Unknown - The Genius

THE BRANCH MANAGER ofthe local Staples had no idea what I was talking about; nor did any of the cashiers, although most of them seemed to have started on the job that very morning. They did offer to sell me paper, though.

When Samantha and I next conferred, she pointed out Victor’s tendency to routinize. “Think about the picture of him that we’re getting so far. He gets his bread from one place. He gets his cheese someplace else, his apples. He does this every day for God knows how long. How long has that Staples been there, five years? That’s not our man. That’s not where he’s going to go for something as important as his paper.”

I called around until I found the oldest place in the neighborhood, a stationer’s a half-mile due west of the Courts, open Tuesday through Thursday, from eleven to three thirty. I had to leave work especially early—earlier than I’d been leaving, which was already beyond self-indulgent—to get out there on time.

My first impression of Zatuchny’s was that it could have been managed by Victor himself, so clogged was it with junk. I walked into a cloud of that same woody smell I’d first encountered in Victor’s apartment, only several orders of magnitude more powerful. It made me wonder how customers could shop without keeling over.

More to the point, I had a hard time believing that the store had customers at all. From the outside the place looked closed, windows plastered over with curling fliers, neon sign extinguished. I stood at the counter and dinged the bell a couple times.

“Shaddap shaddap shaddap. Shaaaddap.”

An old man appeared, his cheeks flecked with tomato sauce. He paused briefly to stare at me, paused longer to stare at Isaac, and then, frowning, he snatched the bell off the counter and tossed it in a drawer. “It ain’t a toy,” he said.

If I hadn’t known any better, I might have taken him for Victor Cracke. Moustachioed, disheveled, he fit with my preconceived notion quite nicely. So did the disorder of the surroundings … and the smell …

A crazy thought occurred to me: he was Victor.

I must have been staring a bit too intensely, because he sneered and said, “I didn’t interrupt my afternoon repast so you could ogle my titties. Whad-daya want.”

I said, “I’m looking for someone.”

“Yeah, whossat.”

I showed him the mug shots.

“Ugly bastards,” he commented as he leafed through them.

I said, “Do you mind if I ask your name?”

“Do I mind, sure I do.”

“Well, can you tell me anyway?”

“Leonard,” he said.

“I’m Ethan.”

“You a cop, Ethan?”

“I work for the District Attorney,” I said, which wasn’t totally untrue.

“What about you, fatso,” he said to Isaac, who remained unmoved behind his sunglasses. “Whassis problem. Can’t he speak?”

“He’s more of the strong silent type,” I said.

“He looks more like the big fucking fatso type. What do you feed him, whole sheep?” He handed me back the photos. “I don’t know these sons of bitches.”

I couldn’t bring myself to come out and ask about Victor, scared as I was that he would turn out to be Victor, and that my questions would send him scurrying out the back door. In trying to dance around the central point, I allowed my questioning to get more and more convoluted, until, eyeing the Band-Aids on my face, he said to Isaac, “You must be the brains of the operation.”

“I’m looking for a man named Victor Cracke,” I blurted, half expecting him to press a button and drop through a trapdoor. But he only nodded.

“Oh yeah?” he said.

“You know him.”

“Sure I know him. You mean with the—” He wiggled his index finger atop his upper lip, meaning moustache, which was bizarre, because he had an actual moustache.

“He was a customer?”

“Sure.”

“How often did he come in here?”

“I’d say a couple times a month or so. All he ever bought was paper. He ain’t been by in a while, though.”

“Can you show me what kind of paper he bought?”

He looked at me like I was insane. Then he shrugged and led me to a tiny stockroom, metal shelves sagging with unopened boxes of pens, stencils, photo albums. Atop a card table sat a microwave, and in front of it, a plastic bowl with fusilli floating in watery marinara sauce. A fork rested atop a stack of comic books.

Leonard grabbed a box on the lowest shelf and dragged it to the middle of the room, huffing and puffing as he bent, revealing a preexisting split in the seat of his pants. He took a utility knife off his belt and sliced open the packing tape. Inside was a box of plain white paper, less yellowed than the drawings but—insofar as plain white paper can be positively identified—correct enough.

“How long has he been shopping here?” I asked.

“My father opened up after the War, passed in ‘63, the same day Kennedy got his head blown off. I think Victor started showing up around then. He came in maybe twice a month.”

“What kind of relationship did you have with him?”

“I sold him paper.”

“Did he ever talk about his personal life?”

Leonard stared at me. “I … sold … him … paper.” Satisfied that he had impressed my own stupidity upon me, he went back to his lunch.

“Excuse me—”

“You’re still here?”

“I just wondered if you ever noticed anything unusual about Victor.”

He sighed, scooted around in his chair. “All right, you want a story, I’ll tell you a story. I once played him checkers.”

I said, “Pardon?”

“Checkers. You know what checkers is, dontcha?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I played him. He came in here with a little checkers set and put it down and we played checkers. He beat my pants off. He wanted to play again but I didn’t want to get beat so bad twice in one day. I offered to box him but he just left. The end.”

Something about the story broke my heart, as I pictured Victor—how I saw him in my mind’s eye, I can’t say; I suppose I saw his spirit, translucent and fuzzy—wandering the neighborhood, a board tucked under his arm, desperate for a competitor.

“Happy now?” Leonard asked.

“Did he use a credit card?”

“I don’t take credit cards. Cash or check.”

“All right, then, did he use a check?”

“Cash.”

“Did he ever buy anything else?”

“Yeah. Pens and markers. Pencils. What are you, the goddamned paper gestapo?”

“I’m concerned about his safety.”

“How the hell is knowing about a bunch of pens going to help him stay safe?”

Despairingly, I thanked him for his time and handed him a card, asking him to call if Victor came in.

“Sure,” he said. As I left, I glanced back and saw him tearing the card into confetti.

20

ecause Samantha worked during the day, I did most of the footwork s^S on my own. This, of course, implies that I did not work during the day, which was increasingly true. I felt restless and trapped at the gallery and kept inventing excuses to leave. Even when I didn’t need to go to Queens, I didn’t want to stay in Chelsea. I would take long walks and ruminate about Victor Cracke and art and myself and Marilyn, fancying myself a private investigator, narrating to myself. He stumbled into the coffee shop and ordered a cuppa joe. Cue saxophone. These self-indulgent fantasies, these stirrings of dissatisfaction, were all too familiar to me. I had them on average every five years.

Samantha’s job was to go down Richard Soto’s list of old cases. Right off the bat she concluded that the majority of them were irrelevant to us—the victim was either female or older or had been murdered without any sign of sexual assault—but she followed them up, just in case. Listening to her, I began to understand that the most outstanding feature of policework is its tedium; throughout November and December there were plenty of idle days, plenty of blind alleys, plenty of conversations that went nowhere. We groped blindly, crushing together hunches to form theories that we then discarded, trial-and-error but mostly error.