Four Past Midnight (49 page)

“Oh. Sorry.”

“No need to be,” Mort said. He looked over toward the gas islands and saw that the jockey had finished filling his tank and was now washing the Buick's windshield, a sight he had never expected to witness again in his lifetime.

“Handling this guy yourself ... are you really sure it's what you want to do?”

“Yes, I think so,” Mort said.

He hesitated, suddenly understanding what was very likely going on in Greg's mind: he was thinking that if he found the man in the black hat and Mort got hurt as a result, he, Greg, would be responsible.

“Listen, Greg—you could go along while I talk to the guy, if you wanted to.”

“I might just do that,” Greg said, relieved.

“It's proof he wants,” Mort said, “so I'll just have to get it for him.”

“But you said you
had
proof.”

“Yes, but he didn't exactly take my word for it. I guess I'm going to have to shove it in his face to get him to leave me alone.”

“Oh.” Greg thought it over. “The guy really is crazy, isn't he?”

“Yes indeed.”

“Well, I'll see if I can find him. Give me a call tonight.”

“I will. And thanks, Greg.”

“Don't mention it. A change is as good as a rest.”

“So they say.”

He told Greg goodbye and checked his watch. It was almost seven-thirty, and that was much too early to call Herb Creekmore, unless he wanted to pry Herb out of bed, and this wasn't that urgent. A stop at the Augusta tollbooths would do fine. He walked back to the Buick, replacing his address book and digging out his wallet. He asked the pump jockey how much he owed him.

“That's twenty-two fifty, with the cash discount,” the jockey said, and then looked at Mort shyly. “I wonder if I could have your autograph, Mr. Rainey? I've all your books.”

That made him think of Amy again, and how Amy had hated the autograph seekers. Mort himself didn't understand them, but saw no harm in them. For her they had seemed to sum up an aspect of their lives which she found increasingly hateful. Toward the end, he had cringed inwardly every time someone asked
that
question in Amy's presence. Sometimes he could almost sense her thinking:
If you love me, why don't you STOP them?
As if he could, he thought. His job was to write books people like this guy would want to read... or so he saw it. When he succeeded at that, they asked for autographs.

He scribbled his name on the back of a credit slip for the pump jockey (who had, after all, actually washed his windshield) and reflected that if Amy had blamed him for doing something they liked—and he thought that, on some level she herself might not be aware of, she had—he supposed he was guilty. But it was only the way he had been built.

Right was right, after all, just as Shooter had said. And fair was fair.

He got back into his car and drove off toward Derry.

He paid his seventy-five cents at the Augusta toll plaza, then pulled into the parking area by the telephones on the far side. The day was sunny, chilly, and windy—coming out of the southwest from the direction of Litchfield and running straight and unbroken across the open plain where the turnpike plaza lay, that wind was strong enough to bring tears to Mort's eyes. He relished it, all the same. He could almost feel it blowing the dust out of rooms inside his head which had been closed and shuttered too long.

He used his credit card to call Herb Creekmore in New York—the apartment, not the office. Herb wouldn't actually make it to James and Creekmore, Mort Rainey's literary agency, for another hour or so, but Mort had known Herb long enough to guess that the man had probably been through the shower by now and was drinking a cup of coffee while he waited for the bathroom mirror to unsteam so he could shave.

He was lucky for the second time in a row. Herb answered in a voice from which most of the sleep-fuzz had departed.
Am I on a roll this morning, or what?
Mort thought, and grinned into the teeth of the cold October wind. Across the four lanes of highway, he could see men stringing snowfence in preparation for the winter which lay just over the calendar's horizon.

“Hi, Herb,” he said. “I'm calling you from a pay telephone outside the Augusta toll plaza. My divorce is final, my house in Derry burned flat last night, some nut killed my cat, and it's colder than a well-digger's belt buckle—are we having fun yet?”

He hadn't realized how absurd his catalogue of woes sounded until he heard himself reciting them aloud, and he almost laughed. Jesus, it was cold out here, but didn't it feel good! Didn't it feel
clean
!

“Mort?” Herb said cautiously, like a man who suspects a practical joke.

“At your service,” Mort said.

“What's this about your house?”

“I'll tell you, but only once. Take notes if you have to, because I plan to be back in my car before I freeze solid to this telephone.” He began with John Shooter and John Shooter's accusation. He finished with the conversation he'd had with Amy last night.

Herb, who had spent a fair amount of time as Mort and Amy's guest (and who had been entirely dismayed by their breakup, Mort guessed), expressed his surprise and sorrow at what had happened to the house in Derry. He asked if Mort had any idea who had done it. Mort said he didn't.

“Do you suspect this guy Shooter?” Herb asked. “I understand the significance of the cat being killed only a short time before you woke up, but—”

“I guess it's technically possible, and I'm not ruling it out completely,” Mort said, “but I doubt it like hell. Maybe it's only because I can't get my mind around the idea of a man burning down a twenty-four-room house in order to get rid of a magazine. But I think it's mostly because I met him. He really believes I stole his story, Herb. I mean, he has no doubts at all. His attitude when I told him I could show him proof was ‘Go ahead, motherfucker, make my day.' ”

“Still ... you called the police, didn't you?”

“Yeah, I made a call this morning,” Mort said, and while this statement was a bit disingenuous, it was not an out-and-out lie. He
had
made a call this morning. To Greg Carstairs. But if he told Herb Creekmore, whom he could visualize sitting in the living room of his New York apartment in a pair of natty tweed pants and a strap-style tee shirt, that he intended to handle this himself, with only Greg to lend a hand, he doubted if Herb would understand. Herb was a good friend, but he was something of a stereotype: Civilized Man, late-twentieth-century model, urban and urbane. He was the sort of man who believed in counselling. The sort of man who believed in meditation and mediation. The sort of man who believed in discussion when reason was present, and the immediate delegation of the problem to Persons in Authority when it was absent. To Herb, the concept that sometimes a man has got to do what a man has got to do was one which had its place ... but its place was in movies starring Sylvester Stallone.

“Well, that's good.” Herb sounded relieved. “You've got enough on your plate without worrying about some psycho from Mississippi. If they find him, what will you do? Have him charged with harassment?”

“I'd rather convince him to take his persecution act and put it on the road,” Mort said. His feeling of cheery optimism, so unwarranted but indubitably real, persisted. He supposed he would crash soon enough, but for the time being, he couldn't stop grinning. So he wiped his leaking nose with the cuff of his coat and went right on doing it. He had forgotten how good it could feel to have a grin pasted onto your kisser.

“How will you do that?”

“With your help, I hope. You've got files of my stuff, right?”

“Right, but—”

“Well, I need you to pull the June, 1980, issue of
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
. That's the one with ‘Sowing Season' in it. I can't very well pull mine because of the fire, so—”

“I don't have it,” Herb said mildly.

“You don't?” Mort blinked. This was one thing he hadn't expected. “Why not?”

“Because 1980 was two years before I came on board as your agent. I have at least one copy of everything
I
sold for you, but that's one of the stories you sold yourself.”

“Oh,
shit
!” In his mind's eye, Mort could see the acknowledgment for “Sowing Season” in
Everybody Drops the Dime
. Most of the other acknowledgments contained the line, “Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agents, James and Creekmore.” The one for “Sowing Season” (and two or three other stories in the collection) read only, “Reprinted by permission of the author.”

“Sorry,” Herb said.

“Of
course
I sent it in myself—I remember writing the query letter before I submitted. It's just that it seems like you've been my agent forever.” He laughed a little then and added, “No offense.”

“None taken,” Herb said. “Do you want me to make a call to
EQMM
? They must have back issues.”

“Would you?” Mort asked gratefully. “That'd be great.”

“I'll do it first thing. Only—” Herb paused.

“Only what?”

“Promise me you're not planning to confront this guy on your own once you have a copy of the printed story in hand.”

“I promise,” Mort agreed promptly. He was being disingenuous again, but what the hell-he
had
asked Greg to come along when he did it, and Greg had agreed, so he
wouldn't
be alone. And Herb Creekmore was his literary agent, after all, not his father. How he handled his personal problems wasn't really Herb's concern.

“Okay,” Herb said. “I'll take care of it. Call me from Derry, Mort—maybe it isn't as bad as it seems.”

“I'd like to believe that.”

“But you don't?”

“Afraid not.”

“Okay.” Herb sighed. Then, diffidently, he added: “Is it okay to ask you to give Amy my best?”

“It is, and I will.”

“Good. You go on and get out of the wind, Mort. I can hear it shrieking in the receiver. You must be freezing.”

“Getting there. Thanks again, Herb.”

He hung up and looked thoughtfully at the telephone for a moment. He'd forgotten that the Buick needed gas, which was minor, but he'd also forgotten that Herb Creekmore hadn't been his agent until 1982, and that wasn't so minor. Too much pressure, he supposed. It made a man wonder what else he might have forgotten.

The voice in his mind, not the midbrain voice but the one from the deep ranges, spoke up suddenly:
What about stealing the story in the first place
?
Maybe you forgot that
.

He snorted a laugh as he hurried back to his car. He had never been to Mississippi in his life, and even now, stuck in a writer's block as he was, he was a long way from stooping to plagiarism. He slid behind the wheel and started the engine, reflecting that a person's mind certainly got up to some weird shit every now and again.

Mort didn't believe that people—even those who tried to be fairly honest with themselves—knew when some things were over. He believed they often went on believing, or trying to believe, even when the handwriting was not only on the wall but writ in letters large enough to read a hundred yards away without a spyglass. If it was something you really cared about and felt that you needed, it was easy to cheat, easy to confuse your life with TV and convince yourself that what felt so wrong would eventually come right ... probably after the next commercial break. He supposed that, without its great capacity for self-deception, the human race would be even crazier than it already was.

But sometimes the truth crashed through, and if you had consciously tried to think or dream your way around that truth, the results could be devastating: it was like being there when a tidal wave roared not over but straight through a dike which had been set in its way, smashing it and you flat.

Mort Rainey experienced one of these cataclysmic epiphanies after the representatives of the police and fire departments had gone and he and Amy and Ted Milner were left alone to walk slowly around the smoking ruin of the green Victorian house which had stood at 92 Kansas Street for one hundred and thirty-six years. It was while they were making that mournful inspection tour that he understood that his marriage to the former Amy Dowd of Portland, Maine, was over. It was no “period of marital stress.” It was no “trial separation.” It was not going to be one of those cases you heard of from time to time where both parties repented their decision and remarried. It was over. Their lives together were history. Even the house where they had shared so many good times was nothing but evilly smouldering beams tumbled into the cellar-hole like the teeth of a giant.

Their meeting at Marchman's, the little coffee shop on Witcham Street, had gone well enough. Amy had hugged him and he had hugged her back, but when he tried to kiss her mouth, she turned her head deftly aside so that his lips landed on her cheek instead. Kiss-kiss, as they said at the office parties. So good to see you, darling.

Ted Milner, blow-dried hair perfectly in place this morning and nary an Alfalfa corkscrew in sight, sat at the table in the comer, watching them. He was holding the pipe which Mort had seen clenched in his teeth at various parties over the last three years or so. Mort was convinced the pipe was an affectation, a little prop employed for the sole purpose of making its owner look older than he was. And how old was that? Mort wasn't sure, but Amy was thirty-six, and he thought Ted, in his impeccable stone-washed jeans and open-throated J. Press shirt, had to be at least four years younger than that, possibly more. He wondered if Amy knew she could be in for trouble ten years down the tine—maybe even five—and then reflected it would take a better man than he was to suggest it to her.