The Dark Half (11 page)

One apartment house had gone in '84; the second in'86, following a disastrous IRS audit. She had held onto this one on L Street as grimly as a losing player in a cutthroat game of Monopoly, convinced that it was in a neighborhood which was about to Happen. But it hadn't Happened yet, and she didn't think it would Happen for another year or two . . . if then. When it did, she meant to pack her bags and move to Aruba. In the meantime, the landlady who had once been the capital city's most sought-after fuck would just have to hang on.

Which she always had.

Which she intended to keep on doing.

And God help anyone who got in her way.

Like Frederick “Mr. Bigshot” Clawson, for instance.

She reached the second-floor landing. Guns n' Roses was bellowing out of the Shulmans' apartment.

“TURN THAT FUCKING RECORD-PLAYER DOWN!” she yelled at the top of her lungs . . . and when Dodie Eberhart raised her voice to its maximum decibel level, windows cracked, the eardrums of small childen ruptured, and dogs fell dead.

The music went from a scream to a whisper at once. She could sense the Shulmans quivering against each other like a pair of scared poppies in a thunderstorm and praying it was not them the Wicked Witch of L Street had come to see They were afraid of her. That was not an unwise way to feel. Shulman was a corporate lawyer with a high-powered firm, but he was still two ulcers away from being high-powered enough to give Dodie pause. If he should cross her at this stage of his young life, she would wear his guts for garters, and he knew it, and that was very satisfactory.

When the bottom dropped out of both your bank accounts and your investment portfolio, you had to take your satisfactions where you found them.

Dodie turned the corner without breaking stride and started up the stairs to the third floor, where Frederick “Mr. Bigshot” Clawson lived in solitary splendor. She walked with that same even rhino-crossing-the-veldt stride, head up, not in the least out of breath in spite of her poundage, the staircase shaking the tiniest bit in spite of its solidity.

She was looking forward to this.

Clawson wasn't even on a low rung of a corporate-law ladder. As of now, he wasn't on the ladder at all. Like all the law students she had ever met (mostly as tenants; she had certainly never fucked any in what she now thought of as her “other life”), he was composed chiefly of high aspirations and low funds, both of them floating on a generous cushion of bullshit. Dodie did not, as a rule, confuse any of these elements. Falling for a law student's line of bull was, in her mind, as bad as turning a trick for free. Once you started in with behavior like that, you might as well hang up your jock.

Figuratively speaking, of course.

Yet Frederick “Mr. Bigshot” Clawson had partially breached her defenses. He had been late with the rent four times in a row and she had allowed this because he had convinced her that in his case the tired old scripture was really the truth (or might come to be): he
did
have money coming in.

He could not have done this to her if he had claimed Sidney Sheldon was really Robert Ludlum, or Victoria Holt was really Rosemary Rogers, because she didn't give a shit about those people or their billions of writealikes. She was into crime novels, and if they were real gutbucket crime novels, so much the better. She supposed there were plenty of people out there who went for the romantic slop and the spy shit, if the
Post
Sunday best-seller list was any indication, but she had been reading Elmore Leonard for years before he hit the lists, and she had also formed strong attachments for Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Horace McCoy, Charles Willeford, and the rest of those guys. If you wanted it short and sweet, Dodie Eberhart liked novels where men robbed banks, shot each other, and demonstrated how much they loved their women mostly by beating the shit out of them.

George Stark, in her opinion, was—or had been—the best of them. She had been a dedicated fan from
Machine's Way
and
Oxford Blues
right up to
Riding to Babylon,
which looked to be the last of them.

The bigshot in the third-floor apartment had been surrounded by notes and Stark novels the first time she came to dun him about the rent (only three days overdue that time, but of course if you gave them an inch they took a mile), and after she had taken care of her business and he had promised to deliver a check to her by noon the following day, she asked him if the collected works of George Stark were now required reading for a career before the bar.

“No,” Clawson had said with a bright, cheerful, and utterly predatory smile, “but they might just
finance
one. ”

It was the smile more than anything else which had hooked her and caused her to pay out line in his case where she had snubbed it brutally tight in all others. She had seen that smile many times before in her own mirror. She had believed then that such a smile could not be faked, and, just for the record, she still believed it. Clawson really
had
had the goods on Thaddeus Beaumont; his mistake had been believing so confidently that Beaumont would go along with the plans of a Mr. Bigshot like Frederick Clawson. And it had been her mistake, too.

She had read one of the two Beaumont novels—
Purple Haze
—following Clawson's explanation of what he had discovered, and thought it an exquisitely stupid book. In spite of the correspondence and photocopies Mr. Bigshot had shown her, she would have found it difficult or impossible to believe both writers were the same man. Except. . . about three-quarters of the way through it, at a point where she had been about ready to throw the boring piece of shit across the room and forget the whole thing, there was a scene in which a farmer shot a horse. The horse had two broken legs and needed to be shot, but the thing was, old Farmer John had
enjoyed
it. Had, in fact, put the barrel of the gun against the horse's head and then jerked himself off, squeezing the trigger at the moment of climax.

It was, she thought, as if Beaumont had stepped out to get a cup of coffee when he got to that part . . . and George Stark had stepped in and written the scene, like a literary Rumpelstiltskin. Certainly it was the only gold in that particular pile of hay.

Well, none of it mattered now. All it proved was that no one was immune to bullshit forever. The bigshot had taken her for a ride, but at least it had been a
short
ride. And it was now over.

Dodie Eberhart reached the third-floor landing, her hand already curling into the sort of tight fist she made when the time had come not for polite knocking but hammering, and then she saw hammering would not be necessary. The bigshot's door was standing ajar.

“Jesus wept!” Dodie muttered, her lip curling. This wasn't a junkie neighborhood, but when it came to ripping off some idiot's apartment, the junkies were more than willing to cross boundary lines. The guy was even stupider than she had thought.

She rapped on the door with her knuckles and it swung open. “Clawson!” she called in a voice which promised doom and damnation.

There was no answer. Looking up the short corridor, she could see the shades in the living room were drawn and the overhead light was burning. A radio was playing softly.

“Clawson, I want to talk to you!”

She started up the short corridor . . . and stopped.

One of the sofa cushions was on the floor.

That was all. No sign that the place had been trashed by a hungry junkie, but her instincts were still sharp, and her wind was up in a moment. She smelled something. It was very faint, but it was there. A little like food which had spoiled but not yet rotted. That wasn't it, but it was as close as she could come. Had she smelled it before? She thought she had.

And there was another smell, although she didn't think it was her nose which was making her aware of it. She knew that one right away. She and Trooper Hamilton from Connecticut would have agreed at once on what it was: the smell of bad.

She stood just outside the living room, looking at the tumbled cushion, listening to the radio. What the climb up three flights of stairs hadn't been able to do that one innocent cushion had—her heart was beating rapidly under her massive left breast, and her breath was coming shallowly through her mouth. Something was not right here. Very much not right. The question was whether or not she would become a part of it if she hung around.

Common sense told her to go, go while she still had a chance, and common sense was very strong. Curiosity told her to stay and peek . . . and it was stronger.

She edged her head around the entrance to the living room and looked first to her right, where there was a fake fireplace, two windows giving a view on L Street, and not much else. She looked to the left and her head suddenly stopped moving. It actually seemed to lock in position. Her eyes widened.

That locked stare lasted no more than three seconds, but it seemed much longer to her. And she saw everything, down to the smallest detail; her mind made its own photograph of what it was seeing, as clear and sharp as those the crime photographer would soon take.

She saw the two bottles of Amstel beer on the coffee-table, one empty and the other half-full, with a collar of foam still inside the bottle-neck. She saw the ashtray with CHICAGOLAND! written on its curving surface. She saw two cigarette butts, unfiltered, squashed into the center of the tray's pristine whiteness, although the bigshot didn't smoke—not cigarettes, at least. She saw the small plastic box which had once been full of push-pins lying on its side between the bottles and the ashtray. Most of the push-pins, which the bigshot used to tack things to his kitchen bulletin board, were scattered across the glass surface of the coffee-table. She saw a few had come to rest on an open copy of
People
magazine, the one featuring the Thad Beaumont/George Stark story. She could see Mr. and Mrs. Beaumont shaking hands across Stark's gravestone, although from here they were upside down. It was the story that, according to Frederick Clawson, would never be printed. It was going to make him a moderately wealthy man instead. He had been wrong about that. In fact, it seemed he had been wrong about everything.

She could see Frederick Clawson, who had gone from Mr. Bigshot to no shot at all, sitting in one of his two living-room chairs. He had been tied in. He was naked, his clothes thrown into a snarly ball under the coffee-table. She saw the bloody hole at his groin. His testicles were still where they belonged; his penis had been stuffed into his mouth. There was plenty of room, because the murderer had also cut out Mr. Bigshot's tongue. It was tacked to the wall. The push-pin had been driven into its pink meat so deeply that she could only see a grinning crescent of bright yellow which was the push-pin's top, and her mind relentlessly photographed this, too. Blood had drizzled down the wallpaper below it, making a wavery fan-shape.

The killer had employed another push-pin, this one with a bright green head, to nail the second page of the
People
magazine article to the ex-bigshot's bare chest. She could not see Liz Beaumont's face—it was obscured by Clawson's blood—but she could see the woman's hand, holding out the pan of brownies for Thad's smiling inspection. She remembered that picture in particular had irked Clawson.
What a put-up job!
he had exclaimed.
She hates
to
cook—she
said so
in an interview just after Beaumont published his first novel
.

Finger-written in blood above the severed tongue tacked to the wall were these five words:

Jesus Christ,
some distant part of her mind thought.
It's just like a George Stark novel . . . like something Alexis Machine would do.

From behind her came a soft bumping sound.

Dodie Eberhart screamed and whirled. Machine came at her with his terrible straight-razor, its steely glitter now sleeved with Frederick Clawson's blood. His face was the twisted mask of scan which was all Nonie Griffiths had left after she carved him up at the end of
Machine's Way,
and—

And there was no one there at all.

The door had swung shut, that was all, the way doors sometimes do.

Is that
so? the distant part of her mind asked . . . except it was closer now, raising its voice, urgent with fright.
It was standing partway open with no problem at all when you came up the stairs. Not wide open, but enough so you could tell it wasn't shut.

Now her eyes went back to the beer-bottles on the coffee-table. One empty. One half-full, with a ring of foam still on the inside of the neck.

The killer had been behind the door when she came in. If she had turned her head she would almost surely have seen him . . . and now she would be dead, too.

And while she had been standing here, mesmerized by the colorful remains of Frederick “Mr. Bigshot” Clawson, he had simply gone out, dosing the door behind him.

The strength flowed out of her legs and she slipped to her knees with a weird kind of grace, looking like a girl about to take communion. Her mind ran frantically over the same thought, like a gerbil on an exercise wheel:
Oh I shouldn't have screamed, he'll come back, oh I shouldn't have screamed, he'll come back, oh I shouldn't have screamed—

And then she heard him, the measured thud of his big feet on the hall carpet. Later she became convinced that the goddam Shulmans had turned up their stereo again, and she had mistaken the steady thump of the bass for footsteps, but at that moment she was convinced it was Alexis Machine and he was returning . . . a man so dedicated and so murderous that not even death would stop him.

For the first time in her life, Dodie Eberhart fainted.