The Plant Read online

  “They looked real to you, didn't they?”

  He considered, then nodded. “Real as rain.”

  “Good.”

  “What do you mean, good? There's nothing good about any of this.”

  “I only meant—”

  “Yeah, I know what you meant.” He got up, shook the legs of his pants the way he always does, and told me to call if I heard from anybody. “And don't say anything to anyone else.”

  “Herb's looked in here a couple of times,” I said. “I think he thinks you're going to fire me.”

  “The idea has some merit. If he asks you right out—”

  “Lie.”

  “Right.”

  “Always a pleasure to lie to Herb Porter.”

  He stopped again at the door, started to say something, and then Riddley, the mailroom kid, came by pushing a basket of rejected manuscripts.

  “You been in there most de mawnin, Mist' Adler,” he said. “Is you gwine t'fire Mist' Kenton?”

  “Get out of here, Riddley,” Roger said, “and if you don't stop insulting your entire race with that disgusting Rastus accent I'll fire you.”

  “Yassuh, Mist' Adler!” Riddley said, and got his mail basket rolling again. “I'se goan! I'se goan!”

  Roger looked at me and rolled his eyes despairingly. “As soon as you hear,” he repeated, and went out.

  I heard from Chief Iverson early that afternoon. Their man had ascertained that Detweiller was at the House of Flowers, business as usual. He said that the House of Flowers is a neat long frame building on a street that's “going downhill” (Iverson's phrase). His man went in, got two red roses, and walked out again. Mrs. Tina Barfield, the proprietor of record according to the papers on file at City Hall, waited on him. The fellow who actually got the flowers, cut them, and wrapped them, was wearing a name tag with the word CARLOS on it. Iverson's man described him as about twenty-five, dark, not bad looking, but portly. The man said he seemed very intense; didn't smile much.

  There's an exceptionally long greenhouse behind the shop. Iverson's man commented on it and Mrs. Barfield told him it was as deep as the block; she said they called it “the little jungle.”

  I asked Iverson if he'd gotten the wirephotos yet. He said he hadn't, but wanted to confirm for me that Detweiller was there. Just knowing he was brought me some relief-I don't mind telling you that, Ruth.

  So here's Act III, Scene I, and the plot sickens, as us guys in the prose-biz like to say. I got a call from Sergeant Tyndale, at the 31st Precinct. He told me that Central Falls had gotten the pictures, that Iverson had taken one look, and had ordered Carlos Detweiller brought in for questioning. Tyndale wanted me down at the 31st right away to make a statement. I was to bring the Demon Infestations manuscript with me, and all my Detweiller correspondence. I told him I would be happy to come down to the 31st as soon as I talked to Iverson again; in fact, I'd be willing to catch The Pilgrim at Penn Station and train right up there to—

  “Please don't call anyone,” Tyndale said, “and don't go anywhere-anywhere, Mr. Kenton-until you've beat your feet down here and make a statement.”

  I'd spent the day feeling upset and on edge. My nervous condition was getting worse rather than better, and I suppose I snapped at the guy. “You sound as though I'm the one under suspicion.”

  “No,” he said. “No, Mr. Kenton.” A pause. “Not as of now.” Another pause. “But he did send you the pictures, didn't he?”

  For a moment I was so flabbergasted I could only flap my mouth like a fish. Then I said, “But I explained that.”

  “Yes, you did. Now come down here and explain it for the record, please.” Tyndale hung up, leaving me feeling both angry and sort of existential-but I'd be lying, Ruth, if I didn't tell you that mostly what I felt was scared-I'd gotten in far over my head, and it hadn't taken long at all.

  I popped into Roger's office, told him what was going on as quickly and sanely as I could, and then headed for the elevator. Riddley came out of the mailroom wheeling his Dandux cart-empty, this time.

  “Is you in trouble wid de law, Mist Kenton?” he whispered hoarsely as I went past him-I tell you, Ruth, it did nothing at all to improve my peace of mind.

  “No!” I said, so loudly that two people going up the hall looked around at me.

  “Cause if you is, my cousin Eddie is sho one fine lawyer. Yassuh!”

  “Riddley,” I said, “where did you go to college?”

  “Co'nell, Mist Kenton, and it sho was fine!” Riddley grinned, showing teeth as white as piano keys (and just as numerous, one is tempted to believe).

  “If you went to Cornell,” I said, “why in God's name do you talk that way?”

  “What way is dat, Mist Kenton?”

  “Never mind,” I said, glancing at my watch. “It's always fine to have one of these philosophical discussions with you, Riddley, but I've got an appointment and I ought to run.”

  “Yassuh!” He said, flashing that obscene grin again. “And if you want my cousin Eddie's phone numbah—”

  But by then I had escaped into the hall. It's always a relief to get free of Riddley. I suppose it's terrible to say this, but I wish Roger would fire him-I look at that big piano-key grin and, God help me, I wonder if Riddley hasn't made a pact to drink white man's blood when the fire comes next time. Along with his cousin, Eddie, of course.

  Well, forget all that-I've been tickling the typewriter keys for over an hour and a half, and this is starting to look like a novelette. I had better scamp through the rest. So... Act III, Scene II.

  I arrived at the police station late and soaking wet all over again-no cabs and the rain had become a good steady downpour. Only a January rain in New York City can be that cold (California looks better to me every day, Ruth!).

  Tyndale took a look at me, offered a thin smile with no noticeable humor in it, and said: “Central Falls just released your author. No cabs out there, huh? Never are when it rains.”

  “They let Detweiller go?” I asked incredulously. “And he's not our author. I wouldn't touch him with a ten-foot-plague-pole.” “Well, whatever he is, the whole thing's nothing but a tempest in a teapot,” he said, handing me what may have been the vilest cup of coffee I have ever drunk in my life.

  He took me into a vacant office, which was something of a mercy-that sense that the others in the squadroom were sneaking peeks at the prematurely balding editor in the drippy tweeds was probably paranoid, but it was pretty strong just the same.

  To make a long story even longer, about forty-five minutes after the wirephotos had arrived, and about fifteen minutes after Detweiller had arrived (not handcuffed, but flanked by two burly men in blue-suits), the plainclothesman who had been dispatched to the House of Flowers after my original call arrived. He had been on the other side of town all afternoon.

  They had left Detweiller alone in a small interrogation room, Tyndale told me, to soften him up-to get him thinking all sorts of nasty thoughts. The plainclothesman who had verified the fact that Detweiller was indeed still working at the House of Flowers was looking at the “Sacrifice Photos” when Chief Iverson came out of his office and headed for the interrogation room where Detweiller was being kept.

  “Jesus,” the plainclothesman said to Iverson, “these look almost real, don't they?”

  Iverson stopped. “Do you have any reason to believe they aren't?” he asked.

  “Well, when I went into that flower-shop this morning to check on that guy Detweiller, this dude getting the informal heart-surgery was sitting off to one side behind the counter, playing solitaire and watching Ryan's Hope on TV.”

  “Are you sure of that?” Iverson demanded.

  The plainclothesman tapped the first of the “Sacrifice Photos,” where the face of the “victim” was clearly shown. “No mistake,” he said. “This guy.”

  “Well why in God's name didn't you say he was there?” Iverson demanded, no doubt with visions of Detweiller bringing charges of false and malicious detainment
beginning to dance dolefully in his head.

  “Because no one asked me about this guy,” the detective said, reasonably enough. “I was supposed to verify Detweiller, which I did. If somebody had asked me to verify this guy, I would have. No one did. See you.” And he walked away, leaving Iverson holding the bag. So that was that.

  I looked at Tyndale.

  Tyndale looked back at me.

  After a moment or two he softened. “For whatever it's worth, Mr. Kenton, that particular photo did look real... real as hell. But so do the effects in some of these horror movies. There's one guy-Tom Savini-and the effects he does—”

  “So they let him go.” A dread was surfacing inside my head like one of those little Russian submarines the Swedes are never quite able to trap.

  “For whatever else it's worth, your ass is covered with three sets of skivvies and four sets of pants, the middle two sets iron-clad,” Tyndale said, and then added, with a sobriety that was positively Alexander Haigian: “I'm speaking legally-wise, you understand. You acted in good faith, as a citizen. If the guy could prove malice, that would be one thing... but hell, you didn't even know him.”

  The submarine came up a little more. Because I felt right then like I was starting to know him, Ruth, and my feelings about Carlos Detweiller were not then and are not now anything I would describe as jolly or benign.

  “Besides, it's never the informant they want to sue for false arrest anyway-it's the cop who came and read them their rights and then took them downtown in a car with no doorhandles in the back doors.”

  Informant. That was the source of the dread. The submarine was all the way up, floating on the surface like a dead fish in the moonlight. Informant. I didn't know Carlos Detweiller from a psychic begonia... but he knew something about me. Not that I was the head of the Brown University literary society, or that I'm prematurely balding, or that I'm engaged to marry a pretty miss from Pasadena named Ruth Tanaka... not any of those things (and please God, not my home address, never my home address), but he knows I'm the editor who had him taken into custody for a murder he did not commit.

  “Do you know,” I asked him, “if Iverson or anyone else at the Central Falls Police Department mentioned me to him by name?” Tyndale lit a cigarette. “No,” he said, “but I'm pretty sure no one there did.”

  “Why not?”

  “It would have been unprofessional. When you're building a case-even one that dies as fast as this one did-every name the perp doesn't know or even might not know becomes a poker chip.”

  Any relief I might have felt was short-lived.

  “But the guy would have to be pretty dumb not to know. Unless, that is, he mailed the photos to every publisher in New York. Think he might have done that?”

  “No,” I said dismally. “No other publisher in New York would have responded to his query letter in the first place.”

  “I see.”

  Tyndale was up, clearing away the styrofoam coffee cups, making those end-of-the-party gestures that meant he was hoping I'd put an egg in my shoe and beat it.

  “One more question and I'll get out of your hair,” I said. “The other photos were obvious fakes. Pififul. How come they look so bad and these other fakes look so damn good?”

  “Maybe Detweiller himself set up the 'Sakred Seance' photos and someone else-Central Fall's answer to Tom Savini, say-made up the 'sakrifice victim. ' Or maybe Detweiller did them all and purposely made the other ones look bad so you'd take these more seriously.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “So you'd stub your toe just the way you have, maybe. Maybe that's how he gets off.”

  “But he got arrested in the process!”

  He looked at me, almost pityingly. “Here's a guy who's in a bar, Mr. Kenton, and he's got these cigarette loads. So just for a joke, he loads up one of his buddy's cigarettes while his buddy's in the john or picking out some tunes on the juke. Seems to him like the funniest idea in the world at the time, even though the buddy's sense of humor only begins when a load explodes in someone else's cigarette, and the guy doing the loading now should know it. So the buddy comes back, and pretty soon he gets to the loaded pill. Takes two puffs and kabang! Tobacco all over his face, powder-burns on his fingers, and he spills his beer in his lap. And his buddy-his previous buddy-is sitting there on the next stool, just about laughing himself into a hemorrhage. Do you see all that?”

  “Yes,” I said reluctantly, because I did.

  “Now the guy loading the cigarette was not a feeb, although I got to say that in my own personal estimation a guy who thinks loading another guy's cigarette is funny is a little bit deficient in the sensa-yuma department. But even if his sensa-yuma starts with some guy getting the shit scared out of him and spilling his beer all over his balls, you'd think a guy who wasn't a feeb would be at least interested enough in keeping his teeth inside his head not to do it. Yet they do. They do it all the fucking time. Now, being a literary man—” (He obviously didn't know about Gash Me, My Darling, Ants from Hell, and the forthcoming Flies from Hell, Ruth)

  “-can you tell me why he goes ahead, and ends up picking his teeth up offa the bar on account of he might be able to hawk the fillings?”

  “Because he has no sense of futurity,” I said dismally, and for the first time, Ruth, I felt as if I could really see Carlos Detweiller.

  “Huh? I don't know that word.”

  “He doesn't know-isn't able to see ahead to the outcome.”

  “Yeah, you're a literary man, all right. I couldn't have said it that good in a thousand years.”

  “And that's my answer?”

  “That's your answer.” He clapped me on the shoulder and led me toward the door. “Go home, Mr. Kenton. Have a drink, a shower, and then another drink. Watch some TV. Get a night's sleep. You did your duty as a citizen, for Christ's sake. Most people would have just tossed those pictures aside... or saved them for their scrapbooks. That sounds weird, but I'm a police-type guy, not a literary-type guy, and I know that some people do that, too. Go home. Forget it. And content yourself with this-if the guy's book is as bad as you said, you just sent him one hell of a rejection slip.”

  So I did just what he said, m'darling-went home, had a drink, had a shower, had a meal, had another drink, watched TV, went to bed. Then after about three hours in the rack with no sleep-I kept seeing that picture, with the slit in the chest and the dripping heart-I got up, had about three more drinks, watched a John Wayne movie called Wake of the Red Witch on TV (John Wayne looks a lot better in a GI helmet than he does in a diving helmet, I want to tell you), went to bed again, and woke up with a hangover.

  It's been a couple of days since all of this went down, and I think-think-that things are beginning to return to normal, both at Zenith House and inside my head. I think (think) it's over-but it's going to be one of those Incidents that haunt me all my life, I guess, like the dreams I used to have as a kid in which I stood up to salute the flag and my pants fell down. Or, even better, there was the time Bill Gelb, my illustrious co-editor at Zenith, told me about. He said he told this joke to a guy at a cocktail party: How do you stop five black guys from raping a white chick? Answer: give them a basketball. “I thought the guy I told it to just had a good tan until he threw his drink in my face and walked away,” Bill said. That's the kind of story I could never tell on myself, which may be one of the reasons I haven't lost all of my respect for Bill, although he's a bigoted, lazy, horse's ass. All of which is to say I feel sort of like a horse's ass... but at least it's over. If all of this seems to make me a hysteric-someone who would eagerly testify at the Salem witch-trials-please write and break our engagement soonest... because if that's the case, I wouldn't marry me either.

  As for me, I'm sort of clinging to what Tyndale said-that I acted in good faith as a citizen. The one thing I'll not do is send you the photos, which were returned to me today. They might give you the sort of dreams I've been having-and those dreams are definitely ungood. I've come to the
conclusion that all special effects wizards must be frustrated surgeons. In fact, if Roger gives me the okay, I'm going to burn them.

  I love you, Ruth.

  Your adoring horse's ass,

  John

  from the office of the editor-in-chief TO: John Kenton DATE: 2/2/81

  MESSAGE: Go ahead and burn them. I never want to hear about Carlos Detweiller again.

  Listen, John-a little excitement's fine, but if we don't start some action here at Zenith, we're all going to be looking for jobs. I've heard that Apex may be hunting buyers. Which is like looking for dodo birds or pterodactyls. We've got to have a book or books that will make some noise by this summer, and that means we better start looking yesterday. Start shaking the trees, okay?

  Roger

  interoffice memo FROM: John TO: Roger RE: Tree-shaking

  What trees? Zenith House exists on the Great Plains of American publishing, and you damned well know it.

  John

  from the office of the editor-in-chief TO: John Kenton DATE: 2/3/81

  MESSAGE: Find a tree or find a job. That's all there is, sweets.

  Roger

  February 4, 1981 Mr. John “Judas Priest” Kenton Zenith Asshole-House, Publishers of Kaka 490 Avenue of Dog-Shit New York, New York 10017

  Dear Judas,

  This is the thanks I get for giving you my book. Okay, I understand. I should have known what to expect. You think you are SO SMART. Okay. I understand. You are really nothing but a dirty betraying bastard. How much have you stolen. Plenty, I would guess. You think you are SO SMART but you are nothing but a “Warped Plank” in “the GREAT FLOOR OF THE UNIVERSE.” There are ways to deal with GUYS LIKE YOU. You probably think I am going to come and get you. But I am not. I would not “dirty my hands with your dirt,” as Mr. Keen used to say. But I can fix you if I want. And I want! I WANT!!!!

  Meantime you have spoiled everything here so I suppose you are satisfied. That doesn't matter. I have gone West. I would say “fuck you” but who would. Not me. I wouldn't even if I was a girl and you were Richard Gear. I wouldn't if you was some really neat girl with a good build.