The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald (24 page)

Marsh: (silence)
She warned me he might try to rattle the cage.

Hoag:
And how do you respond?

Marsh:
Allow me to assure you his charges are utterly false and groundless. I do not know the source of his information, but —

Hoag:
Skitsy. He got it all from her — pillow talk.

Marsh:
I must say I find it vile and reprehensible to discuss this matter for the purposes of a book that Skitsy’s own murderer intends to profit from. I will not. And if I have to take legal action against your publisher to prevent you from doing so, I shall. Do I make myself clear?

Hoag:
Your power must mean a lot to you. After all, you’re the ayatollah of American lit. It would be awfully tough on you to get taken down, wouldn’t it?

Marsh:
What are you — ?

Hoag:
Ferris’s charges stand to raise a few eyebrows. People just might look at you a bit differently. Certainly the IRS will. The
Quarterly
, the Conference, will suffer. Maybe even die. It’s pretty understandable that someone in your position might take some pretty drastic steps to hold on to what he has.

Marsh:
I do not know what you are —

Hoag:
Delilah Moscowitz’s pub party. Perhaps you recall it. We were aboard the
Gotham Princess
? It was a rather warm evening … ?

Marsh:
I recall it, as you well know.

Hoag:
You said in from of a number of adoring listeners that I should no longer be allowed to own a typewriter.

Marsh:
A figure of speech. What of it?

Hoag:
Are you sure you didn’t back it up — with a sledgehammer? Are you sure you haven’t been trying to get me off of this project ever since you got wind of what we were up to? That you didn’t send me those threats? Try to blind my ex-wife?

Marsh:
This is preposterous. I did none of it.

Hoag:
You didn’t send me to Farmington to expose him — this boy who humiliated you in from of all those famous people? Who you tried to shoot at Elaine’s?

Marsh: (silence)
I-I was in a state of shock. Traumatized. I did not mean to. Kill him, I mean. I meant to defend myself. He had left me so … so defenseless, you see. I lost control. A momentary thing. I regretted it at once. I would not … could not willingly hurt him, or anyone.

Hoag:
Possibly you “lost control” again the evening that I was to visit Skitsy. Possibly the two of you disagreed over how much, if anything, to reveal to me.

Marsh:
This is outrageous! I will not sit here and listen to these groundless accusations! The police are quite certain who killed Skitsy. Just as they are quite certain who killed Charleston. You have no right to interrogate me like this. None. This interview is terminated. Turn off your recorder. Shut your notebook.

Hoag:
I get the feeling you want me to leave.

Marsh:
At once!
(sound of rustling)
No, wait. Not yet, Stewart. Before you go, there is one thing …

Hoag:
Yes, Tanner?

Marsh:
I am a fair man.

Hoag:
I’ve always said so.

Marsh:
I know you are doing this out of loyalty to Ferris. Out of friendship. I understand that. I want you to write another novel, Stewart. A grand, glorious novel. I hope with your gifts you will. And when you do, Stewart …

Hoag:
Yes?

Marsh:
I will be anxiously waiting to review it.

Hoag:
Wonderful.

(end tape)

T
HE DAY OF CHARLIE’S
memorial service was the first hot, muggy one of spring. The air was so moist and rank it felt as if someone were holding a plastic bag over the city’s head.

The service was held at Rat’s Nest. Not many people showed up for it. A couple of grand poohbahs from the Whitney and MOMA. Some gallery owners, critics, and fellow artists. Vic Early, who wore a navy-blue suit and sat stiffly with his hands folded in his lap like a good, huge boy. Me. Boyd Samuels wasn’t there. Charlie wasn’t there, either, in spirit or body. Her only relative, an older sister in San Francisco, had requested the body be shipped out there for burial. I had made the arrangements.

My police tail waited discreetly outside after following me there from my apartment, just as I’d been followed the previous two days wherever I went. Very was taking no chances. I was on a leash, all right, for as long as my celebrity was on the loose. That mornings papers had reported no new leads in the manhunt, other than a story in the
Post
that a witness claimed he had seen Cameron Noyes enjoying lunch at a Pizza Hut in Clinton, Iowa. The claim had been discounted when the witness turned out to be someone who’d previously spotted Elvis having coffee there. Reporters were calling me constantly now for quotes and tips. I was hanging up on them. It gets easy after the first dozen times you do it.

It was a short service. A couple of people got up and said some words about how important an artist Charlie could have become, and how her death was such a terrible waste. I didn’t pay close attention. I was getting sick of hearing about waste.

Afterward, I headed uptown to my apartment with Vic and my tail to pack up Charlie’s things for her sister. There really wasn’t much, and I was fully capable of boxing it myself, but the big guy insisted. When he does that, you give in. We worked in silence. Neither of us felt particularly chatty.

Lulu watched us from under the bed, trembling. Packing upsets her. Some trauma buried deep in her early puppyhood. What, I don’t know. But I do know I’m not putting her in therapy.

We didn’t pack up Charlie’s personal papers. Very had said he might want to look through those. We also left the portraits, photos, and sketches she’d done for the book. Those belonged to the publisher.

When we were done, I helped Vic carry the boxes downstairs. Then we put them, and him, in a cab bound for United Parcel.

“I wish I could give you a reason to stick around, Vic,” I said to him through the open cab window. “But I’m afraid I can’t. So if you want to be heading back to L.A., you may as well. Your end of this job is history.”

Vic sat there in the backseat, rubbing his forehead. “I don’t feel like I did much good, Hoag.”

“I don’t feel like I did either.”

In the front seat, the cabbie, who wore a turban, began drumming his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. He stopped as soon as he saw Vic glowering at him in the rear-view mirror.

“I’ll be sticking around his place until they catch him,” Vic informed me. “I’d like to be here. I’d like to ask him why he did that to that nice little girl. You don’t mind, do you, Hoag?”

I patted his heavy shoulder. “Not even a little.”

Lulu was still cowering under the bed, her eyes glowing in the darkness. I was trying to coax her out with promises of bouillabaisse and coquilles St. Jacques when the phone rang. It was Very.

“How’s the belly, Lieutenant?” I asked him as he popped his gum in my ear.

“Sour, dude. Just got a sweet break, though — his wheels turned up.”

“The Loveboat? Where?”

“Trenton. Low-income housing project. Cruiser spotted it there early this morning. Bunch of homeboys were breaking into it. Plates and registration still on it. Suitcase full of clothes in the trunk. He wear real preppy shit? There’s a Ralph Lauren suit, white. Bunch of Brooks Brothers shirts and boxer shorts … ”

“That sounds like him.”

“Nobody saw him — at least nobody says they saw him. It’s not one of your more cooperative neighborhoods. FBI is in on it now, which is about egos and territorial bullshit and stomach acid that I can live without. They began canvassing the people on the street. All anybody will tell ’em is they think the car was left there sometime last night. Any idea what he’d be doing around Trenton?”

“None.”

“He have any family or friends there?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Okay if I try a theory on you, dude?”

“Go right ahead, Lieutenant.”

“What it is,” he began, giving his gum a workout, “I was eyeballing this book of his,
Bang
, and his character in that, when things get real crazed for him psychologically — when he starts to, like, crack up — he runs to Atlantic City for a blowout. You think Noyes could be headed there like in his book? Or is that too wigged-out?”

“I can’t tell you if he’s headed there or not, Lieutenant,” I replied. “I can tell you that with Cam Noyes the line between fact and fiction is extremely fuzzy. I’d say it’s worth pursuing.”

“Me, too. Trenton’s a little off course between here and A.C., but not much. I figure he’s taking an indirect route in case we’re watching the Garden State Parkway and Route Nine. We’re checking the buses in case he took one there from Trenton. Also limo services, taxis, car rentals. You got any addresses for him down there?”

“No, but if your theory holds true, he’s probably heading for the hotel were the movie was made. That’s where I’d try.”

“Good thinking. I gotta run now. Dude?”

“I know, I know, Lieutenant — stay with you.”

“Not what I was gonna say.”

“Oh. What were you going to — ?”

“Dude?”

I sighed. “Yes, Lieutenant?”

“We’re gonna nail his ass.”

“Yes, I believe you will.”

Then he said, “Stay with me,” and burped and hung up.

I immediately got my Il Bisonte overnight bag out of the closet, stuffed some clothes and shaving gear and mackerel cans in it, and told Lulu we were leaving. She still wouldn’t budge from under the bed. I had to grab her by the front paws and slide her out, shaking, covered with dust balls. Then the two of us headed out.

A cab dropped us at the garage on West Sixty-seventh where Merilee keeps the Jaguar, my police tail hovering a careful half-block behind in an unmarked navy-blue sedan. I gassed it up, put the top down, and headed out. I didn’t have time right now to ask Merilee for permission. I worked my way down Broadway, making no effort to beat the sluggish flow. My tail stayed his same half-block behind. There was the usual bottleneck at Columbus Circle before Broadway became all one-way and the flow opened up. I cruised through what was left of the theater district and then the trashy splendor of Forty-second Street before I made a right at Thirty-ninth and headed west toward the Lincoln Tunnel, which is how you go under the Hudson into New Jersey, especially if you’re heading south to Atlantic City. My tail stayed with me.

The tunnel traffic choked up just before it reached Ninth Avenue. Truckers, cabbies, delivery-van drivers, were stuck there honking and cursing at each other hotly. I casually inched ahead of a cab and then not so casually cut him off as I swung left onto Ninth and tore downtown. The Jag is a phenomenal darter — it’s almost as swift and elusive in traffic as Merilee is in the shoe stores of Milan’s Montenapoleone. By Thirty-seventh, I was losing sight of my tail in my rearview mirror. I made a right there on two wheels and shot through the crosstown traffic to Eleventh, where I made a left and then sped down to Thirty-fourth, no tail in sight. I took Thirty-fourth back across town toward the East Side. Certain I was alone now, I got on the FDR Drive and made my way up the East River toward the New England Thruway. And Connecticut.

Ferris Rush was many things. Brilliant. Disturbed. Tragic. One thing he wasn’t was stupid. If he was headed for Atlantic City, there was no way he’d abandon the Loveboat there in Trenton for everyone to find. That was to throw the police off. He knew Very would draw precisely the conclusion Very had drawn. He knew they would spend days combing the hotels and casinos for him.

They would find nothing. Ferris Rush had gone in the direction I was going now — the opposite direction. He was making a run for his shack on Crescent Moon Pond, just as he had run for it after that night with Skitsy in his cabin at Stony Creek. Every man, Smilin’ Jack told him, needs his secret place. The shack was his. He was headed for the pond. And so was I. To have it out with him.

The shack was dark.

No light came from its busted windows as I rowed around the bend in the dusk, Lulu seated stiffly before me in her life preserver, nostrils aquiver. What had been sticky haze in the city was cool dampness here. The pond gave off a fetid, yeasty smell. It was very quiet. No sound except for the soft plop the oars made as they broke the glassy surface. It was completely dark by the time I reached the shack, dark like it doesn’t get in the city. I couldn’t even see Lulu in the other end of the boat. I needed my flashlight to guide me to the remains of the mooring. No other boat was tied up there. The kid at the boatyard said no one besides me had rented one in days. Was I wrong? I couldn’t be. He was here. Had to be here.

Lulu remembered where we were. She guided me up the shacks rickety steps to the open front door. The oil lantern was sitting there on the rough table as before, only it had oil in it now, and a box of kitchen matches next to it. I lit it, bathing the room in golden light.

The wood stove had been used in the past day — the heavy cast iron was still warm to the touch. Fresh firewood was piled before it. Cans of chili and soup were piled up over with the kitchen things. A tin of crackers. A crumpled pack of Marlboros. His brand. A half-empty bottle of tequila. His drink.

I carried the lantern into the tiny bedroom. Lying there on the stained mattress was the copy of
The Great Gatsby
I’d given him a couple weeks before. I know it was the same one because it was my own cherished copy, the autographed first edition I’d found hidden among the old Dartmouth yearbooks in grandfather’s attic one hot summer day long ago.

I went back out onto the front porch and called out his name as loud as I could, in every direction. I waited. After a moment, I heard footsteps off the brush. Coming toward the shack. Closer. Closer still. I shone the flashlight — it was a raccoon. Lulu growled at it but didn’t budge from the porch. Raccoons fight back.

It had gotten cold out. I made a fire in the stove and sampled the tequila. Out back I pumped some water into a pail from the well. I put a bowl of it down for Lulu along with a can her mackerel. I opened one of the cans of chili and heated it in a pan on the stove. When it was hot, I ate it with some crackers and washed it down with tequila and well water. Then I stretched out on the mattress with the lantern and F. Scott Fitzgerald and wait for Ferris Rush to come home.