Mr. Murder

This might be for the best. When Paige and the girls get home, the four of them will search for it together. When they find it, he will kill it in front of Charlotte or perhaps require her to kill it herself. That will be a good lesson. Thereafter, she will bring no more inappropriate pets into the Stillwater house.

3

In the parking lot outside of the three-story, Spanish-style business complex where Dr. Guthridge had his offices, while a gusty wind harried dead leaves across the pavement, Marty sat in his car and read the article about himself in People. Two photographs and a page’s worth of prose were spread over three pages of the magazine. At least for the few minutes he took to read the piece, all of his other worries were forgotten.

The black headline made him flinch even though he knew what it would be—MR. MURDER—but he was equally embarrassed by the subhead in smaller letters: IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, MYSTERY NOVELIST MARTIN STILLWATER SEES DARKNESS AND EVIL WHERE OTHERS SEE ONLY SUNSHINE.

He felt it portrayed him as a brooding pessimist who dressed entirely in black and lurked on beaches and among the palm trees, glowering at anyone who dared to have fun, tediously expounding on the inherent vileness of the human species. At best it implied he was a theatrical phony costuming himself in what he thought was the most commercial image for a mystery novelist.

Possibly he was over-reacting. Paige would tell him that he was too sensitive about these things. That was what she always said, and she usually made him feel better, whether he could bring himself to believe her or not.

He examined the photographs before reading the piece.

In the first and largest picture, he was standing in the yard behind the house, against a backdrop of trees and twilight sky. He looked demented.

The photographer, Ben Walenko, had been given instructions to induce Marty into a pose deemed fitting for a mystery novelist, so he had come with props he assumed Marty would brandish with suitable expressions of malevolent intent: an axe, an enormous knife, an ice pick, and a gun. When Marty politely declined to use the props and also refused to wear a trenchcoat with the collar turned up and a fedora pulled low on his forehead, the photographer agreed it was ludicrous for an adult to play dress-up, and suggested they avoid the usual cliches in favor of shots portraying him simply as a writer and an ordinary human being.

Now it was obvious that Walenko had been clever enough to get what he wanted without props, after lulling his subject into a false sense of security. The backyard had seemed an innocuous setting. However, through a combination of the deep shadows of dusk, looming trees, ominous clouds backlit by the final somber light of day, the strategic placement of studio lights, and an extreme camera angle, the photographer succeeded in making Marty appear weird. Furthermore, of the twenty exposures taken in the backyard, the editors had chosen the worst: Marty was squinting; his features were distorted; the photographer’s lights were reflected in his slitted eyes, which seemed to be glowing like the eyes of a zombie.

The second photograph was taken in his study. He was sitting at his desk, facing the camera. He was recognizably himself in this one, though by now he preferred not to be recognizable, for it seemed that the only way he could maintain a shred of dignity was to have his true appearance remain a mystery; a combination of shadows and the peculiar light of the stained-glass lamp, even in a black-and-white shot, made him resemble a Gypsy fortuneteller who had glimpsed a portent of disaster in his crystal ball.

He was convinced that a lot of the modern world’s problems could be attributed to the popular media’s saturation of society and its tendency not merely to simplify all issues to the point of absurdity but to confuse fiction and reality. Television news emphasized dramatic footage over facts, sensationalism over substance, seeking ratings with the same tools employed by the producers of prime-time cop and courtroom dramas. Documentaries about real historical figures had become “docudramas” in which accurate details of famous lives and events were relentlessly subordinated to entertainment values or even to the personal fantasies of the show’s creators, grossly distorting the past. Patent medicines were sold in TV commercials by performers who also played doctors in highly rated programs, as if they had in fact graduated from Harvard Medical School instead of merely having attended an acting class or two. Politicians made cameo appearances on episodes of situation comedies. Actors in those comedies appeared at political rallies. Not long ago the Vice-President of the United States engaged in a protracted argument with a fictional television reporter from a sitcom. The public confused actors and politicians with the roles they played. A mystery writer was supposed to be not merely like a character in one of his books but like the cartoonish archetype of the most common character in the entire genre. And year by troubled year, fewer people were able to think clearly about important issues or separate fantasy from reality.

Marty had been determined not to contribute to that sickness, but he had been suckered. Now he was fixed in the public mind as Martin Stillwater, creepy and mysterious author of creepy murder mysteries, preoccupied with the dark side of life, as brooding and strange as any of the characters about whom he wrote.

Sooner or later a disturbed citizen, having confused Marty’s manipulation of fictional people in novels for the manipulation of actual people in real life, would arrive at his house in an old van decorated with signs accusing him of having killed John Lennon, John Kennedy, Rick Nelson, and God-alone-knew-who-else, even though he was an infant when Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger on Kennedy (or when seventeen thousand and thirty-seven homosexual conspirators pulled the trigger, if you believed Oliver Stone’s movie). Something similar had happened to Stephen King, hadn’t it? And Salman Rushdie had sure experienced a few years as suspenseful as any endured by a character in a Robert Ludlum extravaganza.

Chagrined by the bizarre image the magazine had given him, flushed with embarrassment, Marty surveyed the parking lot to be sure no one was watching him as he read about himself. A couple of people were going to and from their cars, but they were paying no attention to him.

Clouds had crept into the previously sunny day. The wind spun dead leaves into a miniature tornado that danced across an empty expanse of blacktop.

He read the article, punctuating it with sighs and mutters. Although it contained a few minor errors, the text was generally factual. But the spin on it matched the photographs. Spooky old Marty Stillwater. What a dour and gloomy guy. Sees a criminal’s wicked grin behind every smile. Works in a dimly lighted office, almost dark, and says he’s just trying to reduce the glare on the computer screen (wink, wink).

His refusal to allow Charlotte and Emily to be photographed, based upon a desire to protect their privacy and to guard against their being teased by schoolmates, was interpreted as a fear of kidnappers lurking under every bush. After all, he had written a novel about a kidnapping a few years ago.

Paige, “as pretty and cerebral as a Martin Stillwater heroine, ” was said to be a “psychologist whose own job requires her to probe into the darkest secrets of her patients,” as if she was engaged not in the counseling of children troubled by their parents’ divorces or the death of a loved one but in the deep analysis of the era’s most savage serial killers.

“Spooky old Paige Stillwater,” he said aloud. “Well, why else would she have married me if she wasn’t already a little weird?”

He told himself he was over-reacting.

Closing the magazine, he said, “Thank God I didn’t let the girls participate. They’d have come out of it looking like the children in ‘The Addams Family.’ ”

Again he told himself that he was over-reacting, but his mood didn’t improve. He felt violated, trivialized; and the fact that he was talking aloud to himself seemed, annoyingly, to validate his new national reputation as an amusing eccentric.

He twisted the key in the ignition, started the engine.

As he drove across the parking lot toward the busy street, Marty was troubled by the feeling that his life had taken more than merely a temporary turn for the worse with the fugue on Saturday, that the magazine article was yet another signpost on this new dark route, and that he would travel a long distance on rough pavement before rediscovering the smooth highway that he had lost.

A whirlwind of leaves burst over the car, startling him. The dry foliage rasped across the hood and roof, like the claws of a beast determined to get inside.