Foul Matter (34 page)

Saul was wondering if people had epiphanies in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh seemed such an unlikely place for them.

He was standing at his bedroom window, which overlooked the Point. He was watching the water, the confluence of the Monongahela and the Allegheny, where they became the Ohio River. The Ohio flowed into the Mississippi. Never ending but becoming something else.

This was, Saul told himself, hardly a novel idea. But in a way it was, too. It set off a train of thought that was not unpleasant, that was, for him, rather startling. He thought of the woman in his book, his protagonist.
“And why—?”

This
was
the end:
“And why—?”

In his room, washing up, Clive thought about writing. All editors felt it now and again, that creepy feeling one was already ghosting for a writer, was already writing rather than rewriting. The thought
I ought to write a book:
he wondered if Tom Kidd ever had this compulsion—for it was beginning to feel like that—compulsion and just a few steps away from obsession.

No, Tom Kidd was too happy doing just what he was doing. But if he had ever had to edit a book by Dwight Staines, he wouldn’t be so smug about writing!

Clive had stopped his electric razor to look in the mirror. That was definitely a middle-aged face, and not early middle age, either. The best he could do was middle middle age.

He felt a spikelike pain in the area of his stomach, which split apart and moved upward, that he could take for a heart attack except he knew it wasn’t. Perhaps gas, perhaps loss.

In spite of her having read
Solace
every year since its publication, this was the first time she had looked up wonderingly from the page and thought that if, at that moment while she was sitting here in the lobby, Ned had appeared, Sally knew she’d be bold enough to do what his protagonist, Ruthie, had failed to do: she would ask him, “Is she me?”

C
andy and Karl had their elbows on the Hilton bar and their hands tight around double shots of Kentucky bourbon.

“Never have I seen anything like it,” said Karl. It wasn’t the first time he’d said it, more like the fifteenth. Candy just shook and shook his head in silent agreement. “I mean,” Karl went on, “in our checkered—you could say—careers we’ve seen some weird things, but never a bunch of strangers on the sidewalk suddenly go for guns.”

“Maybe it’s the area. I mean, maybe it’s a high crime rate area.”

“What? Did it look like one? No bars on the windows, no grates on the doors.” Karl shook his head, disbelievingly. “A mother with a little
baby
packing heat? Some dumb blonde just got her hair done with a .22 stashed in her bag? That maniac running his car up on the
sidewalk
? Come on, stuff like that? You don’t see stuff like that in your high crime areas. In the movies maybe, but not in a real high crime rate area.”

“And who the fuck were they gonna
shoot,
K? One another? Not even
I
could say where that shot came from, so how could any of
them
?” Candy delicately touched the two Band-Aids on his cheek. It had been a purely surface wound, but they still wondered, Who the hell?

“Us?”

“What? Shoot
us?
We weren’t doin’ nothin’.”

“I’m just saying”—Karl tilted his glass to drain it—“it looked to me like one or two of those guns were pointing in our direction. Didn’t it you?”

“It makes no sense. This whole fucking city makes no sense.”

“Well, gentlemen!”

A new voice came from behind and both of them had a hand placed on a shoulder. They whirled around, going instinctively for their guns, but stopping the movement just in time.

“Arthur!” said Candy.

“Mordred!” said Karl, at the same time.

“What in fuck you doing in Pitts-bloody-burgh?” asked Candy.

They gave each other a slap-hand handshake and Arthur said, “Visiting. Another round,” he said to the bartender, circling his finger above the two glasses. “I’ll have a Perrier.” He turned back to them. “What about yourselves? What brought you here?”

Karl shrugged. “Same thing.”

“Hell,” said Candy, “we haven’t seen you in ten, fifteen years.”

Arthur hitched a stool out from under the counter. “I’m in Vegas now.”

“You’re fucking kidding me,” said Candy.

“What? You don’t like Vegas?”

“You get enough action there?”

“Christ, yes. You know it.”

“Used to,” said Karl. “Used to have a lot of grit, Vegas. Then people with too much money and no sense, these financiers, started building all of these ‘theme’ hotels and the place went to hell. It’s all families now. Hell, you couldn’t get off a round there without hitting six kids under twelve.” Karl said thanks to Arthur and raised his fresh drink and clicked glasses with the other two.

“It’s not so bad, I mean you get used to stumbling over babies and so forth. But what brings you two here?”

“Work.” Candy shrugged.

“It went okay?” asked Arthur.

“Sure, except this is one fucking crazy city.” Candy was about to recap the afternoon for Arthur when Clive came up to the bar.

He was introduced to Arthur Mordred. Clive gave him a curt nod and asked of the three, “Do you think you can tell me what in God’s name
happened
this afternoon?”—Clive nodded in the general direction of where they’d been—“out there?”

Candy pressed his hands to his chest, his eyebrows bolting to his hairline. “You asking
us
?
Us?
What about
you
? It sure looked to me like you had that piece aimed at me.”

Karl said, “It couldn’t’ve been him, C. The shot didn’t come from that direction.”

“What shot?”

Candy leaned toward Clive, tapping the Band-Aids with his finger. “This shot.”

“That’s a scratch.”

“Okay, so a bullet scratched me. What were you doing with a gun, Clive-O?”

“I’ve always carried a gun. I live in New York; you almost have to.” Clive pawed the little dish of nuts, taking out the cashews, which he popped in his mouth one after the other.

“In a book? You always shoot the book, too?”

Clive found two more cashews and held on to them, thinking. He said, “I was just copying Robert De Niro. In that movie with Eddie Murphy? De Niro’s a cop. In this one scene he’s gotten himself a twenty-four-ounce paper cup of soda at a Seven-Eleven and walks into the dope dealers’ place holding it. Only what he’s really done is pushed a gun up the bottom. He sips through the straw; I guess the straw’s there to lend it greater verisimilitude.”

“You’re full of shit, Clive,” said Candy.

Arthur plucked a peanut from the dish. “You all seem to lead such interesting lives.” He ate the peanut, and asked Clive, “What line of work are you in?”

“I’m an editor. Senior book editor at Mackenzie-Haack. If you’re writing a book, please keep it to yourself.”

Arthur’s laugh was a little on the trill side of hearty. “Not to worry on that score.”

Clive looked at him. “Why not? Everybody else is doing it.”

“But it must be fascinating, working with all kinds of writers.”

“Oh, it’s all kinds all right.
All
kinds. Here comes one of the kinds now, lucky us.”

Dwight Staines bade them a hearty hello and shouldered his way in between Clive and Karl. “Terrific book signing,” he said, “as per usual, right?” and he cuffed Clive on the shoulder. “Line stretched all the way into the street.”

Clive cuffed him back, as hard as he could, and Dwight nearly fell over.

In the lobby, Ned cast a glance at the attractive blonde in the Buddy Holly glasses, wondering why she looked familiar. That was it: he’d seen her in Schenley Park that morning. Or had she been one of the people on the pavement that afternoon, part of that queer scene that had dissolved just as Ned had turned to look at what sounded like some kind of shootout, or what he’d first thought was possibly a TV show being filmed? Maybe a movie.

But then in the next ten minutes the police had come and the fire trucks
and
the omnipresent TV news teams (as if they’d all been stationed behind bushes and down alleys). Their anchors or field reporters were being brushed and brightened by their on-the-run makeup artists before the newscasters faced the cameras. Customers came out of shops, cafés, and bookstores, restlessly milling and watching as police looked for the place to cordon off the crime scene. Unfortunately for their purposes there wasn’t one.

Watching all of this, Ned doubled back on the pavement, licking his ice cream cone. He stood where one of the cops was listening to a group who swore there’d been shots.

“How many?”

“Oh a lot,” said a fat woman with incandescent orange hair who’d hurried out of a beauty parlor.

The officer looked dubious.

“And farther along the pavement,” another woman said, pointing at the place imagination selected as the crime scene, “some woman was abducting a baby—right out of its carriage!”

The group more or less swept the officer along to the dark blue carriage. “Look, see, it’s empty! This baby’s been kidnapped!” She was close to tears.

Ned had gone along with them, all in a bunch with a single mind, from what would now be a crime scene (police spooling out their yellow tape) to where one television crew was ensconced before an antiquarian bookstore. You could tell Miss Channel 5 was bursting with a news-nugget “exclusive” (which is how she put it), the one concrete piece of evidence found. The field reporter was very pretty in her powder blue suit. (Why did all women TV presenters look like Nicole Kidman? wondered Ned.)

She had a man in tow, apparently the owner or manager of the bookshop. “What has been found, and Mr. Stooley will confirm this, is a book sold by him to a customer that was later discovered in the street with a bullet hole through it!”