The Matlock Paper (7 page)

“I’m sorry you think so. Because I don’t. We don’t.… I haven’t gotten the detailed briefing, Kressel, but aren’t you supposed to act as liaison? Because if that’s true, I suggest you remove yourself. We’ll have someone else assigned to the job.”

“And give you a clear field? Let you run roughshod over this campus? Not on your life.”

“Then we work together. As disagreeable as that may be for both of us … You’re hostile; perhaps that’s good. You’ll keep me on my toes. You protest too much.”

Matlock was startled by Greenberg’s statement. It was one thing to form an antagonistic coalition, quite another to make veiled accusations; insulting to use a literary cliché.

“That remark requires an explanation,” said Kressel, his face flushed with anger.

When Greenberg replied, his voice was soft and reasonable, belying the words he spoke. “Pound sand, mister. I lost a very good friend tonight. Twenty minutes ago I spoke with his wife. I don’t give explanations under those conditions. That’s where my employers and me part company. Now, shut up and I’ll write out the hours of contact and give you the emergency telephone numbers. If you don’t want them, get the hell out of here.”

Greenberg lifted the briefcase onto a small table and opened it. Sam Kressel, stunned, approached the agent silently.

Matlock stared at the worn leather briefcase, only hours ago chained to the wrist of a dead man. He knew the deadly pavanne had begun. The first steps of the dance had been taken violently.

There were decisions to make, people to confront.

The implausible name below the doorbell on the two-family faculty house read: Mr. and Mrs. Archer Beeson. Matlock had elicited the dinner invitation easily. History instructor Beeson had been flattered by his interest in coordinating a seminar between two of their courses. Beeson would have been flattered if a faculty member of Matlock’s attainments had asked him how his wife was in bed (and most wondered). And since Matlock was very clearly male, Archer Beeson felt that “drinks and din” with his wife wriggling around in a short skirt might help cement a relationship with the highly regarded professor of English literature.

Matlock heard the breathless shout from the second-floor landing. “Just a sec!”

It was Beeson’s wife, and her broad accent, over-cultivated at Miss Porter’s and Finch, sounded caricatured. Matlock pictured the girl racing around checking the plates of cheese and dip—very unusual cheese and dip, conversation pieces, really—while her husband put the final touches on the visual aspects of his bookcases—perhaps several obscure tomes carelessly, carefully, placed on tables, impossible for a visitor to miss.

Matlock wondered if these two were also secreting small tablets of lysergic acid or capsules of methedrine.

The door opened and Beeson’s petite wife, dressed in the expected short skirt and translucent silk blouse that loosely covered her large breasts, smiled ingenuously.

“Hi! I’m Ginny Beeson. We met at several
mad
cocktail parties. I’m
so
glad you could come. Archie’s just finishing a paper. Come on up.” She preceded Matlock up the stairs, hardly giving him a chance to acknowledge. “These stairs are
horrendous!
Oh, well, the price of starting at the bottom.”

“I’m sure it won’t be for long,” said Matlock.

“That’s what Archie keeps saying. He’d better be right or I’ll have muscles all over my legs!”

“I’m sure he is,” said Matlock, looking at the soft, unmuscular, large expanse of legs in front of him.

Inside the Beeson apartment, the cheese and dip were prominently displayed on an odd-shaped coffee table, and the anticipated showcase volume was one of Matlock’s own. It was titled
Interpolations in Richard II
and it resided on a table underneath a fringed lamp. Impossible for a visitor to miss.

The minute Ginny closed the door, Archie burst into the small living room from what Matlock presumed was Beeson’s study—also small. He carried a sheaf of papers in his left hand; his right was extended.

“Good-oh! Glad you could make it, old man!… Sit, sit. Drinks are due and overdue! God! I’m flaked out for one!… Just spent three hours reading twenty versions of the Thirty Years’ War!”

“It happens. Yesterday I got a theme on
Volpone
with the strangest ending I ever heard of. Turned out
the kid never read it but saw the film in Hartford.”

“With a new ending?”

“Totally.”

“God! That’s marvy!” injected Ginny semihysterically. “What’s your drink preference, Jim? I may call you Jim, mayn’t I, Doctor?”

“Bourbon and a touch of water, and you certainly better, Ginny. I’ve never gotten used to the ‘doctor.’ My father calls it fraud. Doctors carry stethoscopes, not books.” Matlock sat in an easy chair covered with an Indian serape.

“Speaking of doctors, I’m working on my dissertation now. That and two more hectic summers’ll do the trick.” Beeson took the ice bucket from his wife and walked to a long table underneath a window where bottles and glasses were carelessly arranged.

“It’s worth it,” said Ginny Beeson emphatically. “Isn’t it worth it, Jim?”

“Almost essential. It’ll pay off.”

“That and
publishing
.” Ginny Beeson picked up the cheese and crackers and carried them to Matlock. “This is an interesting little Irish
fromage
. Would you believe, it’s called ‘Blarney? Found it in a little shop in New York two weeks ago.”

“Looks great. Never heard of it.”

“Speaking of publishing. I picked up your
Interpolations
book the other day.
Damned fascinating!
Really!”

“Lord, I’ve almost forgotten it. Wrote it four years ago.”

“It should be a
required text!
That’s what Archie said, isn’t it, Archie?”

“Damned right! Here’s the poison, old man,” said Beeson, bringing Matlock his drink. “Do you work
through an agent, Jim? Not that I’m nosy. I’m years from writing anything.”

“That’s not true, and you know it,” Ginny pouted vocally.

“Yes, I do. Irving Block in Boston. If you’re working on something, perhaps I could show it to him.”

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t … that’d be awfully presumptuous of me.…” Beeson retreated with feigned humility to the couch with his drink. He sat next to his wife and they involuntarily, thought Matlock exchanged satisfied looks.

“Come on, Archie. You’re a bright fellow. A real comer on this campus. Why do you think I asked you about the seminar?
You
could be doing
me
the favor. I might be bringing Block a winner. That rubs off, you know.”

Beeson’s expression had the honesty of gratitude. It embarrassed Matlock to return the instructor’s gaze until he saw something else in Beeson’s eyes. He couldn’t define it, but it was there. A slight wildness, a trace of panic.

The look of a man whose mind and body knew drugs.

“That’s
damned
good-oh of you, Jim. I’m touched,
really
.”

The cheese, drinks, and dinner somehow passed. There were moments when Matlock had the feeling he was outside himself, watching three characters in a scene from some old movie. Perhaps on board ship or in a sloppily elegant New York apartment with the three of them wearing tightly fitted formal clothes. He wondered why he visualized the scene in such fashion—and then he knew. The Beesons had a thirties
quality about them. The thirties that he had observed on the late night television films. They were somehow an anachronism, of this time but not of the time. It was either more than camp or less than puton; he couldn’t be sure. They were not artificial in themselves, but there was a falseness in their emphatic small talk, their dated expressions. Yet the truth was that they were the
now
of the present generation.

Lysergic acid and methedrine.

Acid heads. Pill poppers.

The Beesons were somehow forcing themselves to show themselves as part of a past and carefree era. Perhaps to deny the times and conditions in which they found themselves.

Archie Beeson and his wife were frightening.

By eleven, after considerable wine with the “interesting-little-veal-dish-from-a-recipe-in-an-old-Italian cookbook,” the three of them sat down in the living room. The last of the proposed seminar problems was ironed out. Matlock knew it was time to begin; the awful, awkward moment He wasn’t sure how; the best he could do was to trust his amateur instincts.

“Look, you two.… I hope to hell this won’t come as too great a shock, but I’ve been a long time without a stick.” He withdrew a thin cigarette case from his pocket and opened it. He felt foolish, uncomfortably clumsy. But he knew he could not show those feelings. “Before you make any judgments, I should tell you I don’t go along with the pot laws and I never have.”

Matlock selected a cigarette from the dozen in the case and left the case open on the table. Was that the proper thing to do? He wasn’t sure; he didn’t know. Archie and his wife looked at each other. Through the flame in front of his face, Matlock watched their
reaction. It was cautious yet positive. Perhaps it was the alcohol in Ginny, but she smiled hesitantly, as if she was relieved to find a friend. Her husband wasn’t quite so responsive.

“Go right ahead, old man,” said the young instructor with a trace of condescension. “We’re hardly on the attorney general’s payroll.”

“Hardly!” giggled the wife.

“The laws are archaic,” continued Matlock, inhaling deeply. “In all areas. Control and an abiding sense of discretion—self-discretion—are all that matter. To deny experience is the real crime. To prohibit any intelligent individual’s right to fulfillment is … goddamn it, it’s repressive.”

“Well, I think the key word is
intelligent
, Jim.
In
discriminate use among the
un
intelligent leads to chaos.”

“Socratically, you’re only half right. The other half is ‘control.’ Effective control among the ‘iron’ and ‘bronze’ then frees the ‘gold’—to borrow from
The Republic
. If the intellectually superior were continually kept from thinking, experimenting, because their thought processes were beyond the comprehension of their fellow citizens, there’d be no great works—artistically, technically, politically. We’d still be in the Dark Ages.”

Matlock inhaled his cigarette and closed his eyes. Had he been too strong, too positive? Had he sounded too much the false proselytizer? He waited, and the wait was not long. Archie spoke quietly, but urgently nevertheless.

“Progress is being made every day, old man. Believe that. It’s the truth.”

Matlock half opened his eyes in relief and looked at Beeson through the cigarette smoke. He held his
gaze steady without blinking and then shifted his stare to Beeson’s wife. He spoke only two words.

“You’re children.”

“That’s a relative supposition under the circumstances,” answered Beeson, still keeping his voice low, his speech precise.

“And that’s talk.”

“Oh, don’t be so sure about that!” Ginny Beeson had had enough alcohol in her to be careless. Her husband reached for her arm and held it. It was a warning. He spoke again, taking his eyes off Matlock, looking at nothing.

“I’m not at all sure we’re on the same wavelength …”

“No, probably not. Forget it … I’ll finish this and shove off. Be in touch with you about the seminar.” Matlock made sure his reference to the seminar was offhanded, almost disinterested.

Archie Beeson, the young man in an academic hurry, could not stand that disinterest.

“Would you mind if I had one of those?”

“If it’s your first, yes, I would.… Don’t try to impress me. It doesn’t really matter.”

“My first?… Of what?” Beeson rose from the couch and walked to the table where the cigarette case lay open. He reached down, picked it up, and held it to his nostrils. “That’s passable grass. I might add, just passable. I’ll try one … for openers.”

“For openers?”

“You seem to be very sincere but, if you’ll forgive me, you’re a bit out of touch.”

“From what?”

“From where it’s at.” Beeson withdrew two cigarettes and lit them in
Now, Voyager
fashion. He inhaled deeply, nodding and shrugging a reserved approval,
and handed one to his wife. “Let’s call this an hors d’oeuvre. An appetizer.”

He went into his study and returned with a Chinese lacquered box, then showed Matlock the tiny peg which, when pushed, enabled the holder to flip up a thin layer of wood on the floor of the box, revealing a false bottom. Beneath were two dozen or so white tablets wrapped in transparent plastic.

“This is the main course … the entrée, if you’re up to it.”

Matlock was grateful for what knowledge he possessed and the intensive homework he’d undertaken during the past forty-eight hours. He smiled but his tone of voice was firm.

“I only take white trips under two conditions. The first is at
my
home with very good, very old friends. The second is with very good, very old friends at
their
homes. I don’t know you well enough, Archie. Self-discretion.… I’m not averse to a small red journey, however. Only I didn’t come prepared.”

“Say no more. I just may be.” Beeson took the Chinese box back into his study and returned with a small leather pouch, the sort pipe smokers use for tobacco, and approached Matlock’s chair. Ginny Beeson’s eyes grew wide; she undid a button on her half-unbuttoned blouse and stretched her legs.

“Dunhill’s best.” Beeson opened the top flap and held the pouch down for Matlock to see inside. Again there was the clear plastic wrapped around tablets. However, these were deep red and slightly larger than the white pills in the Chinese box. There were at least fifty to sixty doses of Seconal.

Ginny jumped out of the chair and squealed. “I
love
it! It’s the pinky-groovy!”

“Beats the hell out of brandy,” added Matlock.

“We’ll trip. Not too much, old man. Limit’s five. That’s the house rules for new old friends.”

The next two hours were blurred for James Matlock, but not as blurred as they were for the Beesons. The history instructor and his wife quickly reached their “highs” with the five pills—as would have Matlock had he not been able to pocket the final three while pretending to have swallowed them. Once on the first plateau, it wasn’t too hard for Matlock to imitate his companions and then convince Beeson to go for another dosage.