Mr. X (36 page)

Laurie told him we wanted to talk to Mr. Edison.

“Max? He’s in the TEE-vee rahm heah. I’ll tell him he has comp’ny.”

The attendant moved into the flickering darkness. Laurie whispered,
“TEE-vee rahm.”

“Like CD-ROM,” I said.

A few seconds later, a small, compact man of about seventy with close-cropped white hair, a neat white beard, steel-rimmed spectacles, and an air of perfect composure emerged to take us in with a curious, lively attentiveness that admitted a flicker of surprise when he looked at me. He had that flawless, dark-chocolate skin that goes unwrinkled, apart from a few crow’s-feet and some lines across the forehead, until it weathers into a well-seasoned ninety. Max Edison could have been a retired doctor or a distinguished elderly jazz musician. He also could have been a great many other things. The Jolly Green Giant followed him out.

“Mr. Edison?” I said.

He stepped forward, examining us with the same wide-awake curiosity, then swiveled on the balls of his feet to look up at the Giant. “Jervis, I’m going to escort my visitors down the hall.”

Edison brought us to a tiny room with a single desk and bookshelves crowded with files. “You people know who I am, but I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

I introduced Laurie and myself, and he shook our hands without any sign of having recognized our names. His jeans had a sharp crease, his shirt was freshly pressed, and his boots gleamed. I wondered what it took to maintain standards like that in the V.A. Hospital. “I hope you came to tell me I won the lottery.”

“No such luck,” I said. “I want to ask you about someone you might have known a long time ago.”

“Why would that be?”

“Let’s say it’s a family matter,” I said.

His face relaxed, and he seemed to smile without quite smiling, as if I had confirmed whatever had been going through his mind.

“Does the name Dunstan mean anything to you?”

He crossed his arms over his chest, still smiling without smiling. “How did you learn I was out here?”

“From someone who doesn’t want to be named,” I said. “When I asked him about this person you might have known, he wrote your name on a piece of paper.”

“Water’s getting deeper and deeper,” Edison said. “I used to know a man who married a woman named Dunstan.”

“That could be,” I said.

“Will you stop beating around the bush?” Laurie said. “He obviously knows it was Toby Kraft.”

Edison and I both looked at her, then at each other. We burst out laughing.

“What?”

“So much for that,” I said.

“But you knew it was him.”

“Man didn’t want to be named,” Edison said.

“I spoiled your fun. I apologize. But I bet Mr. Edison could already tell us who we came here to talk about, and I only have about an hour before I have to drive back to town.”

“Could you?” I asked Edison. “Do you already know?”

“Why don’t you tell me, so I won’t have to guess?”

“Edward Rinehart.”

Edison looked at the door, then, with less than his usual composure, back at me. “We should grab some fresh air. It’s so pretty under those trees, you can almost forget where you are.”

“Toby Kraft. I called him ‘Mr. Inside,’ because that’s what he was.”

Max Edison faced the tall beeches and the long green lawn from the end of the bench across our picnic table. He had slipped dark glasses over his eyes, and his legs in their knife-creased jeans extended out to the side, crossed at the ankle. One elbow was propped on the surface of the table. He looked as though he had joined us for a moment before moving on.

“When I got back from the war, I had a leg injury that kept me from doing heavy work, so instead of one big job I had a bunch of little ones. Swept floors and washed windows. Ran numbers. Driving jobs. After a while, some people decided I was reliable.”

Edison turned to me. “Know what I mean?”

“You did what you were supposed to do, and you kept your mouth shut.”

“Toby Kraft asked me to help out in the pawnshop three days a week. I knew he was doing more business out back than up front. I’m not accusing him of anything, understand, but when Toby gave you my name he knew I’d have to say some of this. If I’m going to talk about Mr. Edward Rinehart, he’s in there, too.”

I nodded.

Edison turned the dark glasses to Laurie. “You don’t have to hear any more than you want to, Mrs. Hatch.”

She said, “At this point, Max, you’d have to drive me away with a whip.”

He smiled, uncrossed his legs, and swung in to face us. He put his arms on the table and folded his hands together. “Every town the size of Edgerton has a Mr. Inside. He can tell you where to go if you want something, and the name of the guy who can help you get it and who to see afterward.”

“Valuable guy,” I said.

“Mr. Inside is like the post office. His lines go
out
. Back and forth down those lines moves
information
. Take on that role, you better keep the wheels greased. Outside you and your circle, other people are taking a steady interest.”

“The police?”

He shook his head. “The force gets taken care of way down the line. They don’t want you in jail, they want you out on the street where you can do some good.”

“Then who are these other people?” Laurie said.

Edison flattened his hands on the table and tilted his head to look up at the great beeches. “About a year after I started part-timing for Toby, a fool named Clothard Spelvin came through from the office. They called him Clothhead because his brainpower could just about hold its own against a dishtowel. Light-skinned black man, but an ugly son of a bitch. Excuse me, Mrs. Hatch.”

“No problem.”

“Thank you. Clothhead said, ‘Max, you don’t work here no more. A man wants to see you.’ I went in and asked Toby, ‘Who does that dumbbell work for? I’m supposed to go with him.’ Toby said, ‘You’ll be all right, it’s all set up.’ He took us through the storage room and slid open the back door. A big Cadillac was out in the alley. Dark blue. Enough wax on the chassis to shine at the stroke of midnight during an eclipse of the moon. Clothhead gave me the keys and told me, Drive north on old Highway 4.
Just past the town line, he pointed at a roadhouse. The place was empty except for a goon up front at the bar and one man sitting way at the back. That man was my new boss, Mr. Edward Rinehart. For the next seven years, all hours of the day and night, I drove Mr. Rinehart wherever he wanted to go.”

“Honest to God,” I said. Laurie put her hands in her lap and looked back and forth between us like a spectator at a tennis match. When my astonishment let me speak again, I uttered, no less idiotically, “Really.”

Edison could not entirely conceal his pleasure in my reaction to his story. “Why did you think Toby gave you my name?”

Unable to contain herself any longer, Laurie burst out with, “Well, what was he
like
?”

Max Edison waited for me to clear my head.

“He was a gangster?” I said at last.

“Maybe there is no organized crime. Maybe the newspapers made the whole thing up. But if it exists, does it seem like you can join up unless you’re Italian? Even better, Sicilian? Mr. Rinehart was a man who worked by himself.”

“So what did he do?” I asked.

“Where you find a Mr. Inside, eventually you will learn there is also a Mr. Outside. Mr. Outside is more important than Mr. Inside, but not many know about him. If you happen to be a professional criminal, one night you are invited to a hotel room. Shrimp, roast beef, chicken, whatever food you like, is laid out. All kinds of bottles and plenty of ice. The lights are turned down. Three, four guys similar to you are already there. Way back in the room where you can’t see his face, Mr. Outside is sitting in a big, comfortable chair. At least one or two of the other guys seem to know him.

“When everybody’s relaxed, Mr. Outside explains from now on, you won’t do anything unless he tells you so. One-third of all your profits go straight to him. You want to walk out, but he starts to explain the benefits. He’s covering all the expenses. There will be enough work to cover the missing third a couple times over. Then he lays out a couple jobs so nice and neat, you could only mess up by having a heart attack when you saw the money. There’s more work on the come. Besides, you’ll never go to the trouble of breaking into a place and discover it was already stripped clean. What do you say?”

“ ‘Show me the dotted line,’ ” I said.

“Edward Rinehart was Mr. Outside?” Laurie asked.

Edison pulled down his sunglasses and leaned forward. His eyes were surprisingly light, an unusual sandy brown flecked with green. The whites were the immaculate white of fresh bed-sheets. “Did you hear me say that?” He turned his disingenuous gaze upon me. “Did you hear me say that?”

“You allowed us to form our own conclusions,” I said.

He pushed the sunglasses up over his eyes.

“Mr. Rinehart doesn’t sound like the sort of man who would write a book,” I said.

Edison lowered his chin and peered at me. I thought he was going to do the sunglasses trick again.

“What book?” Laurie asked. “You didn’t say anything about a book.”

“It was in the box my mother sent to herself, the one with the envelope and the key.”

“Did you read that book?” Edison asked.

“Not yet. Did you?”

“Mr. Rinehart gave me a copy, but it got lost along the way. You’re right, he didn’t seem like a man who would sit down to write a book. But Mr. Rinehart didn’t do anything
ordinary
. For one thing, around the time he came out with his book, he retired. Every now and then he had me drive him somewhere, but basically, the man walked away. He told me he had a mission. What Mr. Rinehart used to say was, he wanted his stories to show people the real truth about the world.”

“He talked to you in the car?” Laurie said.

Edison grinned. “I spent seven years driving Mr. Rinehart all over Hell’s Half-Acre in the dead of night, him in the back of that Cadillac talking a blue streak. If Mr. Rinehart had been a preacher, his sermons would have rolled on for two days and nights.”

Edison’s laughter sounded as though he still disbelieved what he had heard coming from the backseat of the Cadillac.

“What did he talk about?” I asked.

“The true nature of the universe. And his book. If every book writer goes through the kind of misery Mr. Rinehart did, I’m glad I was a driver.”

After rejection from a well-known New York house, Rinehart had decided to publish the book himself. Regent Press &
Bindery, a Chicago print shop with a subsidiary specializing in rebinding library books, shipped two hundred copies to Edgerton, where Rinehart stored them in a Hatchtown warehouse. For six weeks, Max Edison had loaded cartons into the Cadillac’s trunk and ferried his employer to bookstores as far north as Springfield. Most of the stores had taken two or three copies of
From Beyond
. Rinehart never invoiced them or requested sales figures. He had no interest in making money from his book; he wanted these copies available for purchase upon publication of the dazzled reviews it was certain to receive. When praise flooded in, he would once again submit the book to the firm in New York.

Out went the review copies. A three-page letter accompanied the first twenty, sent to the newspapers and magazines Rinehart judged most crucial to literary success. Fifty publications occupying the second rung received a single-page statement. A simple card went out with the copies sent to pulp magazines.

Three months passed without acknowledgment from the significant and semisignificant publications. The pulps, from which Rinehart anticipated cries of rapture, were silent. Two months later, the irate author sent out letters reminding seventy editors of their obligations to literature. None responded.

Nine months later,
Weird Tales
propped
From Beyond
against a brick wall and dispatched it in a public execution. Eight parallel columns spread over four pages condemned Rinehart’s book for being formulaic, cliché-ridden, and self-parodying. A corrosive laughter washed through the review.

Weird Tales
sent Rinehart into orbit.