among us resolve the conflict in more creative endeavors, from building a business to writing a poem-creativity is born of pain, no matter the pleasure it gives…”
“ Do you write poetry, Mr. Eddings?”
“ I don’t, no, but I have a novel I’ve been shopping around for years.”
“ By fashioning a world or a poem inside which women are brutalized, you’re saying no harm but rather good comes?”
“ In the fictive world, we are in constant control of the props, the staging, the curtains, all the strings, my dear, so that it is safe to unleash these passions, however evil, however bleak and destructive or raw to the bone, perhaps so that we do not act on these same impulses in the real world as the Night Crawler obviously has.”
So this explains the little man’s interest in the killer, she thought. “And you think all men have such ingrained feelings toward women?”
“ Given our genes? Given our race, our heredity, our primal instincts or that leftover-from-another millennium beginner’s brain we all started with and still carry around inside here like a ticking bomb?” He ended by poking his cranium. “Yes, I’m afraid so. Even those of us who deny it in both appearance and deed are saddled with it. yes.”
“ So you are yourself a writer, other than at the newspaper, I mean?” she asked.
“ I’m working on my second novel, yes. Working toward publication.”
“ Oh, really? And what’s it about?”
“ It’s something of a nasty little mystery coiled around the newspaper business, the spiraling injustices one young reporter faces at the hands of his superiors, one of whom is a woman not unlike the owner of the Heralds rival paper, for which I used to work. If it ever sees the light of day, I’m through in this town, certainly at the Herald, you can bet on that.”
She wondered just how deep his anger toward this woman ran. “But the writing keeps you sane?”
“ Precisely.”
She momentarily wondered who was the real victim here in this little obit man’s world, where he had squirreled away his hatred and anger only to resolve it amid black ink markings hidden like glyphs in an undiscovered cavern, an unpublished book, a poem like hellering’s. Or was the true victim the target of C. David Eddings’s venom, the mystery woman he mentioned? She further wondered if Eddings was sleeping with the woman he hated so much, and if so, what made him so full of rage. Her control over him? His need for her? Or the fact that he was the leak at the Herald, giving away the trust of his current bosses, and perhaps that of a woman he truly loved? In any case, he seemed a walking basket of nerves strolling along a needlepoint of stress as a result, all in the name of love, or hate. In that moment she caught a glint in his eye that told her he had seen the understanding in her eye, and in that instant, she saw a reserve of anger leaving a trail just for her.
Santiva noisily rejoined them, remarking on how nudity in paintings by the old masters like Rubens was perfectly acceptable in libraries like this, but that a brown paper wrapper had to go around the cover of Penthouse. He got no response from either Jessica or Eddings, who instead extended a sheaf of paper to him. Santiva accepted a copy of the hellering poem. “Ahh, good,” he crooned. “Now each of us is armed with words which we share with the killer…”
“ And thoughts and emotions, Eriq,” she replied as Eddings reached for her change at the bottom of the copier.
Eddings had gone silent. He extended fifteen cents to Jessica, and in the exchange she felt a well of emotions firing the little man’s spirit.
“ Do you think the Night Crawler is insane then, because he acts on his hatred?” she asked Eddings.
Eddings removed his glasses, cleaned them with a handkerchief and nodded. “Yes, I do.”
“ Then he’s no artist.”
“ No doubt in my mind. He may think of himself as an artist; he may have once been an artist, but once the killing started in this world, the artist in him no longer existed, you see. If Picasso were ever to have killed anyone before he painted out his bare emotions of slaughter and rage in Guernica, then the depiction of raw murder and carnage of that awful war would have fallen flat. As it is, it moves anyone who sees it. Why? Because he emptied the vessel from which the emotions flowed directly into the painting, and not into a world without a frame… Had he gone out and killed someone in retaliation for the real Guernica debacle, he could not have brought the passion to bear on a world both confined and radiated by form.”
“ How did we get to Picasso?” asked Eriq.
Eddings ignored Eriq. “Art both confines passion and crystallizes it. So neither a van Gogh, a Picasso, a Michelangelo, a Kipling or a Sartre, nor a Twain or a hellering, could ever have proved murderers… Look through the history of the world, the history of murder in particular- and being an obituary man, I know something of murder. How many true artists have been murderers? There have been far more doctors who’ve become murderers than writers and painters, I assure you.
” Eddings’s voice had risen on the final words as he warmed to his subject, and this brought a snarling librarian from behind the counter to ask them to please be quiet. Santiva nudged Jessica and said, “Let’s get out of here, shall we? This place is giving me a case of indigestion.”
“ Everything gives you indigestion.”
“ I was the kid in school who always got caught talking in the library and sent to the principal’s office for talking back to the librarian.”
“ I’ll bet, and you were always talking about books, too, right?” “You got me… girls.”
“ That would figure.”
“ I like a good figure…” Jessica realized only now that like many men, Santiva saw little use for poetry, that it was about as significant to his life as was a little man like C. David Eddings. Eriq showed his boredom in his face; it appeared he felt the direction they had taken was costing them too much time and energy for whatever dividend they might reap. For this reason, Eriq had already stepped away from Eddings once, and now he wanted farther away from the round obituary editor, without even fully knowing why. Jessica, too, wanted away from the small man at her side whose dream of becoming a satirical novelist revealed an ambiguous creature filled with copious, venomous and passionate secrets all of his own making. He had in effect told her that so long as he regarded himself as an artist, he would remain sane, but that should that self-image ever be shattered, he, rightly or wrongly, would blame others-specifically female others; he had told Jessica that one day she could well be hunting him. She wondered how many other men balanced their sanity on such a flimsy, egoistic scale. Then she thought of Adolf Hitler, the failed painter, and Manson, the failed performer.
Jessica and Eddings followed Eriq toward the huge en- tryway and foyer of the library, but Eddings stopped at the desk, whipped out his library card and asked for assistance in checking out the book from which he’d made copies.
“ What’s he doing now?” asked Eriq, who had found himself going through the checkout gate alone and having to return to Jessica. As she stared across at Eddings, he asked, “Is it me, or does this guy give you the creeps, too?”
“ He reminds me of Burgess Meredith in that old Twilight Zone episode-you know, he’s the last man on earth, surrounded by books, but he breaks his prescription glasses.
” Eriq only guffawed and said, “Let’s get some air.”
They waited just outside at the Grecian columns and the huge stone staircase, a place where Charlton Heston in robe and sandals might have played a scene out of Ben Hur if only the traffic noise, the overhead airplanes and the constant buzz of city construction and electricity could be silenced.
“ Here you are,” said Eddings when he joined them.
Jessica looked up to see that he was offering hellering’s book of poems to her. “I’m not sure-”
“ There’s two weeks on it. Return it to me when you can. I’ll pay any late fees.” He was adamant. “Who knows, you might learn something valuable-something that might help you with the case, I mean.”
“ Thank you, Mr. Eddings.”
“ If anything comes of it, you can thank me then.” Just what she’d hoped to avoid, she thought-ever seeing him again. He obviously wanted it otherwise, however. They parted company back at the newspaper, the original note from the killer safely tucked away in Jessica’s valise. From there, they drove to FBI Headquarters in Miami, where Jessica ceremoniously turned over the evidence to Eriq. “You’ll make sure, then, that Kim Desinor sees this immediately? Are we agreed?”
