Bookman's promise

“Well, you’ve heard of him now. Don’t you find Josephine a little suspicious at this point? I know you don’t want to hear this but that sweet old gal may have known more about all these people than she ever let on. Has it ever occurred to you that she may be manipulating us from the grave?”

Her temper erupted. “Oh, go away! God, you’re such a cynic!”

“Somebody’s got to ask the hard questions, Koko. Where do you think she got Archer’s name? Did she just pull it out of thin air? Did she pluck it out of the phone book by chance?” I leaned over and stared in her face. “Maybe it came to her in a supernatural daze.”

“No, it did not come to her and I’ve told you before, there’s nothing supernatural about it. Listen, picklepuss, because I don’t intend to say this again. I do not believe in the supernatural. At all. About anything. Do I have to say that again or did you get it this time?”

“Picklepuss?”

She glared. “If the face fits, wear it.”

I countered with deadpan silence. Once in a while our eyes would meet across the table and I’d give her my crushed-dog-in-the-highway look and eventually I got her to laugh.

“That’s better,” I said soothingly. “Now isn’t that better?”

“You mark my words, Cliff, and get ready to eat your own. You’re going to learn there’s a practical answer for everything. Jo heard that name somewhere—she heard it, read it—how and when she got it isn’t important now. But it made an impression and later she dreamed about it. She was describing a dream, you fool, you know how mixed-up dreams are. This can’t be that hard to under-stand, or are you still such a poopy old cop that you always think the worst of everybody?”

“That’s a great way to leave it for now, Koko. You be the pure-hearted optimist, I’ll be the poopy old cop.”

“Poopy old cynical picklepuss cop,” she said with sour amusement.

And on that note we split up.

At least I had a starting point, something to do with my day while she plowed through dusty archives. I prepared to battle pissant clerks who had never been told that public records belong to the public, but this time it was easy. It helps to know what questions to ask and how to ask them, and by late afternoon I had a growing file on Archer.

God, we have become such a depressing nation of numbers. Get a guy’s number and you can get almost everything about him. From Motor Vehicles I had his address and phone number on Sullivan’s Island. I had his Social Security number and the license plate number on his car. I knew he drove a Pontiac, two-tone blue, bought new in the year of his Pulitzer. But a check of his credit turned up a surprise. He had almost lost the car to repo boys in ‘85 and again last year. If the Pulitzer had put Archer on Easy Street, he wasn’t there long. He needed another book, a big one, and soon.

I bullshat my way from office to office, the good-old boy who made people want to help. If a clerk commented on my battered face, I turned on the charm and yukked him around, concocting tall yarns that made him laugh. In the courthouse I learned that Archer had been sued several times for nonpayment of bills. None of these had gone beyond the filing stage: he always coughed up when the wounded party got serious. He was one of those infuriating stonewallers who will not pay even a bona fide debt until he absolutely must, and now he was considered a bad risk by his plumber, his mechanic, and the man who had painted his house after a near-hurricane a few years ear-lier. He had several ugly defaults and a history of leaving others holding bags of various sizes. Some of them never did collect, and these days nobody loaned the famous Hal Archer money. He had kept up the payments on his beach house, but by then I had a hunch that it was always by the skin of his teeth. He had bought the property in 1983, leaving me to wonder why he had moved here from Virginia, where he had spent his entire life until then.

I stopped at the public library just off Marion Square. As I’d figured, Archer was in the latest Who’s Who. Son of Robert Russell Archer and Ann Howard Archer of Alexandria, Virginia, he had married and divorced long ago: a woman named Dorothea Hoskins, who had lived with him only long enough to have a son in 1957. In a vertical file of clippings the library kept on local notables, I learned that Archer had had little to do with his son, and today the boy was a man, living in California with his own family. Archer was a grandfather three times over and he’d never seen his grandchildren. The source of all this was a tabloid tearsheet, not great, but in Archer’s case it had a ring of truth. Suddenly the bitter picture looked tragic: a life wasted, with the big prize little more than a hollow victory. I found it unimaginable that anyone could have a child and not die to be part of that kid’s life.

There were no other marriages cited, no business affiliations, no memberships, and he did not seem to be religious. He had turned fifty-four on his last birthday. He had never served in the military, even though Korea was still causing trouble on his nineteenth birthday. His residence was listed as his business address: the same Sullivan’s Island street number I had gotten from Motor Vehicles. There was a list of his books, unhelpful since I already knew them.

His father, Robert Russell Archer, had been a powerhouse Virginia politician, prominent enough to earn his own entry in past Who’s Whos. Born in Alexandria, Virginia, 1905, he was an academic whiz, graduating from high school at sixteen and with honors from Rutgers in 1925. Married Ann Howard of Baltimore, 1926. Two children, the first named Robert Russell after himself and a few years later our boy Hal, William Harold Archer. Admitted to the Virginia bar 1928. Read law and studied under a prominent judge of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Public servant prior to starting own law firm: assistant DA in the mid-thirties; U.S. Attorney just before World War II. Too young to be killed in one generation’s war, too old to be maimed in the next. Never a candidate in his prime but always a power behind the scenes: worked hard for Dewey against FDR, even harder for the same poor loser against Truman. Chairman of his state’s Republican party in the early postwar years; a presidential elector from Virginia in 1948. The firstborn son, the namesake, died in 1945, at fourteen. I made a note to find out how.

Many honors were attached to his name. Slowly as I listed them I began to imagine a powerful patriarch, some Burl Ivesian codger from a Tennessee Williams play. He had come out of his shell to run for the U.S. Senate in the early