Mr. X (89 page)

“Let’s see how it goes,” I said.

“There may be hope after all.” Mullan gazed at the mutilated photograph behind me. “You weren’t surprised to hear that the boy in that picture was Cordwainer Hatch.”

“I learned that Cordwainer Hatch was my father about twelve hours ago.” I told him I had dropped into Hugh Coventry’s office and heard about the disappearance of the Hatch photographs. I gave him a vague reason for suspecting Nettie and described finding the file in her bedroom. “As soon as I looked at them, I knew Cordwainer was my father.”

“I take it that Cordwainer is dead.”

I did not answer.

“What I want to do is going to be a lot easier if I don’t have to set up a manhunt for Cordwainer Hatch while his nephew is on trial. I think something happened today—a showdown—and because you’re still here, he probably isn’t. Say something to me.”

I said nothing.

“This is between you and me, Mr. Dunstan. If you tell me you killed him with your own hands, I wouldn’t consider bringing charges against you.”

“Cordwainer Hatch is dead.”

“You could do us both some good by telling me where to find his body.”

“Nobody is ever going to find his body.”

Mullan regarded me utterly without judgment. “Two years from now, some guy on a backhoe, or a kid out walking in the woods, is not going to come upon his remains. The next time the river floods, his body is not going to wash up on a sandbar.”

“Nothing like that will ever happen. It’s your turn to trust me.”

“Did you kill him?”

“Are you wearing a wire?”

He smiled.

“You’d have to say he killed himself.”

“Let me ask you a question completely from left field. Did any of these missing photographs, including the ones of your family, have anything to do with that?”

“Is there something you’re not telling me, Captain?”

“I’ll be a little more explicit. When Stewart Hatch accused you of attacking him with a knife, he also said that he suspected you of having broken into his house for the purpose of retrieving some photographs he had mistakenly removed from the library. I don’t give a damn if you went into Stewart’s house and took back something that belonged to your family. I want to know if you showed those pictures to Cordwainer Hatch.”

The alarms ringing throughout my nervous system were getting louder. “Why would I?”

Mullan took a moment to answer, and when he did, it took me another moment to understand what he was telling me. “When I was a boy, my mother once pointed out Howard Dunstan to me on the street. He was an old man, but he didn’t look tame, like most old guys. In fact, he scared me. My mother said, ‘When I was a girl, Howard Dunstan could make you feel like the first day of spring just by smiling at you.’ I gather that he had the same effect on a lot of women.”

I stared at Mullan in forthright awe complicated only by my shock. He knew everything—he knew everything he
could
know. Ever since we had been left alone in my room at the Brazen Head, Mullan had been leading me toward the point I had been trying to conceal. “You’re too good for this town,” I said.

“They don’t have stories like this in Cape Girardeau. The minute Stewart Hatch laid eyes on you, he tried to get you arrested or run out of town. But he never had any idea who
Earl
was, did he?”

“He thought Cordwainer was dead.”

“And Cordwainer didn’t know, either. But I have an idea of what he thought he was. Turn around and open that journal, or whatever you call it. He had beautiful penmanship, I’ll say that for him.”

I swung around and put my hands on the journal. My fingers turned a thick wad of pages, and I read
I, too, have had my Judases, the first of them one Clothhead Spelvin, whose betrayal I answered with a summary visit to his jail cell
.

Further down the page, Cordwainer Hatch’s calligraphic handwriting declared,
In a weathered manner, I am still handsome, if I say so myself
.

On an earlier page, in irate black capitals:
I HATE ART. ART NEVER DID ANYONE A BIT OF GOOD
.

And on an earlier still:
Great Ones, You with whom this Drudge shares a common Ancestry, should You exist at all, I humbly request a degree of recognition commensurate to my Service
.

Then I turned to the last words he had written.
I set down the Pen—& close the Book—the
Triumph
hastens—My Heartless Fathers—

Behind me, Mullan asked, “Did you show him a picture of Howard Dunstan?”

I closed the journal. “What are you going to do with this?”

“That’s an excellent question. While the officers you saw posted at the door were looking through the front room, I came in here, opened that book, and read a couple of paragraphs. I ordered the officers outside and skimmed through the rest. Cordwainer Hatch thought he came from a race of alien monsters who put him here to set up their takeover. He claimed he could transport himself through space, enter locked rooms, and make himself invisible. What happens if that goes public? A thousand reporters start digging into these murders. The whole town turns into the
National Enquirer
. The chief is out, and I’m out, spending the rest of my life running from people who want to write books about the Edgerton monster.”

“Won’t you need this as evidence?”

“That cardboard box has all the evidence I’ll ever need.” He looked down at a glistening garbage-undulation four feet away. A well-fed rat had poked half of its body through the surface and was staring back at him. “Get away from me,” Mullan said.

Sleek, prosperous, and unafraid, the rat twitched its nose and emerged from the garbage. Mullan stamped on the floor. The rat inched forward, its black eyes fixed on him.

He unbuttoned his jacket and reached for his revolver. “Sometimes self-respect makes you do things you know you shouldn’t.” Mullan cocked the revolver and aimed it at the rat.

Baring its teeth, the animal elongated over the floor. Mullan jumped back and fired. A second before it reached Mullan’s feet, the rat turned into a bloody lump of hair and an open pink
mouth. My ears rang. A tinny echo of Mullan’s voice said, “At least I can claim I fired in self-defense.” He kicked the corpse into the garbage and reholstered the pistol.

“Good shot.” I sounded as though I were speaking through a towel.

“I must be losing my mind.” His mouth moved, but all I could hear was the tinny echo. “I think this guy could do everything he says. I don’t know any other way to explain how Prentiss and Frenchy were killed.”

My muffled voice said, “Good point.”

“Do you have a twin brother, Mr. Dunstan?
He
says you do. He claims this brother of yours killed Minor Keyes.”

“I have a brother. He isn’t really a human being.” Mullan was looking at me, hard, as though seeing more than he wanted to. “I didn’t know he existed until he showed himself in that lane.”

“That’s as far as I want to go, Mr. Dunstan.” I thought he wished he had an excuse to plug another ambitious rat. “The position of the Edgerton Police Department is that your father, Cordwainer Hatch, committed his crimes out of rage at his family’s rejection. Prints from this hovel are going to match those taken at the time of Cordwainer’s first arrest. The FBI will have Rinehart’s prints on file, and the body buried at Greenhaven will be an administrative error. Frenchy La Chapelle and Clyde Prentiss were suicides. The murders of Toby Kraft and Cassandra Little have been linked to organized crime. A witness currently under police protection has established to our satisfaction that Cordwainer Hatch, alias Edward Rinehart, alias Earl Sawyer, died in the course of a struggle and that his body can never be recovered.”

“Unless you plan to hang me out to dry, I’ll have to be a lot more precise about the body.” Both of our voices might as well have come from the realm of my father’s Cruel Gods.

“Shut up and listen,” Mullan said. “Remember what I say, because you’ll have to repeat it about a hundred times.”

127

I will never know, but I’d give three-to-one odds that Captain Mullan was one of those people gifted with the capacity to dream in long, coherent narrative structures. Maybe years of detective work, or of homicide investigations especially, develop the ability to create fiction, in the way working out at a gym develops other muscles.

What I do know is that Mullan reached into his imagination and instantly, without hesitation, unfurled the story that rescued us both. Here and there, I gave him some help. He prompted me to get some details clear in my mind. This is what he told me:

After my mother had given me Edward Rinehart’s name, I learned of his arrest in 1958 and death in the Greenhaven riot. Suki Teeter told me more. Still curious, I asked Hugh Coventry to check the Buxton Place property records and noticed that they had been purchased in the names of characters from the works of Rinehart’s favorite author. I visited the properties and encountered Earl Sawyer, who admitted me inside them. Sawyer learned that I was staying at the Brazen Head, remarked that he lived nearby, and gave me his address. The following night, an anonymous man called me from the lobby of the Brazen Head and said that he was in possession of certain missing Dunstan family photographs. He refused to say how he had obtained the photographs, but wondered what they were worth to me. We settled on one hundred dollars. I came downstairs, glimpsed a man going outside, and followed him into Veal Yard.

“What did he look like?” I asked.

In the darkness, he had appeared to be a Caucasian male of five-ten or five-eleven and approximately 160 pounds. He had been wearing a dark blue or black zippered jacket, dark trousers, and gloves. I brought the photographs to my room and noticed
the resemblance between Howard Dunstan and myself. After my mother’s funeral, Rachel Milton advised me to look at some photographs in the care of Hugh Coventry, not the Dunstan photographs I had already obtained. I went to the library and found that the Hatch file had been discovered missing shortly after Mrs. Hatch had accompanied my aunts to the archive.