Mr. Murder

Christie’s old clothes if it would sell his books. Or license his name for a breakfast cereal: Martin Stillwater’s Mystery Puffs, made of oats and enigmatic milling by-products; a free action figure included in each box, one in a series of eleven murder victims, each wasted in a different fashion, all wounds detailed in “Day-Glo” red; start your collection today and, at the same time, let our milling by-products do your bowels a favor.

Oslett read the text on the first page, but he still didn’t see why the article had put the New York contact’s blood pressure in the stroke-risk zone. Reading about Stillwater, he thought the headline ought to be “Mr. Tedium.” If the guy ever did license his name for a cereal, it wouldn’t need high fiber content because it would be guaranteed to bore the crap out of you.

Drew Oslett disliked books as intensely as some people disliked dentists, and he thought that the people who wrote them—especially novelists—had been born into the wrong half of the century and ought to get real jobs in computer design, cybernetic management, the space sciences, or applied fiber optics, industries that had something to contribute to the quality of life here on the cusp of the millennium. As entertainment, books were so slow. Writers insisted on taking you into the minds of characters, showing you what they were thinking. You didn’t have to put up with that in the movies. Movies never took you inside characters’ minds. Even if movies could show you what the people in them were thinking, who would want to go inside the mind of Sylvester Stallone or Eddie Murphy or Susan Sarandon, anyway, for God’s sake? Books were just too intimate. It didn’t matter what people thought, only what they did. Action and speed. Here on the brink of a new high-tech century, there were only two watchwords: action and speed.

He turned to the third page of the article and saw another picture of Martin Stillwater.

“Holy shit.”

In this second photograph, the writer was sitting at his desk, facing the camera. The quality of light was strange, since it seemed to come mainly from a stained-glass lamp behind and to one side of him, but he looked entirely different from the blazing-eyed zombie on the previous pages.

Clocker was sitting on the other end of the bench, like a huge trained bear dressed in human clothes and patiently waiting for the circus orchestra to strike up his theme music. He was engrossed in the first chapter of the Star Trek novelization Spock Gets the Clap or whatever the hell it was called.

Holding out the magazine so Clocker could see the photo, Oslett said, “Look at this.”

After taking the time to finish the paragraph he was reading, Clocker glanced at People. “That’s Alfie.”

“No, it isn’t.”

Gnawing on his wad of Juicy Fruit, Clocker said, “Sure looks like him.”

“Something’s very wrong here.”

“Looks exactly like him.”

“The kiss of the iceberg,” Oslett said ominously.

Frowning, Clocker said, “Huh?”

In the comfortable cabin of the twelve-passenger private jet, which was warmly and tastefully decorated in soft camel-brown suede and contrasting crackle-finish leather with accents in forest green, Clocker sat toward the front and read The Alien Proctology Menace or whatever the damned paperback was titled. Oslett sat toward the middle of the plane.

As they were still ascending out of Oklahoma City, he phoned his contact in New York. “Okay, I’ve seen People.”

“Like a kick in the face, isn’t it?” New York said.

“What’s going on here?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“You think the resemblance is just a coincidence?”

“No. Jesus, they’re like identical twins.”

“Why am I going to California—to get a look at this writer jerk?”

“And maybe to find Alfie.”

“You think Alfie’s in California?”

New York said, “Well, he had to go somewhere. Besides, the minute this People thing fell on us, we started trying to learn everything we could about Martin Stillwater, and right away we find out there was some trouble at his house in Mission Viejo late this afternoon, early this evening.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“The police report’s been written up, but it isn’t logged into their computer yet, so we can’t just access it. We need to get our hands on a hard copy. We’re working on that. So far, we know there was an intruder in the house. Stillwater apparently shot somebody, but the guy got away.”

“You think it has something to do with Alfie?”

“Nobody here’s a big believer in coincidence.”

The pitch of the Lear engines changed. The jet had come out of its climb, leveled off, and settled down to cruising speed.

Oslett said, “But how would Alfie know about Stillwater?”

“Maybe he reads People,” New York said, and laughed nervously.

“If you’re thinking the intruder was Alfie—why would he go after this guy?”

“We don’t have a theory yet.”

Oslett sighed. “I feel as if I’m standing in a cosmic toilet, and God just flushed it.”

“Maybe you should’ve taken more care with the way you were handling him.”

“This wasn’t a handling screwup,” Oslett bristled.

“Hey, I’m making no accusations. I’m only telling you one of the things that’s being said back here.”

“Seems to me the big screwup was in satellite surveillance. ”

“Can’t expect them to locate him after he took off the shoes.”

“But how come they needed a day and a half to find the damned shoes? Bad weather over the Midwest. Sunspot activity, magnetic disturbances. Too many hundreds of square miles in the initial search zone. Excuses, excuses, excuses.”

“At least they have some,” New York said smugly.

Oslett fumed in silence. He hated being away from Manhattan. The moment the shadow of his plane crossed the city line, the knives came out, and the ambitious pygmies started trying to whittle his reputation down to their size.

“You’ll be met by an advance man in California,” New York said. “He’ll give you an update.”

“Terrific.”

Oslett frowned at the phone and pressed END, terminating the call.

He needed a drink.

In addition to the pilot and co-pilot, the flight crew included a stewardess. With a button on the arm of his chair, he could summon her from the small galley at the back of the plane. In seconds she arrived, and he ordered a double Scotch on the rocks.

She was an attractive blonde in a burgundy blouse, gray skirt, and matching gray jacket. He turned in his seat to watch her walk back to the galley.

He wondered how easy she was. If he charmed her, maybe she’d let him take her into the john and do it to her standing up.

For all of a minute, he indulged that fantasy, but then faced reality and put her out of his mind. Even if she was easy, there would be unpleasant consequences. Afterward, she would want to sit beside him, probably all the way to California, and share with him her thoughts and feelings about everything from love and fate to death and the significance of Cheez Whiz. He didn’t care what she thought and felt, only what she could do, and he was in no mood to pretend to be a sensitive nineties kind of guy.

When she brought the Scotch, he asked what videotapes were available. She gave him a list of forty titles. The best movie of all time was in the plane’s library: Lethal Weapon 3. He had lost track of how many times he’d seen it, and the pleasure he took from it did not diminish with repetition. It was the ideal