Part 3 (1/2)
So that was that.
I looked at Tyndale.
Tyndale looked back at me.
After a moment or two he softened. ”For whatever it's worth, Mr. Kenton, that particular photo did look real...real as h.e.l.l. But so do the effects in some of these horror movies. There's one guy-Tom Savini-and the effects he does-”
”So they let him go.” A dread was surfacing inside my head like one of those little Russian submarines the Swedes are never quite able to trap.
”For whatever else it's worth, your a.s.s is covered with three sets of skivvies and four sets of pants, the middle two sets iron-clad,” Tyndale said, and then added, with a sobriety that was positively Alexander Haigian: ”I'm speaking legally-wise, you understand. You acted in good faith, as a citizen. If the guy could prove malice, that would be one thing...but h.e.l.l, you didn't even know him.”
The submarine came up a little more. Because I felt right then like I was starting to know him, Ruth, and my feelings about Carlos Detweiller were not then and are not now anything I would describe as jolly or benign.
”Besides, it's never the informant they want to sue for false arrest anyway-it's the cop who came and read them their rights and then took them downtown in a car with no doorhandles in the back doors.”
Informant. That was the source of the dread. The submarine was all the way up, floating on the surface like a dead fish in the moonlight. Informant. I didn't know Carlos Detweiller from a psychic begonia...but he knew something about me. Not that I was the head of the Brown University literary soci ety, or that I'm prematurely balding, or that I'm engaged to marry a pretty miss from Pasadena named Ruth Tanaka...not any of those things (and please G.o.d, not my home address, never my home address), but he knows I'm the editor who had him taken into custody for a murder he did not commit.
”Do you know,” I asked him, ”if Iverson or anyone else at the Central Falls Police Department mentioned me to him by name?”
Tyndale lit a cigarette. ”No,” he said, ”but I'm pretty sure no one there did.”
”Why not?”
”It would have been unprofessional. When you're building a case- even one that dies as fast as this one did-every name the perp doesn't know or even might not know becomes a poker chip.”
Any relief I might have felt was short-lived.
”But the guy would have to be pretty dumb not to know. Unless, that is, he mailed the photos to every publisher in New York. Think he might have done that?”
”No,” I said dismally. ”No other publisher in New York would have responded to his query letter in the first place.”
”I see.”
Tyndale was up, clearing away the styrofoam coffee cups, making those end-of-the-party gestures that meant he was hoping I'd put an egg in my shoe and beat it.
”One more question and I'll get out of your hair,” I said. ”The other photos were obvious fakes. Pitiful. How come they look so bad and these other fakes look so d.a.m.n good?”
”Maybe Detweiller himself set up the 'Sakred Seance' photos and someone else-Central Fall's answer to Tom Savini, say-made up the 'sakrifice victim.' Or maybe Detweiller did them all and purposely made the other ones look bad so you'd take these more seriously.”
”Why would he do that?”
”So you'd stub your toe just the way you have, maybe. Maybe that's how he gets off.”
”But he got arrested in the process!”He looked at me, almost pityingly. ”Here's a guy who's in a bar, Mr. Kenton, and he's got these cigarette loads. So just for a joke, he loads up one of his buddy's cigarettes while his buddy's in the john or picking out some tunes on the juke. Seems to him like the funniest idea in the world at the time, even though the buddy's sense of humor only begins when a load explodes in someone else's cigarette, and the guy doing the loading now should know it. So the buddy comes back, and pretty soon he gets to the loaded pill. Takes two puffs and ka-bang! Tobacco all over his face, powderburns on his fingers, and he spills his beer in his lap. And his buddy-his previous buddy-is sitting there on the next stool, just about laughing himself into a hemorrhage. Do you see all that?”
”Yes,” I said reluctantly, because I did.
”Now the guy loading the cigarette was not a feeb, although I got to say that in my own personal estimation a guy who thinks loading another guy's cigarette is funny is a little bit deficient in the sensa-yuma department. But even if his sensa-yuma starts with some guy getting the s.h.i.+t scared out of him and spilling his beer all over his b.a.l.l.s, you'd think a guy who wasn't a feeb would be at least interested enough in keeping his teeth inside his head not to do it. Yet they do. They do it all the f.u.c.king time. Now, being a literary man-”
(He obviously didn't know about Gash Me, My Darling, Ants from h.e.l.l, and the forthcoming Flies from h.e.l.l, Ruth) ”-can you tell me why he goes ahead, and ends up picking his teeth up offa the bar on account of he might be able to hawk the fillings?”
”Because he has no sense of futurity,” I said dismally, and for the first time, Ruth, I felt as if I could really see Carlos Detweiller.
”Huh? I don't know that word.”
”He doesn't know-isn't able to see ahead to the outcome.”
”Yeah, you're a literary man, all right. I couldn't have said it that good in a thousand years.”