with his left hand tightly closed on his right wrist, was aiming his pistol at some speck on the gray-green wall. Craine closed his eyes for a moment, sighed, then drew the clipping toward him, sliding it in across the desk blotter, and bent forward to read it. The print was slightly blurry, but even for Craine’s weak eyes manageable. The usual tale: old woman living alone opens door to killer; neighbors chatter, say nothing. There was, of course, no mention of Ms. Elaine Glass. He looked at the check again. It told him nothing. Dated three days ago, drearily official. So the urgency was fake. He’d assumed it was, of course. Yet how odd, he thought — how Goddamned tiresomely incompetent — to claim there was someone hunting you like a rabbit and back up the claim with a five-hundred-dollar check, and then, lured on by irrepressible hatred, blow the whole story with this news of having tailed him, this palpitating red neon sign of raw she-wolf rage.

But laugh as he might — though he felt crowded, too, no denying it — the check was real: she was in earnest. What could she be after, except, at very least, to humble him a little? For advertising female operatives, maybe, and hiring only men. Probably worse. It was a lot of money. Here in Little Egypt you could hire a man murdered for forty-five dollars. Craine had read what women had to say about men these days — stories, novels about lecherous uncles, malevolent employers. However ridiculous the thing she held against him — her father, her brother, Uncle Fred in the garage — and whatever her stupidity and incompetence, she might just get lucky and shoot a hole in him. Unless, on the other hand, the rant against males was a clever trick and it was the “female operative” she had some reason to be down on. She? he thought, frowning — denying, for an instant, everything he knew. He looked more carefully at the handwriting on the letter. Surely it was a woman’s. Black ball-point, fine tip. (A sentimentalist, no extravert; touch of the legalist, maybe mannish as well, otherwise the ink would be blue or green.) Slanted writing, small but loopy, with meticulous little flourishes and oversized caps. (A careful writer, secretive, but an egoist, slyly flashy; capable of acting like a crazy; impulsive.) He got a nightmare image — just a flicker — of huge, pale breasts, filed teeth, a scent of blood. He pushed the letter and the clipping away.

“See anything, Meakins?” he asked without turning, opening his pipe knife and attacking the stone-hard dottle in his pipe.

“Nothing suspicious,” Meakins said. “It would be easy to watch us from one of the hospital windows, behind the blinds, or from somewhere down the street, with binoculars.”

Craine banged his pipe on the ashtray cork and poked the knife in again, hands meaninglessly shaking. He was dehydrated, as always; so dry that if he spit he’d spit dust. “She’s not that smart,” he said. “She’d screw it up.”