Four Past Midnight (58 page)

There was another long pause, but this time Mort kept the telephone screwed tightly against his ear. Shooter was there. And suddenly the
story
was the central issue again, the story and the accusation of plagiarism; Shooter treating him like he was a goddam college kid was the issue, and maybe the man was on the run at last.

Once, in the same parochial school where Mort had learned the trick of swallowing crooked, he had seen a boy stick a pin in a beetle which had been trundling across his desk. The beetle had been caught—pinned, wriggling, and dying. At the time, Mort had been sad and horrified. Now he understood. Now he only wanted to do the same thing to this man. This crazy man.

“There can't be any magazine,” Shooter said finally. “Not with that story in it. That story is
mine!”

Mort could hear anguish in the man's voice. Real anguish. It made him glad. The pin was in Shooter. He was wriggling around on it.

“It'll be here at ten tomorrow,” Mort said, “or as soon after as FedEx drops the Tashmore stuff. I'll be happy to meet you there. You can take a look. As long a look as you want, you goddamned maniac.”

“Not there,” Shooter said after another pause. “At your house.”

“Forget it. When I show you that issue of
Ellery Queen,
I want to be someplace where I can yell for help if you go apeshit.”

“You'll do it my way,” Shooter said. He sounded a little more in control ... but Mort did not believe Shooter had even half the control he'd had previously. “If you don't, I'll see you in the Maine State Prison for murder.”

“Don't make me laugh.” But Mort felt his bowels begin to knot up again.

“I hooked you to those two men in more ways than you know,” Shooter said, “and you have told a right smart of lies. If I just disappear, Mr. Rainey, you are going to find yourself standing with your head in a noose and your feet in Crisco.”

“You don't scare me.”

“Yeah, I do,” Shooter said. He spoke almost gently. “The only thing is, you're startin to scare me a little, too. I can't quite figure you out.”

Mort was silent.

“It'd be funny,” Shooter said in a strange, ruminating tone, “if we had come by the same story in two different places, at two different times.”

“The thought had occurred to me.”

“Did it?”

“I dismissed it,” Mort said. “Too much of a coincidence. If it was just the same plot, that would be one thing. But the same language? The same goddam
diction?”

“Uh-huh,” Shooter said. “I thought the same thing, pilgrim. It's just too much. Coincidence is out. You stole it from me, all right, but I'm goddamned if I can figure out how or when.”

“Oh, quit it!” Mort burst out. “I have the magazine! I have
proof!
Don't you understand that? It's over! Whether it was some nutty game on your part or just a delusion, it is over!
I have the magazine!”

After a long silence, Shooter said: “Not yet, you don't.”

“How true,” Mort said. He felt a sudden and totally unwanted sense of kinship with the man. “So what do we do tonight?”

“Why, nothing,” Shooter said. “Those men will keep. One has a wife and kids visiting family. The other lives alone. You go and get your magazine tomorrow morning. I will come to your place around noon.”

“You'll kill me,” Mort said. He found that the idea didn't carry much terror with it—not tonight, anyway. “If I show you the magazine, your delusion will break down and you'll kill me.”

“No!” Shooter replied, and this time he seemed clearly surprised. “You? No, sir! But those others were going to get in the way of our business. I couldn't have that... and I saw that I could use them to make you deal with me. To face up to your responsibility.”

“You're crafty,” Mort said. “I'll give you that. I believe you're nuts, but I also believe you're just about the craftiest son of a bitch I ever ran across in my life.”

“Well, you can believe this,” Shooter said. “If I come tomorrow and find you gone, Mr. Rainey, I will make it my business to destroy every person in the world that you love and care for. I will burn your life like a canefield in a high wind. You will go to jail for killing those two men, but going to jail will be the least of your sorrows. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Mort said. “I understand. Pilgrim.”

“Then you be there.”

“And suppose—just suppose—I show you the magazine, and it has my name on the contents page and my story inside. What then?”

There was a short pause. Then Shooter said, “I go to the authorities and confess to the whole shooting match. But I'd take care of myself long before the trial, Mr. Rainey. Because if things turn out that way, then I suppose I am crazy. And that kind of a crazy man...” There was a sigh. “That kind of crazy man has no excuse or reason to live.”

The words struck Mort with queer force.
He's unsure,
.he thought.
For the first time, he's really unsure ... which is more than I've ever been.

But he cut that off, and hard. He had never had a reason to be unsure. This was Shooter's fault. Every bit of it was Shooter's fault.

He said: “How do I know you won't claim the magazine is a fake?”

He expected no response to this, except maybe something about how Mort would have to take his word, but Shooter surprised him.

“If it's real, I'll know,” he said, “and if it's fake, we'll both know. I don't reckon you could have rigged a whole fake magazine in three days, no matter how many people you have got working for you in New York.”

It was Mort's turn to think, and he thought for a long, long time. Shooter waited for him.

“I'm going to trust you,” Mort said at last. “I don't know why, for sure. Maybe because I don't have a lot to live for myself these days. But I'm not going to trust you whole hog. You come down here. Stand in the driveway where I can see you, and see that you're unarmed. I'll come out. Is that satisfactory ?”

“That'll do her.”

“God help us both.”

“Yessir. I'll be damned if I'm sure what I'm into anymore ... and that is not a comfortable feeling.”

“Shooter?”

“Right here.”

“I want you to answer one question.”

Silence ... but an inviting silence, Mort thought.

“Did you burn down my house in Derry?”

“No,” Shooter said at once. “I was keeping an eye on you.”

“And Bump,” Mort said bitterly.

“Listen,” Shooter said. “You got my hat?”

“Yes.”

“I'll want it,” Shooter said, “one way or the other.”

And the line went dead.

Just like that.

Mort put the phone down slowly and carefully and walked back to the bathroom—once again holding his pants up as he went—to finish his business.

Amy
did
call back, around seven, and this time Mort was able to talk to her quite normally—just as if the bathroom upstairs wasn't trashed and there weren't two dead men sitting behind a screen of bushes on the path down to the lake, stiffening as the twilight turned to dark around them.

She had spoken with Fred Evans herself since her last call, she said, and she was convinced he either knew something or suspected something about the fire he didn't want to tell them. Mort tried to soothe her, and thought he succeeded to some degree, but he was worried himself. If Shooter hadn't started the fire—and Mort felt inclined to believe the man had been telling the truth about that—then it must have been raw coincidence ... right?

He didn't know if it was right or not.

“Mort, I've been so worried about you,” she said suddenly.

That snapped him back from his thoughts. “Me? I'm okay.”

“Are you sure? When I saw you yesterday, I thought you looked ... strained.” She paused. “In fact, I thought you looked like you did before you had the ... you know.”

“Amy, I did not have a nervous breakdown.”

“Well, no,” she said quickly. “But you know what I mean. When the movie people were being so awful about
The Delacourt Family.”

That had been one of the bitterest experiences of Mort's life. Paramount had optioned the book for $75,000 on a pick-up price of $750,000-damned big money. And they had been on the verge of exercising their option when someone had turned up an old script in the files, something called
The Home Team,
which was enough like
The Delacourt Family
to open up potential legal problems. It was the only time in his career-before this nightmare, anyway—when he had been exposed to the possibility of a plagiarism charge. The execs had ended up letting the option lapse at the eleventh hour. Mort still did not know if they had been really worried about plagiarism or had simply had second thoughts about his novel's film potential. If they really
had
been worried, he didn't know how such a bunch of pansies could make any movies. Herb Creekmore had obtained a copy of the
Home Team
screenplay, and Mort had seen only the most casual similarity. Amy agreed.

The fuss happened just as he was reaching a dead end on a novel he had wanted desperately to write. There had been a short PR tour for the paperback version of
The Delacourt Family
at the same time. All of that at once had put him under a great deal of strain.

But he had not had a nervous breakdown.

“I'm okay,” he insisted again, speaking gently. He had discovered an amazing and rather touching thing about Amy some years before: if you spoke to her gently enough, she was apt to believe you about almost anything. He had often thought that, if it had been a species-wide trait, like showing your teeth to indicate rage or amusement, wars would have ceased millennia ago.

“Are you
sure,
Mort?”

“Yes. Call me if you hear any more from our insurance friend.”

“I will.”

He paused. “Are you at Ted's?”

“Yes.”

“How do you feel about him, these days?”

She hesitated, then said simply: “I love him.”

“Oh.”

“I didn't go with other men,” she said suddenly. “I've always wanted to tell you that. I didn't go with other men. But Ted ... he looked past your name and saw me, Mort. He saw
me.”

“You mean I didn't.”

“You did when you were here,” she said. Her voice sounded small and forlorn. “But you were gone so much.”

His eyes widened and he was instantly ready to do battle.
Righteous
battle.
“What?
I haven't been on tour since
The Delacourt Family!
And that was a short one!”

“I don't want to argue with you, Mort,” she said softly. “That part should be over. All I'm trying to say is that, even when you were here, you were gone a lot. You had your own lover, you know. Your work was your lover.” Her voice was steady, but he sensed tears buried deep inside it. “How I hated that bitch, Mort. She was prettier than me, smarter than me, more fun than me. How could I compete?”

“Blame it all on me, why not?” he asked her, dismayed to find himself on the edge of tears. “What did you want me to do? Become a goddam plumber? We would have been poor and I would have been unemployed. There was nothing else I could fucking do, don't you understand that? There was nothing else I could do!” He had hoped the tears were over, at least for awhile, but here they were. Who had rubbed this horrible magic lamp again? Had it been him or her this time?

“I'm not blaming you. There's blame for me, too. You never would have found us ... the way you did ... if I hadn't been weak and cowardly. It wasn't Ted; Ted wanted us to go to you and tell you together. He kept asking. And I kept putting him off. I told him I wasn't sure. I told myself I still loved you, that things could go back to the way they were ... but things never do, I guess. I'll-” She caught her breath, and Mort realized she was crying, too. “I'll never forget the look on your face when you opened the door of that motel room. I'll carry that to my grave.”

“You knew my love,” he said unsteadily. “I never hid her from you. You knew from the start.”

“But I never knew,” she said, “how deep her embrace could be.”

“Well, cheer up,” Mort said. “She seems to have left me now.”

Amy was weeping. “Mort, Mort—I only want you to live and be happy. Can't you see that? Can't you do that?”

What he had seen was one of her bare shoulders touching one of Ted Milner's bare shoulders. He had seen their eyes, wide and frightened, and Ted's hair stuck up in an Alfalfa corkscrew. He thought of telling her this—of trying, anyway—and let it go. It was enough. They had hurt each other enough. Another time, perhaps, they could go at it again. He wished she hadn't said that thing about the nervous breakdown, though. He had not had a nervous breakdown.

“Amy, I think I ought to go.”

“Yes—both of us. Ted's out showing a house, but he'll be back soon. I have to put some dinner together.”

“I'm sorry about the argument.”

“Will you call if you need me? I'm still worried.”

“Yes,” he said, and said goodbye, and hung up. He stood there by the telephone for a moment, thinking he would surely burst into tears. But it passed. That was perhaps the real horror.

It passed.