The Writer (19 page)

He was about to say, “Only
you,” but thought it best not to.

His first day had been
productive and he achieved much more than expected. Given his
tiredness from the train and the fact that he didn’t arrive until
after noon, he assumed his first day would be slow. But Max had
managed to chat with the old bar guys for a good four hours, and
Gene had given his endorsement to write anything he wanted about
the town. In turn, Max promised to write Gene up as a viable
candidate in the next elections, and the more Sal protested the
more he felt determined to do it.

He planned to start out
early tomorrow and go door to door to ask each resident nicely if
he could have an interview. That way he might gain a family story
about some interesting relative, and even allow him to put that
person into his book. There was one resident he wanted for his book
more than any other, but their first meeting had not gone well.
Since he would be spending most of his time at Susan’s house, that
was the place where most of his story needed to take place, and for
that to happen he needed her endorsement. He knew that he could
just go ahead and invent a new character, but Max wanted to keep
the authenticity going.

“I’ve been hearing some
interesting talk in town,” Max said to Susan after he asked to see
the menu for the night’s meal. He knew about Simona’s cooking and
he would be happy with anything she served. “Seems there was a
murder here not long back. Unusual for the town.”

“Yes, Allan Longbottom,”
said Susan. She had been looking though a furniture catalogue,
thinking of changing the curtains, a project that had been in her
mind for the last year. Some decisions just couldn’t be
rushed.

Max waited for her to go
on.

“Poor unfortunate man was
Allan,” she said. “I never knew much about him, but then, some
people prefer to live like that, out of the public eye. Funny how
you can see someone every day and yet know nothing about them, and
never discuss anything other than the weather. How could he not be
a stranger when he never wants to have a conversation?”

“And it was one of your
boarders who did it? Is that right?”

“Oh no, you have your facts
entirely wrong there, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have anyone like that
staying around me and my children. No one who’s a murderer is
allowed into my house. I’m sorry, but I do have my
limits.”

Max swallowed nervously,
thinking that she would view him differently if she knew what he
had wanted to do to Craigfield that fateful night when he caught
him sleepwalking. But that was a dark time for him and he was over
it all now.

“If you don’t mind my
asking,” he asked carefully, “how can you tell what a murderer
looks like? How do you know I’m not a murderer?”

“Because I can see it in
your eyes. Even if you get that angry, enough to swing with intent,
you wouldn’t be able to do it. I can tell with people. And it was
the same with the man they’re talking about, I knew he was a fine
young man. Some ghastly rumours around town about him, too. Some
people are just not nice. They really should watch what they say
before they start in on people they don’t know.”

Max hid his relief. “I guess
you’re right.”

“No, the man who visited
with us was most charming and polite. My niece was staying here too
at the time, from the city, and they are an item now, the two of
them. Isn’t it funny, they were living so long together in the same
place without ever meeting, and it takes them both to come here,
for entirely different reasons, for them to meet. For them to have
a conversation, so they were no longer strangers.”

“I guess you never know
where love’s going to take you.”

Susan raised her hand in
mock surrender. “Oh, you’re not going to get me into any
conversation like that. I’ve long since thinking of all the trouble
men have given me. And that’s one story I certainly won’t be
telling someone calling themselves a writer.”

“We’re not always to blame,
you must admit? Us men, I mean?”

“Of course, you’re right.
The way men act around women, it’s entirely our fault for driving
them crazy enough to do stupid things.”

Max nodded, happy to see
that he had gained her confidence.

“Enjoy your stay here in
Gendry, Mr Marshall,” she said with a smile. “But do go find for
yourself better, nicer stories than murderers and strangers from
the city. Gendry’s a better place than that, as I’m sure you’ll
find.”

PART
TWO

IRONWRIGHT

Dan Ironwright’s wife Sam
had been in a testy mood that morning. She had berated him for
drinking his coffee in the shower again, saying something about the
water not being clean, which to him was nonsense. If it wasn’t
clean then why was he using it to clean himself? None of it got
into his coffee anyway; at least not enough to worry about. If he
felt like pushing her, as he sometimes did, then he’d claim that it
added to the flavour. He said nothing this time since he didn’t
feel like enduring a lecture on soap grime. Not that early in the
morning. Not with a full week of work ahead of him.

When he roughly dried
himself and put on his shirt he found it was too tight. He didn’t
want to mention it to anyone, especially Sam. It didn’t make any
difference to him that she had a range of shirts of various sizes,
all bought in advance and ready for him to wear. He just didn’t
want to admit that she was right, that he was still gaining weight.
The shirt was going to fit and the buttons will not break, and his
work colleagues would have no reason to find amusement.

He knew that if he had done
the same for her, and provided a wide range of pants depending upon
her varying weight, a world war would break out. There was a time,
and with a different wife, when he would have deliberately started
a fight. He no longer did such things, since he was in his second
marriage, apparently his “happy” marriage, the one you have after
the “starter” marriage. Towards the end of his first, when they
both sensed it wasn’t working, he practised a dangerous and yet
awesome game known as Urban Matador. He would actively work to wind
up his wife, particularly when she was extra grumpy on a Sunday
morning, to see how far she would go.

The crowd cheers as he
sidesteps each charge of accusation. They applaud as he taunts
while she paws the ground, snorting. She eyes how she will gorge
him, throw him in the air and trample him with examples of his
inherent masculine stupidity. But each time, with deft sidesteps of
subject change, and a few flourishes of sarcasm, he emerges
victorious. And divorced.

For this marriage he hung up
his matador cape, retired from the arena of wife baiting, but there
were times he thought of coming out of retirement. Only a week ago
he responded to her question from the bedroom with, “Yes, you
always do.” She then rushed at him with a horrified
look.

“I always look
fat?”

“What?” he asked, with no
idea why she was asking that. “You always look fabulous, I
said.”

“I asked you,” she said like
she was the professional investigator and not him, “if I looked fat
in this.”

Knowing that he had misheard
her, he knew that the last thing he should do next was to start
laughing. The absurdity of the situation made it nearly impossible
to hold back. “I thought you said,” he said with his voice
quivering as he held back giggles, “you said you look
fabulous.”

The matador was well and
truly retired.

She studied him, checking
for any signs that he was mocking her, and then came to her
conclusion. “You think I’m fat.”

“Fabulous,” he said with a
stronger voice, not appreciating the accusation. “I think you look
fabulous.” Now his tone suggested that he no longer thought she was
“fabulous”.

“Don’t lie. You think I’m
fat,” she said as she went to find something else to wear. That was
the end of the conversation and he was relieved for it. He could
have gone on and told her that it wasn’t the pants that made her
look fat. She looked fat in everything, because she was fat. But so
was he, and he was okay with that. All women, he had found, were
not interested in logic when it came to their weight. Men who were
fat knew they were fat, and while they didn’t like it very much,
they knew that that was how they looked and different clothes
weren’t going to change it. A few, Dan noticed, liked to wear their
shirts untucked to hide their bulky bellies, and then claim it was
the fashion to wear it that way.

Dan liked to have his shirt
tucked in and didn’t care at all who noticed. There was only one
person he feared to hear a comment from, and that was his doctor. A
German woman whom he liked to call “The General”, she would look
upon his large belly as a non human entity. Perhaps to her it was
some sort of alien life form that has landed on him and was seeking
someone to introduce to their leader. Her eyes would become glued
to his belly and her lip would turn up, and Dan would fight back
his jokes that perhaps he was hiding a troop of alien clowns. She
was not someone to bait with such comments. The last time he had
seen her she prescribed a very detailed diet after a lecture that
lasted so long that Dan lost track of time.

He was the one who should be
cranky, not Sam. Not only was food his favourite pastime, anything
else came in a distant second place. The General was not someone to
say no to, and he was seriously considering looking for a new
doctor, but he had given her his promise that he would try to lose
some weight and he felt obligated to that. He would give it three
months which, with good behaviour, might become six
weeks.

Now down to four slices of
toast for breakfast, he helped them down with grilled tomatoes and
a dab of cream cheese and only half as much salt and pepper as he
wanted. Keeping the promise to cut down on his coffee was more of a
problem to solve, and by “solve” he meant not letting either doctor
or wife know exactly how many cups he was having. He also had
several strawberry rolls concealed under the driver’s seat of his
car, for emergencies. Then he remembered that he finished them off
last night when he snuck out to the garage. He realised that he
would have to take that familiar detour to the bakery on his way in
to work.

A pleasant woman on the
radio told him that the dreary rainy weather had finally passed and
the forecast for the next month was for warm weather and light
winds. That was the day’s first good news but it wasn’t enough to
change Dan’s mood. He didn’t care for sunny weather since it meant
being stuck in traffic with the sun on him making him sweat so much
that it would soak through his clothes and drain into his
shoes.

Dan would sweat a lot in his
job and he knew how to use it to his advantage. He would lean in
close when interrogating suspects, letting them get a good whiff of
his armpit, and even feel a few drops courtesy of his forehead.
Some tried to complain about police brutality, which would only be
answered with an innocent shrug and a comment along the lines of he
can’t help his glands. He could always take his shirt off, he would
suggest, but then they would complain about his flabby chest and
stomach, and no one wanted to see that.

He thought that he deserved
to be in a good mood, since his last case went to court and looked
a sure-thing. His last three before that had all resulted in
convictions and Dan knew that he was on a roll. At the back of his
mind he knew that various factions within the office were working
on undermining his streak, but he tried to ignore those thoughts.
When his boss Dun Moore casually told him to take another look at
Dale Gant’s Gendry case, Dan fought to keep thinking those good
thoughts. Dale was on leave, he was told, and it’s a case with no
motives or suspects. Oh yeah, the boss added like it wasn’t too
important, and there’s evidence. And it’s up in Gendry too, where
the local police hardly did anything to help with the
investigation. Try that one, Dan.

“Got someone coming in with
a new angle on it,” the boss said.

“A new angle that’s going to
convict?” Dan asked, but his boss just walked away. If Dan didn’t
know better, he thought he heard sniggering.

Paul Evans had no known
connection to the Gendry case, and what he was saying didn’t make
an awful amount of sense. Dan was meant to sit him down in a quiet
room to see what his problem was. When Dan looked over the few
basic notes taken by a disinterested desk-worker, probably over the
phone, he suspected that this might be some kind of elaborate
set-up to kill his streak. Such things had been done
before.

He left Paul seated at his
desk and then walked casually into Dun’s small office and asked, in
a roundabout way, if this guy was for real. Not only was he real,
Dun assured him, he had connections to some important police chiefs
and had been causing them headaches for the past few weeks. Dan
nodded and went to find some more coffee, knowing that this one was
just a matter of going through the motions to keep everyone happy.
Police work was like that most the time.

“Ok, so you think there’s
been a murder?” Dan asked Paul as he ushered him into one of their
interrogation rooms. He explained that Paul was not meant to read
anything into the fact that this was the room where they hammered
away at suspects for hours on end. It was more the fact that it was
private, so he could relax and speak his mind. It was all
confidential, he was told, and Dan was not someone who liked to go
around telling people anything at all. A quiet and reserved man, he
was.