Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories (22 page)

Rose surveyed the sheeplike faces and wished she’d had time for another cup of coffee. “Good morning,” she began. “I have come to bury John Clay Hawkins, not to praise him. As you know, our featured speaker was murdered last night with an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s.”

“Those who live by the sword …” muttered Samari from the front row.

“Even now the police are measuring and photographing, and doing all that they can to collect the physical evidence to convict the killer. I used another approach—the examination of motives. Who would want to kill a poet?”

A suppressed whoop of laughter emanated from the romance writers’ contingent in the back of the room.

“Precisely,” said Rose. “Who
wouldn’t
want to kill a poet? But why this particular poet, when there are so many more annoying and less-talented specimens around. Besides, in this case, the suspects were all poets themselves, or people well acquainted with John Clay Hawkins as a human being.”

Hawkins’s fellow bards glared up at her from their front-row seats.

“The main motive that occurred to me was professional competitiveness. Hawkins, as a well-known minor poet, had a number of workshop engagements, editorships, and other poetic plums that everyone else seemed to want very badly.” Rose nodded in the direction of Jess
Scarberry’s waving hand, acknowledging his objection. “Yes. Except for Jess Scarberry. No one would give him any literary recognition, not even if he was the last poet on earth. But I doubt if he minds. He’s in the game to pick up women and sell chapbooks, and he can do all of that without any academic recognition. If he killed Mr. Hawkins, it would have to be for more personal reasons. I didn’t find any.”

“That left Samari, Snowfield, and Carter Jute, whose personal attributes suggest that poems are made by barracudas. I didn’t even have a favorite suspect among them. So I read Amy Dillow’s thesis about John Clay Hawkins. And I read the last poem of Hawkins himself. Bear with me.”

She read the poem in clear measured tones to the startled audience. “At least it’s timely,” she remarked. “I wondered why Hawkins was thinking of Norman, and if in fact he knew anyone by that name.” Rose held up Amy Dillow’s thesis. “It turns out that he did. His old college roommate Norman Grant, interviewed by Ms. Dillow here as a source for material about Hawkins’s early years. I called Norman Grant, and read him the poem.”

“Since you had no address, how’d you find him on a Saturday morning?” Villanova called out from the front row. He was obviously enjoying himself.

Rose smiled. “Professional connections. The PR director of his alma mater is a colleague of mine. She looked him up in the alumni directory. Anyway, I called Norman Grant, and read the poem to him.”

There was a murmur of interest from the audience.

Rose shrugged. “He said it made no sense to him, either. But then he said Hawkins’s poems never did make sense, as far as he could tell. People just read them and assigned them meanings. He said John Clay used to joke that once a critic found one of your works profound, then anything else you ever wrote would be analyzed to death. Didn’t matter what it was. He said John Clay was getting
pretty tired of all the pretension, and of the old-boy network of you-blurb-my-chapbook-and-I’ll-publish-your-poem-in-my-literary-magazine. He said it was the Mafia with meter. He said that Hawkins was talking about quitting the poetry business and coming to work with him. Mr. Grant is a crop duster in north Georgia.”

“He’s lying!” Amy Dillow called out. “He was always jealous of Hawkins’s success. Norman Grant flunked English!”

“He told me that, too,” said Rose. “He said they used to laugh about it, because John Clay Hawkins wrote his papers for him that term. Now assuming Hawkins was planning to quit poetry, there would be no need for the other poets to do him in, but that still leaves one very clear motive.” She pointed to Amy Dillow. “If Hawkins renounced poetry, your graduate career would have been ruined, wouldn’t it? You couldn’t very well make your literary reputation on an ex-poet who was never widely recognized to begin with. Besides, dead poets are so much more respected than live ones. Look at Sylvia Plath: famous for being dead.”

Amy Dillow jumped to her feet. “He had no ambition!” she cried. “He wouldn’t apply for the right fellowships, or curry favor with the really important critics. I had to do something! His work really had potential, but he was holding back his own reputation. I did it for scholarly reasons! I had to kill him so that I could devote myself to the legend!”

Rose’s jaw dropped. “You did?” she exclaimed. “You mean
you
did it?”

Amy Dillow nodded. “I thought you had figured it out.”

“No,” Rose blurted before she thought better of it. (It had been a long night.) “I was just using that theory for dramatic effect, building up for the big finish. You see, Norman Grant also told me that Hawkins’s first wife, Dreama Belcher, is still a librarian, but now she writes
romance novels as Deidre Bellaire. I assumed she had done it.”

A wizened figure in rhinestones and green chiffon stood up in the back of the room, waving her fan. “I killed the bastard off in eight Harlequins and three Silhouettes,” she called out. “That was enough. Got it out of my system.”

Joe Villanova’s shouts of laughter drowned out the polite applause from the mystery fans. Rose Hanelon shrugged. “My editor will want me to change this ending.”

I
T HAD SEEMED
like a good idea at the time. Of course, Philip Danby had only been joking, but he had said it in a serious tone in order to humor those idiot New Age clients who actually seemed to believe in the stuff. “I want to come back as a cat,” he’d said, smiling facetiously into the candlelight at the Eskeridge dinner table. He had to hold his breath to keep from laughing as the others babbled about reincarnation. The women wanted to come back blonder and thinner, and the men wanted to be everything from Dallas Cowboys to oak trees.
Oak trees?
And he had to keep a straight face through it all, hoping these dodos would give the firm some business.

The things he had to put up with to humor clients. His partner, Giles Eskeridge, seemed to have no difficulties in that quarter, however. Giles often said that rich and crazy went together; therefore, architects who wanted a lucrative business had to be prepared to put up with eccentrics. They also had to put up with long hours, obstinate building contractors, and capricious zoning boards. Perhaps that was why Danby had plumped for life as a cat next time. As he had explained to his dinner companions that night, “Cats are independent. They don’t have to kowtow to anybody; they sleep sixteen hours a day; and yet they get fed and sheltered and even loved—just
for being their contrary little selves. It sounds like a good deal to me.”

Julie Eskeridge tapped him playfully on the cheek. “You’d better take care to be a pretty, pedigreed kitty, Philip.” She laughed. “Because life isn’t so pleasant for an ugly old alley cat!”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he told her. “In fifty years or so.”

It had been more like fifty days. The fact that Giles had wanted to come back as a shark should have tipped him off. When they found out that they’d just built a three-million-dollar building on top of a toxic landfill, the contractor was happy to keep his mouth shut about it for a mere ten grand, and Giles was perfectly prepared to bury the evidence to protect the firm from lawsuits and EPA fines.

Looking back on it, Danby realized that he should not have insisted that they report the landfill to the authorities. In particular, he should not have insisted on it at six P.M. at the building site with no one present but himself and Giles. That was literally a fatal error. Before you could say “philosophical differences,” Giles had picked up a shovel lying near the offending trench, and with one brisk swing, he had sent the matter to a higher court. As he pitched headlong into the reeking evidence, Danby’s last thought was a flicker of cold anger at the injustice of it all.

His next thought was that he was watching a black-and-white movie, while his brain seemed intent upon sorting out a flood of olfactory sensations.
Furniture polish
 … 
stale coffee
 … 
sweaty socks
 … 
Prell shampoo … potting soil
 … He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. Where was he? The apparent answer to that was: lying on a gray sofa inside the black-and-white movie, because everywhere he looked he saw the same colorless vista. A concussion, maybe? The memory of
Giles Eskeridge swinging a shovel came back in a flash. Danby decided to call the police before Giles turned up to try again. He stood up, and promptly fell off the sofa.

Of course, he landed on his feet.

All four of them.

Idly, to keep from thinking anything more ominous for the moment, Danby wondered what
else
the New Age clients had been right about. Was Stonehenge a flying saucer landing pad? Did crystals lower cholesterol? He was in no position to doubt anything just now. He sat twitching his plume of a tail and wishing he hadn’t been so flippant about the afterlife at the Eskeridge dinner party. He didn’t even particularly like cats. He also wished that he could get his paws on Giles in retribution for the shovel incident. First he would bite Giles’s neck, snapping his spine, and then he would let him escape for a few seconds. Then he’d sneak up behind him and pounce. Then bat him into a corner. Danby began to purr in happy contemplation.

The sight of a coffee table looming a foot above his head brought the problem into perspective. At present Danby weighed approximately fifteen furry pounds, and he was unsure of his exact whereabouts. Under those circumstances avenging his murder would be difficult. On the other hand, he didn’t have any other pressing business, apart from an eight-hour nap which he felt in need of. First things first, though. Danby wanted to know what he looked like, and then he needed to find out where the kitchen was, and whether Sweaty Socks and Prell Shampoo had left anything edible on the countertops. There would be time enough for philosophical thoughts and revenge plans when he was cleaning his whiskers.

The living room was enough to make an architect shudder. Clunky Early American sofas and clutter. He was glad he couldn’t see the color scheme.

There was a mirror above the sofa, though, and he hopped up on the cheap upholstery to take a look at his
new self. The face that looked back at him was definitely feline, and so malevolent that Danby wondered how anyone could mistake cats for pets. The yellow (or possibly green) almond eyes glowered at him from a massive triangular face, tiger-striped, and surrounded by a ruff of gray-brown fur. Just visible beneath the ruff was a dark leather collar equipped with a little brass bell. That would explain the ringing in his ears. The rest of his body seemed massive, even allowing for the fur, and the great plumed tail swayed rhythmically as he watched. He resisted a silly urge to swat at the reflected movement. So he was a tortoiseshell, or tabby, or whatever they called those brown-striped cats, and his hair was long. And he was still male. He didn’t need to check beneath his tail to confirm that. Besides, the reek of ammonia in the vicinity of the sofa suggested that he was not shy about proclaiming his masculinity in various corners of his domain.

No doubt it would have interested those New Age clowns to learn that he was not a kitten, but a fully grown cat. Apparently the arrival had been instantaneous as well. He had always been given to understand that the afterlife would provide some kind of preliminary orientation before assigning him a new identity. A deity resembling John Denver, in rimless glasses and a Sierra Club T-shirt, should have been on hand with some paperwork regarding his case, and in a nonthreatening conference they would decide what his karma entitled him to become. At least, that’s what the New Agers had led him to believe. But it hadn’t been like that at all. One minute he had been tumbling into a sewage pit, and the next, he had a craving for Meow Mix. Just like that. He wondered what sort of consciousness had been flickering inside that narrow skull prior to his arrival. Probably not much. A brain with the wattage of a lightning bug could control most of the items on the feline agenda: eat, sleep, snack, doze, dine, nap, and so on. Speaking of eating …

He made it to the floor in two moderate bounds, and
jingled toward the kitchen, conveniently signposted by the smell of lemon-scented dishwashing soap and stale coffee. The floor could do with a good sweeping, too, he thought, noting with distaste the gritty feel of tracked-in dirt on his velvet paws.

The cat dish, tucked in a corner beside the sink cabinet, confirmed his worst fears about the inhabitants’ instinct for tackiness. Two plastic bowls were inserted into a plywood cat model, painted white, and decorated with a cartoonish cat face. If his food hadn’t been at stake, Danby would have sprayed
that
as an indication of his professional judgment. As it was, he summoned a regal sneer and bent down to inspect the offering. The water wasn’t fresh; there were bits of dry catfood floating in it. Did they expect him to drink
that
? Perhaps he ought to dump it out so that they’d take the hint. And the dry catfood hadn’t been stored in an airtight container, either. He sniffed contemptuously: the cheap brand, mostly cereal. He supposed he’d have to go out and kill something just to keep his ribs from crashing together. Better check out the counters for other options. It took considerable force to launch his bulk from floor to countertop, and for a moment he teetered on the edge of the sink fighting to regain his balance, while his bell tolled ominously, but once he righted himself he strolled onto the counter with an expression of nonchalance suggesting that his dignity had never been imperiled. He found two breakfast plates stacked in the sink. The top one was a trove of congealing egg yolk and bits of buttered toast. He finished it off, licking off every scrap of egg with his rough tongue, and thinking what a favor he was doing the people by cleaning the plate for them.