Lawrence Block - Candy

Sgt. Charles Schwerner, spokesman for Manhattan West, admitted that Flanders seemed to have “vanished into thin air.”

“We’ve followed up every lead around,” Schwerner stated. “We’re pretty sure he’s travelling with the woman but we haven’t gotten a lead on them yet. It’s like the earth opened up and swallowed them.”

The woman Schwerner referred to is Miss Candace Cain, acquaintance of Mrs. Christie’s, at whose swank East Side apartment Mrs. Christie was found.

Police conjecture that Flanders and Miss Cain fled the city after Flanders criminally assaulted Mrs. Christie and stabbed her to death with a kitchen knife.

I finished the story, nodded sadly and guiltily, and took a quick drag of my cigarette. Then when the story hit me, I dropped the cigarette and it rolled from the counter to the floor.

I didn’t bother to pick it up.

I re-read the last paragraph of the story, then read it a third time. I thought long and hard about the kitchen knife with which I had stabbed Caroline Lipton Christie to death.

What kitchen knife?

Chapter Eleven

THERE COULD, OF COURSE, be any number of rational explanations. The wires of Associated Press had more than a few goofs on their respectable shoulders and this was quite possibly one of them. Or, if the Galveston Record went to press without benefit of teletype apparatus, a local linotype operator might have substituted a non-existent kitchen knife for my bloody hands.

And then again …

I tried to forget about the then-and-again part of it. I got out of the coffee shop and found a cab to take me to the Record building, a three-story brick mess that looked as though it was taking a siesta until it was time to get down to the monotony of putting out a newspaper once again. The friendly old coot with horn-rimmed spectacles and alcoholic breath who was minding the store gave me copies of the past week’s issues and didn’t even charge me a nickel apiece for them. I remember thinking hazily that a person could save a nickel a day in Galveston if he was willing to get his news a day late.

If the kitchen knife gambit had been an error, then it had been a persistent wire service goof that showed up an amazing total of four times in the first story and at least once in every other version. It seemed that Mrs. Caroline Lipton Christie had suffered the overwhelming indignity of having her ivory throat slit from ear to ear.

The possibility of suicide had been ruled out, I learned. Police had conjectured that Caroline might have been raped and then have killed herself, but the absence of any fingerprints whatsoever ruled that out. It was a clear-cut case of rape and murder (although the puritanical press persisted in calling it “Criminal Assault”) and the rapist and murderer, according to all sorts of testimony, turned out to be none other than yours truly.

Two people in the world knew better. Three people if you could count Caroline, but since she was no longer in the world but in a gay heaven all her own, that left just the two of us.

Me.

And my own true love.

I thought it over and decided that I didn’t believe it. Then I thought it over some more and decided that there was nothing else to believe no matter how bitter the inevitable realization tasted in my throat.

So I tossed the newspapers in the nearest trashbasket in an effort to oblige in the drive to KEEP GALVESTON CLEAN and found my way back to the Hotel Westlake. My brain burned and my fingers played neurotic games with themselves. The beautiful morning was a neutral gray now and the hot sun was a pale cardboard cut-out on a sky of vomit purple.

It all made sense, sick sense, horrible sense, unnatural sense that was now frighteningly and staggeringly and all-too-obviously natural. I was the ultimate Mark, the Magnificent Sucker, the Patsy-to-end-all-Patsies. I felt duped and swindled and taken, but more than anything else I felt appallingly stupid, which hurt more than the rest of it. There are few things quite so disheartening as the discovery that your love and trust have been used to nail you to the wall.

In the taxi back to the hotel and on the elevator to the room I thought valiantly that it couldn’t have been her, that she couldn’t have done a thing like that, that even if she had she would never have been able to fool me the way she did. My mind invented an Unknown Person who slipped into the apartment after I left and before Candy appeared, a blank-faced, medium-built nonentity who had done the evil deed and vanished like smoke in a whirlwind.

That explained everything. Mr. Nobody had done it, Candy thought I had done it, and off we were to Mexico. Mr. Nobody, the little man who wasn’t there.

Only he wasn’t there. That was the sore point and it sort of fouled things up.

I started to knock on the door, then changed my mind and used my key instead. The door opened and I walked inside and closed it behind me. She was on the bed and she was awake and she was naked. She looked at me and her eyes were wide with a combination of Gee-I’m-glad-to-see-you and Something’s-bothering-you-what-is-it? shining softly in them.

I didn’t know what to say or where to start. I walked over and sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at the nudity of her. Somehow it made me feel out of place with my clothes on but there was nothing to do about that but take my clothes off and that wasn’t what I had in mind. I was, for once in my life, not in the mood for love.

“Hi,” she said. “I missed you this morning. I wanted you when I woke up and you weren’t here. The bed was empty and it was terrible.”

I looked away from her. I saw her shoes at the edge of the bed with their high heels and pointed toes. I saw our clothes on one chair where we had hurled them the night before. I saw a wisp of lingerie in a tangle on the floor at the foot of the bed.

I turned back and saw her. Her face was a little drawn now, not so much that anybody would have noticed it, but enough so that I knew she knew that something was wrong. I knew her well enough to read her face.

Or did I? Perhaps I never knew her at all. Perhaps I was just beginning to discover her.

“Jeff,” she said. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Did I do something?”

That was sort of a leading question.

“Jeff—” She paused, a significant pause that was pregnant with meaning, and waited for me to unburden my alleged mind.

I said: “How come you killed her with the knife?”

The silence was strikingly loud.

Her face never cracked but there was just the merest twitch of her right eye and the slightest trembling of one shoulder. That was enough. Then she was calm and relaxed and said things that didn’t mean anything to me because I did not hear them. I sat there mute and deaf with rage and self-pity and hate and every emotion in the catalogue except happiness, and finally I asked her to start over at the beginning because I hadn’t heard one goddamn word that came out of her mouth.

“The knife was right there,” she said. “You cut her throat with it. What are you talking about?”

“I never saw any knife.”

“But it was there! Jeff, are you sure? Because … because if you didn’t then somebody else must have done it and you’re in the clear. Of course we’ll still have to go to Mexico because there’s no way to prove it and you did rape her, but—”

“Candy.” I had just remembered something, something that made Mr. Nobody nobody at all. I had thought that Mr. Nobody had already died within my mind, but evidently he hadn’t because this present realization was sufficiently crushing to keep me speechless for a second or two. It was all I could do to get her name out in a flat two syllables devoid of any intonation whatsoever. That was enough—the tone of my voice must have combined with the expression on her face to silence her because her mouth snapped shut and she didn’t say another word.