Four Past Midnight (44 page)

Mostly because she might then have asked the same thing of him.

She had suggested he call Dave Newsome, the Tashmore constable—after all, the man might be dangerous. Mort told her he didn't think that would be necessary, at least not yet, but if “John Shooter” called by again, he would probably give Dave a jingle. After a few more stilted amenities, they hung up. He could tell she was still smarting over his oblique suggestion that Ted might currently be sitting in Mortybear's chair and sleeping in Mortybear's bed, but he honestly didn't know how he could have avoided mentioning Ted Milner sooner or later. The man had become a part of Amy's life, after all. And
she
had called
him,
that was the thing. She had gotten one of her funny feelings and called
him.

Mort reached the place where the lakeside path forked, the righthand branch climbing the steep bank back up to Lake Drive. He took that branch, walking slowly and savoring the fall color. As he came around the final curve in the path and into sight of the narrow ribbon of blacktop, he was somehow not surprised to see the dusty blue station wagon with the Mississippi plates parked there like an oft-whipped dog chained to a tree, nor the lean figure of John Shooter propped against the right front mudguard with his arms folded across his chest.

Mort waited for his heartbeat to speed up, for the surge of adrenaline into his body, but his heart went on maintaining its normal beat, and his glands kept their own counsel—which, for the time being, seemed to be to remain quiet.

The sun, which had gone behind a cloud, came out again, and fall colors which had already been bright now seemed to burst into flame. His own shadow reappeared, dark and long and clearcut. Shooter's round black hat looked blacker, his blue shirt bluer, and the air was so clear the man seemed scissored from a swatch of reality that was brighter and more vital than the one Mort knew as a rule. And he understood that he had been wrong about his reasons for not calling Dave Newsome—wrong, or practicing a little deception—on himself as well as on Amy. The truth was that he wanted to deal with this matter himself.
Maybe just to prove to myself that there are things I still CAN deal with,
he thought, and started up the hill again toward where John Shooter was leaning against his car and waiting for him.

His walk along the lake path had been both long and slow, and Amy's call hadn't been the only thing Mort had thought about as he picked his way over or around the occasional downed tree or paused to skip the occasional flat stone across the water (as a boy he had been able to get a really good one—what they called “a flattie”—to skip as many as nine times, but today four was the most he'd been able to manage). He had also thought about how to deal with Shooter, when and if Shooter turned up again.

It was true he had felt a transient—or maybe not-so-transient—guilt when he saw how close to identical the two stories were, but he had worked that one out; it was only the generalized guilt he guessed all writers of fiction felt from time to time. As for Shooter himself, the only feelings he had were annoyance, anger... and a kind of relief. He was full of an unfocussed rage; had been for months. It was good to finally have a donkey to pin this rotten, stinking tail on.

Mort had heard the old saw about how, if four hundred monkeys banged away on four hundred typewriters for four million years, one of them would produce the complete works of Shakespeare. He didn't believe it. Even if it were true, John Shooter was no monkey and he hadn't been alive anywhere near that long, no matter how lined his face was.

So Shooter had copied his story. Why he had picked “Sowing Season” was beyond Mort Rainey's powers of conjecture, but he knew that was what had happened because he had ruled out coincidence, and he knew damned well that, while he might have stolen that story, like all his others, from The Great Idea Bank of the Universe, he most certainly had not stolen it from Mr. John Shooter of the Great State of Mississippi.

Where, then, had Shooter copied it
from?
Mort thought that was the most important question; his chance to expose Shooter as a fake and a cheat might lie buried within the answer to it.

There were only two possible answers, because “Sowing Season” had only been published twice—first in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine,
and then in his collection,
Everybody Drops the Dime.
The dates of publication for the short stories in a collection are usually listed on the copyright page at the front of the book, and this format had been followed in
Everybody Drops the Dime.
He had looked up the acknowledgment for “Sowing Season” and found that it had been originally published in the June, 1980, issue of
EQMM.
The collection,
Everybody Drops the Dime,
had been issued by St. Martin's Press in 1983. There had been subsequent printings since then—all but one of them in paperback—but that didn't matter. All he really had to work with were those two dates, 1980 and 1983 ... and his own hopeful belief that, aside from agents and publishing-company lawyers, no one paid much attention to those lines of fine print on the copyright page.

Hoping that this would prove true of John Shooter, hoping that Shooter would simply assume—as most general readers did—that a story he had read for the first time in a collection had no prior existence, Mort approached the man and finally stood before him on the edge of the road.

“I guess you must have had a chance to read my story by now,” Shooter said. He spoke as casually as a man commenting on the weather.

“I did.”

Shooter nodded gravely. “I imagine it rang a bell, didn't it?”

“It certainly did,” Mort agreed, and then, with studied casualness: “When did you write it?”

“I thought you'd ask that,” Shooter said. He smiled a secret little smile, but said no more. His arms remained crossed over his chest, his hands laid against his sides just below the armpits. He looked like a man who would be perfectly content to remain where he was forever, or at least until the sun sank below the horizon and ceased to warm his face.

“Well, sure,” Mort said, still casually. “I have to, you know. When two fellows show up with the same story, that's serious.”

“Serious,” Shooter agreed in a deeply meditative tone of voice.

“And the only way to sort a thing like that out,” Mort continued, “to decide who copied from whom, is to find out who wrote the words first.” He fixed Shooter's faded blue eyes with his own dry and uncompromising gaze. Somewhere nearby a chickadee twittered self-importantly in a tangle of trees and was then quiet again. “Wouldn't you say that's true?”

“I suppose I would,” Shooter agreed. “I suppose that's why I came all the way up here from Miss'ippi.”

Mort heard the rumble of an approaching vehicle. They both turned in that direction, and Tom Greenleaf's Scout came over the nearest hill, pulling a little cyclone of fallen leaves behind it. Tom, a hale and healthy Tashmore native of seventy-something, was the caretaker for most of the places on this side of the lake that Greg Carstairs didn't handle. Tom raised one hand in salute as he passed. Mort waved back. Shooter removed one hand from its resting place and tipped a finger at Tom in a friendly gesture which spoke in some obscure way of a great many years spent in the country, of the uncountable and unrecollected number of times he had saluted the passing drivers of passing trucks and tractors and tedders and balers in that exact same casual way. Then, as Tom's Scout passed out of sight, he returned his hand to his ribcage so that his arms were crossed again. As the leaves rattled to rest on the road, his patient, unwavering, almost eternal gaze came back to Mort Rainey's face once more. “Now what were we saying?” he asked almost gently.

“We were trying to establish provenance,” Mort said. “That means—”

“I know what it means,” Shooter said, favoring Mort with a glance which was both calm and mildly contemptuous. “I know I am wearing shitkicker clothes and driving a shitkicker car, and I come from a long line of shitkickers, and maybe that makes me a shitkicker myself, but it doesn't necessarily make me a
stupid
shitkicker.”

“No,” Mort agreed. “I don't guess it does. But being smart doesn't necessarily make you honest, either. In fact, I think it's more often apt to go the other way.”

“I could figure that much out from you, had I not known it,” Shooter said dryly, and Mort felt himself flush. He didn't like to be zinged and rarely was, but Shooter had just done it with the effortless ease of an experienced shotgunner popping a clay pigeon.

His hopes of trapping Shooter dropped. Not all the way to zero, but quite a considerable way. Smart and sharp were not the same things, but he now suspected that Shooter might be both. Still, there was no sense drawing this out. He didn't want to be around the man any longer than he had to be. In some strange way he had looked forward to this confrontation, once he had become sure that another confrontation was inevitable—maybe only because it was a break in a routine which had already become dull and unpleasant. Now he wanted it over. He was no longer sure John Shooter was crazy—not completely, anyway—but he thought the man could be dangerous. He was so goddam implacable. He decided to take his best shot and get it over with—no more dancing around.

“When
did
you write your story, Mr. Shooter?”

“Maybe my name's not Shooter,” the man said, looking faintly amused. “Maybe that's just a pen name.”

“I see. What's your real one?” “I didn't say it wasn't; I only said maybe. Either way, that's not part of our business.” He spoke serenely, appearing to be more interested in a cloud which was making its way slowly across the high blue sky and toward the westering sun.

“Okay,” Mort said, “but when you wrote that story is.”

“I wrote it seven years ago,” he said, still studying the cloud—it had touched the edge of the sun now and had acquired a gold fringe. “In 1982.”

Bingo,
Mort thought.
Wily old bastard or not, he stepped right into the trap after all. He got the story out of the collection, all right. And since
Everybody Drops the Dime
was published in 1983, he thought any date before then had to be safe. Should have read the copyright page, old son.

He waited for a feeling of triumph, but there was none. Only a muted sense of relief that this nut could be sent on his merry way with no further fuss or muss. Still, he was curious; it was the curse of the writing class. For instance, why that particular story, a story which was so out of his usual run, so downright atypical? And if the guy was going to accuse him of plagiarism, why settle for an obscure short story when he could have cobbled up the same sort of almost identical manuscript of a best-seller like
The Organ-Grinder's Boy? That
would have been juicy; this was almost a joke.

I suppose knocking off one of the novels would have been too much like work,
Mort thought.

“Why did you wait so long?” he asked. “I mean, my book of short stories was published in 1983, and that's six years ago. Going on seven now.”

“Because I didn't know,” Shooter said. He removed his gaze from the cloud and studied Mort with that discomfiting look of faint contempt again. “A man like you, I suppose that kind of man just assumes that everyone in America, if not everyone in every country where his books are published, reads what he has written.”

“I know better than that, I think,” Mort said, and it was his turn to be dry.

“But that's not true,” Shooter went on, ignoring what Mort had said in his scarily serene and utterly fixated way. “That is not true at all. I never saw that story until the middle of June.
This
June.”

Mort thought of saying:
Well, guess what, Johnny-me-boy? I never saw my wife in bed with another man until the middle of May!
Would it knock Shooter off his pace if he actually
did
say something like that out loud?

He looked into the man's face and decided not. The serenity had burned out of those faded eyes the way mist bums off the hills on a day which is going to be a real scorcher. Now Shooter looked like a fundamentalist preacher about to ladle a large helping of fire and brimstone upon the trembling, downcast heads of his flock, and for the first time Mort Rainey felt really and personally afraid of the man. Yet he was also still angry. The thought he'd had near the end of his first encounter with “John Shooter” now recurred: scared or not, he was damned if he was just going to stand here and take it while this man accused him of theft—especially now that the falsity had been revealed out of the man's own mouth.

“Let me guess,” Mort said. “A guy like you is a little too picky about what he reads to bother with the sort of trash I write. You stick to guys like Marcel Proust and Thomas Hardy, right? At night, after the milking's done, you like to fire up one of those honest country kerosene lamps, plunk it down on the kitchen table—which is, of course, covered with a homey red-and-white-checked tablecloth—and unwind with a little
Tess or Remembrance of Things Past.
Maybe on the weekend you let your hair down a little, get a little funky, and drag out some Erskine Caldwell or Annie Dillard. It was one of your friends who told you about how I'd copied your honestly wrought tale. Isn't that how the story goes, Mr. Shooter ... or whatever your name is?”

His voice had taken on a rough edge, and he was surprised to find himself on the edge of real fury. But, he discovered, not
totally
surprised.

“Nope. I don't have any friends.” Shooter spoke in the dry tone of a man who is only stating a fact. “No friends, no family, no wife. I've got a little place about twenty miles south of Perkinsburg, and I do have a checked tablecloth on my kitchen table—now that you mention it—but we got electric lights in our town. I only bring out the kerosenes when there's a storm and the lines go down.”