Gerald's Party

  ‘Yes, but everybody—’

  ‘And feces, which we haven’t yet identified’ – he sniffed meditatively – ‘as well as oil and alcohol stains, what might be lipstick, the usual. Or so we thought. But then, under the microscope, we discovered a fleck of old blue paint and a—’

  ‘Blue?’

  He smiled flickeringly. Bob, watching us, scratched out a note. ‘Mmm, or green, gray, something like that, and a touch of rust. Curious, isn’t it? Of course, blood, paint, rust – just a pair of dirty shorts, you might say. But we found something else. Look: do you see that hole? Well! You’ll agree, only one instrument could make a perforation like that! If we find the weapon that did it, we’ll have our … our perpetrator …’

  I knew there was something I should be doing, or saying (at my feet lay a photo of Ros on her back, dressed in a pith helmet and gunbelt, and sucking off a tiger that crouched over her, lapping at her sex with a huge rough tongue – how did we do that? I couldn’t remember, but I did remember the one we shot with Ros as the tiger: that one scared me to this day …), but before I could get my thoughts in order (some vague sense of entrapment: I was trying to play back the recent exchanges), Fred came back in behind me with a fresh sandwich and Howard: ‘We caught him with his thumb in the old pudding,’ Fred reported around a half-chewed mouthful, and the Inspector raised his brows at me as though to say: Haven’t I just told you so?

  Howard, sagging flabbily in Fred’s grip – shirttails out, broken glasses hooked over one ear and the tip of his pink nose, thin gray-blond hair falling loosely over his brow like a lowered scrim – held his stained finger up in front of his nose, trying to focus his weak eyes on it. ‘Something … spesh …,’ he mumbled and put it in his mouth. Fred clipped him ferociously behind the ears, kicked him in the belly as he hit the floor.

  ‘Stop!’ I protested. ‘You’ve got to understand – he just lost his wife—!’

  Fred whirled round on me, whipping out his nightstick, sandwich clamped in his jaws, Bob unsnapped his holster, elbow crooked behind his back. ‘All right, all right,’ said Pardew, ‘that will do!’ The cops eased up, their hunched shoulders dropping, backs straightening, though they continued to watch me with narrowed eyes. Howard gurgled miserably into the carpet at my feet, his horn-rimmed spectacles crushed once and for all beneath him. Poor Howard. I understood what the others could not: that there was nothing mischievous or prurient about what he had done, that for him it was simply a matter of aesthetic need. He was an art critic. A good one. He had to know.

  On a signal from Pardew, Bob and Fred hauled Howard to his feet and dragged him, weak-kneed and drooling, over to their work area. ‘The important thing,’ the Inspector was saying, his finger in his nose, ‘is to keep your eyes open, to miss nothing, not just to look, but to see – true percipience is an art, but you must work at it, it’s the first thing you learn in this game.’ He fished a long string of mucus from his nose like a snail from its shell and laid it in my handkerchief. His two assistants were taking caliper measurements of Howard’s head and face. ‘I’ve solved crimes with my ears, my mouth, even my toes and the seat of my pants, but mostly I’ve solved them up here. In the old conk.’

  ‘Well, he’s got the thick lips and swollen eyelids, all right,’ Fred was saying, putting the last of the sandwich in his mouth and mumbling around it, ‘but the hair’s too thin and the jaw’s not right.’

  ‘How about bumps?’

  ‘It’s a little like sorting out the grammar of a sentence,’ the Inspector went on. He was studying the string of mucus in my handkerchief. ‘You have the object there before you and evidence at least of the verb.’ He folded the mucus into the handkerchief and handed it back to me. ‘But you have to reach back in time to locate the subject. I say, locate—’

  ‘Ah, you can keep it, I have—’

  ‘Take it!’

  ‘What about the left one?’ Bob was asking, and Fred, chewing, said: ‘Definitely different from the right.’

  ‘It – he is what I came in here to tell you about,’ I said, and wiped my hands on my shirt. Fred had grabbed a hank of Howard’s hair and jerked his head forward: ‘Crikey, look! He’s wearing somebody’s flopper-stoppers!’ ‘Fucking weirdo.’ Fred plucked a strand of hair, scraped some dirt from Howard’s ear, made him spit on a glass slide, while Bob scratched away in a notepad, muttering to himself. ‘It’s about his wife, you see – she’s up in the bathtub, we just—’

  ‘One thing at a time!’ The Inspector rapped his briar pipe smartly against the ashtray. ‘We’re scientists here, not sightseers!’

  ‘Say, speaking of your old chamber of commerce,’ Fred put in over his shoulder (they had pulled Howard over to the inkpad and roller and were undoing his pants), ‘you got a real problem up there!’

  ‘I know. There’s a plumber—’

  ‘Come on, apeshit, stand up straight!’ Bob growled, kneeing Howard in the butt.

  ‘Or if sightseers,’ the Inspector added thoughtfully, fitting the empty pipe into his mouth, ‘then sightseers of a very special kind.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Is that a hernia scar?’ Bob asked.

  Fred leaned closer. ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘I mean, sightseers not of place, but of time.’ Pardew picked up some watches from the pile and began laying them out in single file. ‘We tend to think of time as something that passes by,’ he said around his pipe, ‘a kind of endless flow, like a river, coming out of nowhere and going into nowhere, with space the theater in which this drama of pure process is acted out, as it were.’ When he ran out of room on the desk, he added five or six watches at a forty-five degree angle to the last one, turning it into a kind of checkmark. ‘But what if it’s the other way around? What if it’s the world that’s insubstantial, time the immovable stage for its ghostly oscillations? Eh?’ The checkmark had become an arrow. From my perspective it was pointed from right to left.

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ said Fred, ‘that ain’t the one in the photos.’

  ‘And if it’s a stage,’ the Inspector continued, picking up a large gold pocketwatch and pointing to its face, ‘if it’s there in its entirety, the script all written, so to speak, a kind of cyclorama which seems to move only because we, like these hands here, move through it, then it should be possible, if we could just overcome our perceptual limitations, to visit any part of it, including the no-longer and the not-yet!’ He was jabbing at these places on the watch, and it brought to mind a play Ros was in called Vanished Days, the one in which, having poisoned her husband, she descended the stairs to receive the news of his death. ‘This idea first came to me – and you can imagine the potential consequences for criminalistics! – when I was working on the case of the West Indian omphaloclast, wherein I ran into the problem of the exact – what are you smiling about?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I was thinking of …’

  ‘You wouldn’t think it was funny if you’d been one of his victims!’

  ‘No …’ At the first rehearsal, she’d come bouncing down the stairs and crossed over to the guy who’d brought the news, reached into his pants, and given him a twist that had sent him yowling and stumbling into the wings. ‘No, no, Ros!’ the director had shouted. ‘You’re supposed to grab up the clock and wind it!’ Or such at least was the legend. One of them …

  ‘He actually cut them out and ate the bloody things!’ As though finding it distasteful, the Inspector took the cold pipe out of his mouth. ‘The point was, I couldn’t pin down the exact moment when it happened. I could not even imagine it! One moment the knife was outside the flesh’ – he demonstrated this, using his pipestem against his stomach – ‘and then it was inside: but what was that moment in between when it was neither?’ I too could not imagine this. I could not even make the effort. Ros was wholly on my mind again, and I could only recall the poignancy of her hugs, the taut silkiness of the flesh around her own navel, the rich juicy flow that filled my mouth as her clitoris stabbed my tong
ue, and now (in another version, of course, it was not a clock, but –) – ‘Stabbed!’ he cried. ‘What does it mean? If we say, he, the murderer, is stabbing her, there are at least twenty ways of verifying it, but if we say he …’ I had started violently with his first word, thinking I must have been talking out loud, and now he watched me intently. ‘Is something—?’

  ‘No! Sorry, I … I was just thinking about your idea of time …’ Trying to anyway. I couldn’t seem to concentrate. The two policemen were putting Howard’s shoes back on. His crushed spectacles stared up at me from the carpet beside a roadmap of Provence and a torn zipper. ‘A stage, you said, a kind of space – like a fourth dimension—’

  ‘Not fourth – first!’

  ‘Yes, well, I mean the idea of events just being there, waiting for us, like stations we keep pulling into—’

  ‘That’s correct. Crimes, for example …’ He peered up at me over his handlebar moustache and white silk scarf, his pate gleaming in the subdued light. He had returned his pipe to the ashtray and seemed to be shuffling watches like cards. We were alone, his two assistants having hauled Howard from the room, feet first, like an old sack. ‘Murders …’

  ‘And – and their solutions.’ It was very quiet. Fred’s soup bubbled. Roger, fallen on his neck, stared at us vacantly. I lowered my voice. ‘Or not: the failure to solve them. Also there waiting. Which would make us just passive observers, and you seem, well … more willful than that …’

  ‘On the contrary. Will, free or otherwise, is just as much a hallucination as flowing time is, or change or meaning. Detectives, like criminals, are born, not made, for even the social forces that might be said to shape them are also part of their birthright. When we in the trade speak, for example, of the “perpetrator” of a crime, we are really speaking not of this or that actor like some character in a play, but rather of certain innate traits and tendencies borne by various individuals like seed, like wavelengths, like the properties of theorems – my curiosity, for instance, or your solicitude and hedonism.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s—’

  ‘Don’t take offense. I’m merely trying to say that I am swept along by the seeming restlessness of matter like everyone else. My investigative labors may define me, but they do not account for my success. Indeed, my most famous solutions to crimes have come to me quite unexpectedly, like gifts. Visions. I use science as a discipline, but only to prepare myself as a vessel for intuition. This is the secret of all great detective work, I might say, and the most important clues, therefore, are not facts, but rather what you might call ‘impressions of radiance’ – like my rather luminous apprehension here tonight of some unspeakable crime-within-a-crime, some dalliance, as it were – or so I feel – with oblivion itself!’ He watched me with that same close intensity as before, and I felt my mouth twitch involuntarily into a half-smile.

  ‘But then—’

  He looked away as though dismissing me, concentrating instead on his watches, enlarging upon his diagram: he was crossing his arrow now with a perpendicular row. ‘I don’t know what it is that perceives these things. I don’t feel any personal identity – any “I” or “me” – I feel simply that I stand at a crossroads on this map of time – that I am a crossroads, that we all are – do you follow?’ He glanced up, transfixing me with the vehemence of his gaze. ‘I realize that it is not easy, that it takes an exceptional mind …’ I chose not to contradict him, but as he returned to his display, sliding the watches from the arrow’s leading edge into the middle, adding others to form a kind of field, fretted with straps and chains and buckles, I recalled a history teacher we once had who accused us of ‘attending to the head of the arrow to the neglect of its tail’ – which at the time we all took as a dirty joke. ‘What I want – all I want, really – is to see time!’ He hovered tensely above the field of watches, his hands outspread as though to scoop them all up, seeming almost to tremble with greed – and indeed they did give an illusion, all ticking, clicking, or pulsing away, of a plenitude. ‘Yes …’ He concentrated on them, his eyes narrowing. ‘Now …’ Beads of perspiration appeared on his brow and the top of his head. I, too, concentrated, afraid to move. ‘Eeny,’ he intoned gravely, his hands quivering rigidly in fiercely contested restraint, ‘meeny, miny …’ He reached, as though through some dense magnetic storm, for a watch. ‘Mo!’ My wife’s.

  ‘Hey, look, Leonard! It’s our old buddy Nigel!’ Soapie shouted from the doorway, blowing in like a sudden gale: the Inspector stiffened momentarily as though buffeted, then sat back, folding his arms. Fred and Bob, who had dragged Howard out, now dragged him in again: ‘Excuse us, Chief – they wanta restage this guy’s examination so as to get some photos.’ Pardew, his brow damp, nodded his permission, watching Soapie warily as the reporter kicked through the papers on the floor in his tattered sneakers, picked up a Mexican rattle – a dried gourd that looked like a tattooed testicle – and shook it, peered into Bob’s microscope, and sniffed specimen bottles, the two policemen meanwhile hauling Howard, his feet trailing behind him, over to the work area and opening him up again. Soapie tested a magnet out on a row of needles and probes, then on Leonard’s crotch – Leonard rolled his eyes, still firing away, his feet seeming to lift off the floor and fall back again – finally on the display of watches on the desk between Pardew and me. ‘What’s old shortcake trying to palm off on you here, Ger?’ Soapie laughed as a watch jumped to his magnet. He pocketed the watch and magnet and, admiring the photos hanging from the line, lit up a cigarette, Leonard’s flashgun popping away the while like magnesium bubbles. ‘So whaddaya got, Nige? Who done it?’

  ‘We have several leads,’ replied the Inspector frostily, ‘but we are still pursuing our inquiries.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, what about fatty here with the red tie and inky dingdong?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘You know, abusing the habeas corpus like that, like maybe he was returning to what you might call the scene of the crime – and then, he’s obviously banged to the bung—’

  Inspector Pardew leaped to his feet. ‘We are not jumping to any half-baked conclusions! We are not peddling headlines here – we are seeking the truth!’

  ‘Awright, awright, calm down—!’

  ‘Holistic criminalistics rejects these narrow localized cause-and-effect fictions popularized by the media! Do you think that poor child in there died because of some arbitrary indeterminate and random act? Oh no, nothing in the world happens that way! It is just by such simple atavistic thinking that we fill our morgues and prisons, missing the point, solving nothing!’ Pardew stormed about the room, waving his arms. Soapie whipped out his notebook. ‘Murder, like laughter, is a muscular solution of conflict, biologically substantial and inevitable, a psychologically imperative and, in the case of murder, death-dealing act that must be related to the total ontological reality!’

  ‘Hold up, hold up!’ cried Soapie, scribbling away frantically, hat tipped back and cigarette between his teeth. ‘Jesus! How do you spell “interterminant”?’

  ‘This death tonight was a violent but dynamically predetermined invasion of what we criminologists call a self-contained system of ritually proscribed behavior in which the parts are linked by implacable forces and the behavior of the whole is precisely defined by the laws of social etiology – and I assure you, we are not going to be pressured by any hack scandalmongers into abrogating our broader responsibilities and jumping to unwarranted and even irrelevant parochial conclusions!’

  ‘Whoa-ho-ho!’ laughed Soapie, his pencil waggling frantically across the pad in his hand. ‘Violent total antilogical, uh, irreverent system … whew! I don’t know what any of this malarkey’s about, Nigel, by golly, but it should knock ’em out on the funny pages!’ He dotted a few i’s, flicked his butt away, and, slapping his notebook shut, nodded at Leonard, who had been photographing the Inspector’s bristly tirade through a foreground of test tubes and beakers. ‘C’mon, Leonard, let’s go get a coupla skin shots of
these impeccable faucets, and then have us something to eat. Ger’s old lady puts out a handsome spread.’

  ‘Stick around,’ Fred urged, coming back in with Bob, the two of them having just dumped Howard outside the door, ‘this one’s next!’

  ‘Nah,’ grinned Soapie, winking at me. ‘He’s old hat.’

  ‘Those shameless egotistical frauds!’ shrieked the Inspector when the two newsmen had left, and then, in a fit of decompressed rage, he began to beat his head against the far wall. ‘Filthy bloated mythomaniacs who feed like dogs off the excrement of their own vile lies!’ I thought this might be a good moment to slip away, but before I could make my move, the Inspector whirled around and cried: ‘Seize him!’

  ‘No, wait—!’ But they had already grabbed me, twisted my arm behind my back, and were highstepping me over to their work area, my feet barely touching the floor. ‘Don’t—!’

  ‘Easy, pal!’

  ‘We don’t want to have to get rough!’

  The Inspector, who was striking his temples with his fists and groaning something about ‘dark fissures of the soul’ and ‘massive spiritual deformity,’ now threw a sheaf of photographs on the table in front of me and, jabbing a tremulous finger at the erected penis that Ros, dressed as a telephone operator, was holding in her ear, cried: ‘Whose is that?!’

  ‘I – I don’t know,’ I stammered, mine being the one she was speaking into.

  ‘And that!!’ he demanded, pointing now at Ros’s pumping fist in a photo of the Pietà, then at one of Little Miss Muffet with what looked like a lamb under her skirt: ‘And this!’

  ‘Actually, uh, that one’s from a show, I believe – a publicity still – The Mother Goo—’

  ‘What are you trying to hide?’ he screamed, banging his fists on the table, making the photos fly.

  Bob tightened his grip on my arm, Fred whipped out his nightstick. ‘Nothing!’