Shriver (16 page)

Finally, he entered the quiet of the carpeted lobby. The detective stood near a window.

“I've been reading your book, Mr. Shriver,” he said, waving a copy of
Goat Time
. “You certainly have a singular outlook on life.”

“I hope this will be quick, Detective.”

“Of course. So, tell me—do you remember any more about last night's debauchery?”

“I don't know which debauchery you're referring to.”

“How many debaucheries
were
there?” Krampus asked with a girlish chuckle. Shriver noticed for the first time that the detective wore a wispy goatee, so thin that it blended in with his pale skin. “Come now, Mr. Shriver. I've been interviewing the hotel staff, including Miss, uh . . .” He consulted his notebook. “Miss Sue St. Marie Debussy.”

“One of the twins?”

“Oh, are they twins?” Krampus asked. “I hadn't noticed.”

Was he serious? Shriver wondered.

“Anyway,” the detective continued, “Miss Debussy says that Ms. Smithee left a note for you earlier in the evening.”

“Yes, that's correct. She wanted me to join her in the hotel bar.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I was tired.”

“Not too tired to throw a party in your room.”

“That wasn't my idea,” Shriver protested.

“Really?” Krampus scribbled something in his notebook. “Now, refresh my memory. Who was the last person to leave this party, that you recall?”

Shriver had seen enough police programs on television to know that detectives will ask questions over and over again, hoping to trip people up. The problem, as he saw it, was that even the most innocent of characters will get confused if you ask them the same question enough times.

“The last person I saw leave,” Shriver answered carefully, “was perhaps Mr. Nixon. Or it may have been the lady next door—Ms. Malarkey-Jones.”

“And Ms. Smithee was not with you in your room at that time?”

Shriver pictured the poet passed out on the bed. Maybe it
hadn't
been a dream. “If she was in the room,” he said, “she must have been under the bed, because I did not see her.”

“Interesting,” the detective said, scribbling something into his notebook.

“And how is Ms. Labio holding up?” Shriver asked.

“She is in her hotel room, amply supplied with sedatives.”

“I see. Well, Detective, if you'll excuse me.”

“Of course. But first . . .” He held out the copy of
Goat Time
and his pen. “If you wouldn't mind?”

Is this what it's like to be a writer? Constantly signing books for people? Shriver took the pen and opened the book to the title page.

“It's an interesting story,” Krampus said as Shriver tried to
decide what to inscribe.
To Det. Krampus
, he scribbled. “The possible murder of the wife is particularly fascinating.”

Best wishes . . .

“Which reminds me,” the detective said, “I've been trying to locate
Mrs.
Shriver.”

The pen slipped, creating a long line of ink across the page.

“
Mrs.
Shriver?”

“Yes. But I can't seem to track her down.”

Shriver composed himself and returned the pen to the page. “That could be because you are under the impression that she remains ‘Mrs. Shriver.' ”

“Oh? Has she taken another name?”

“I wouldn't know. What does she have to do with this, anyway?”

“Just following a hunch.”

Shriver signed the author's name and handed the book over. “There you are.”

“Thank you. Oh—and please remain available, just in case I need to speak with you again.”

Shriver turned to go, but, remembering the pint of whiskey in his back pocket, and not wishing the detective to see what everyone in the ballroom had just seen, he backed away until Krampus began to make some notes in his little notebook. At that point Shriver turned and ran smack into the closed ballroom doors, his nose making first contact, and then, a split second later, the toe of his shoe. There was a loud bang and the door rattled for a few seconds as Shriver stepped back and put his hand up to his face. The pain radiated out from his nose to his eyes and ears. Exacerbating the sting was the knowledge that, inside the ballroom, seven hundred people were staring at the closed door that, obviously, some fool had just run into.

Krampus burst out laughing. “I just adore slapstick!”

Shriver headed for the restroom. Inside, he looked in the mirror. His nose throbbed red but was not bleeding. He splashed some water on his face and took a swig of whiskey. It bothered him that Krampus was trying to track down his ex-wife. He felt somehow violated. Then he remembered that it wasn't his
own
ex-wife Krampus was looking for, but the ex-wife of the
real
Shriver! He laughed at his own stupidity.

On the other hand, the real Shriver's agent was at this very moment making plans to come here, at which point he would be exposed as a fraud. But he didn't care anymore. His face ached, his rear end was a bruised mess, he was half-drunk and unable to read his own story. It would be a relief to confess and simply go home to Mr. Bojangles.

He returned to the lobby, his nose pulsing, and collapsed into a chair beside the ballroom doors. From inside he heard the sound of hearty applause. A moment later, the doors flew open, and a noisy crowd made its way into the lobby. Immediately, a long line formed at the book table, where people plunked down their money for copies of Zebra Amphetamine's story collections. A few moments later the author emerged from the ballroom, accompanied by Simone and a nimbus of fans praising her reading in loud voices.

Zebra sat down at a small table to sign books. Simone stood nearby, gauging the success of the enterprise with a beaming face. She even smiled at Shriver.

“Shriver!”

T. Wätzczesnam came striding out of the ballroom.

“I've seen the future of literary fiction,” he declared, “and it belongs to young Nefertiti over there.” He plopped down with a sigh in the next chair. “Honest to God, our day is over. If you're
not young and black and female, you have no hope of getting a book published in this country. And on the basis of that reading, it's just as well. These kids from the ghetto have a fresh voice that's been missing. It's loud, it's angry, it's
real
. People are tired of our dyspeptic white men wandering the suburbs. Oh, ‘superfluous lags the veteran on the stage,' Shriver. We old white men are done for.”

Shriver rubbed the tip of his tender nose.

“Hey, where'd you run off to, anyway?” T. asked. “Don't tell me it's that irritable bowel syndrome. Goddamn if everyone I know doesn't suffer from that bizarre affliction.”

“It wasn't that.”

“Well, you sure hustled off in a hurry.”

“It was that detective.”

“Krampus? What did that little homunculus want?”

“More questions.”

“Do you need a lawyer, Shriver?”

“Lord, no.”

“Because I know a good one. A real barracuda.”

“I don't need a lawyer. I didn't do anything.”

“Doesn't matter. Sometimes you need to shoot back just to let them know you mean business.”

“No, thanks.”

“Of course, my man deals mostly with DUIs and that sort of thing. I'm not sure how he would perform in a more serious criminal case.”

“There
is
no criminal case. He was simply asking questions.”

“Of course. Still . . .”

The two men sat there watching Zebra Amphetamine autograph copy after copy of her books.

“Are you going to the reception?” the cowboy asked.

“I suppose so. Where is it?”

“Over at the museum. At least there will be booze. Speaking of which.” He removed his pint bottle and took a long swig. “Let's track down our Mr. Nixon,” he said. “He can ferry us over there in his Jeepster.”

The current exhibition at the local museum of art was entitled
Slaughter: A Meditation on Carnivorous Consumption
and featured wall-sized color videos of various farm animals in the process of being butchered—a steer getting bashed on the head while gripped in a vise operated by men in cowboy hats; a hog hoisted by its hind hooves into the air and sliced from chin to genitals with a long, sharp blade—all projected above tables laden with trays of pigs in a blanket.

“I don't know how you can eat that,” Zebra Amphetamine said. “You're swallowing the murdered flesh of a sentient creature.”

“There's nothing else to eat,” Edsel Nixon explained, waving toward the empty cheese plate and the tossed-out stems of strawberries.

“I'd rather starve to death,” Zebra huffed. “I'm a firm believer in evolution. I think it's our job to move the human race forward and out of the carnivorous age.”

“Hear hear!” T. Wätzczesnam cried, a dough-encased wiener held high in his callused hand. “I have loads of faith in your generation.”

“If it were up to guys like you, we'd still be swinging from trees by our tails.”

“Wouldn't that be fun!” T. said.

Shriver watched Simone standing among a herd of
well-wishers and students over near the video loop of a headless, blood-spouting chicken hopping around a farmyard. She seemed so pleased by the reading that she may even have forgiven him for so rudely walking out.

Though he had considered confessing to Simone his real identity, Shriver was now wavering. He and T. had polished off a bottle or so of wine, and the booze, it seemed—as well as the sight of Simone looking so happy—had fortified his resolve to remain incognito. At least until Mr. Cheadem arrived tomorrow.

He watched her excuse herself from the group and enter one of several gallery alcoves.

“She's not on the market, old boy,” T. whispered into his ear.

Shriver, caught, turned the color of pinot noir. “What do you mean? She has a boyfriend?”

“Not exactly.” T. laughed, showing wine-stained teeth, and moved off to find another pig in a blanket.

Shriver's face still felt hot. Was he being that obvious? He barely knew this woman, and here he was mooning after her like a virginal schoolboy. And what did T. mean by “Not exactly”?

He finished his current glass of wine and followed Simone into the darkened alcove, where a video of a goose being force-fed through a metal tube played out across an entire wall.

“I came in here to catch my breath, believe it or not,” Simone said. She was the only one in the room.

“Oh, sorry,” Shriver said. “I can leave.”

“No, of course not. Stay, please.”

She said it in a way that sounded genuine, not just polite. Shriver suddenly didn't know what to say or do. He realized only now how intoxicated he was.

“Feeling better today?” he finally asked.

“I was until I saw
this
,” she said. “I guess I'll never eat foie gras again.”

Shriver stared at the floor, trying to think of something interesting to say before she ran from the room and the tortured goose.

“I'm sorry I had to leave Ms. Amphetamine's reading,” he said. “Detective Krampus—”

“It's not important, Mr. Shriver.”

“No, it is. I wanted to stay, and . . .”

“Yes?” she said.

She had been imbibing a fair amount herself, apparently: her face glowed, her eyes vibrated. It was exciting to see her so wound up.

“I know how important this is to you,” he said. “I don't want to disappoint you.”

“Well, you sort of
have
disappointed me.”

Shriver's stomach lurched. “How so?”

She smiled, ignoring the sight of the goose struggling on-screen. “You haven't exactly lived up to my expectations of a literary superstar.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Don't apologize. I'm
happily
disappointed, if that's possible.”

Shriver was surprised by the extent of the relief he felt. His entire body relaxed, as though he had ejected a virus.

“I was looking at your novel again last night,” Simone said.

“Really?”

“Yes. It was more . . . interesting than I'd remembered.”

The video ended, and the room went dark. Simone was standing so close to him Shriver could smell the wine on her breath. He felt something moving in the air between them, atoms pinging back and forth. Then the video started back up,
a man holding a metal tube and approaching the doomed goose.

“Oh, Lord,” Simone said. “I can't watch this again.” She headed back out to the main gallery, where several students descended upon her.

Shriver rejoined the writers, but he could not concentrate on what they were saying. Had Simone been about to kiss him? Did she like him that much, or had she just drunk too much? He thought of the poet at last year's conference—was this just another case of a crush on a “literary superstar”? To calm himself down, he drank another glass of wine and meditated on Zebra Amphetamine's swaying earrings, which refracted light into little rainbows.

“How can you wear those things?” he asked her. “They look so heavy!”

“These?” She reached up to cup the earrings in her palms. “These are made of tin mined from the dirt of Namibia. They're my good-luck charm and a reminder of the exploitation of my people.”

“Don't they hurt your ears?”

“Sure. Just like these photos hurt my eyes. But we all need reminders sometimes.”

“Basil, ol' boy!” Wätzczesnam exclaimed as the playwright, accompanied by Ms. Brazir, joined the group. “I thought you were flying back to Gotham today.”

“I thought so too. But that mini-cop has ordered us to remain in town until they figure out what happened to our poetess friend.”