Mr. X

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    A stuffed black cat and white rabbit lay tumbled on the floor. Into the mirror before me swam a misshapen figure shaking with malicious laughter. Horrified, I burst my ropes, threw off the weights, and woke up standing beside the bed with my hands flattened over my eyes.

 •62

 •The Russian doll gave me the detail that explained everything I was ready to understand. Nearly all the entries were dated within a day or two of June 25th. I had visited the murdered couples with Mr. X—I hadseen them murdered. Star had collected these stories because she feared . . . that Robert was behind them? That Rinehart was? She thought that Robert had obliterated half a dozen policemen in Ottumwa, Iowa, and killed two young women hiking in Vermont. The newspapers had told her that her second son was loose in the world, wandering from one tragedy to another like a furious ghost.

    Robert had sent Ashleigh Ashton to the Motel Comfort because he had known I would be there. The next day, he had rescued me from life in prison by going to bed with her.

    I felt as though I, too, were a kind of Russian doll, hiding secrets inside secrets that led to an unknowable mystery. Robert; Edward Rinehart. It was too much, I could not work it out. Neither could I continue to endanger Laurie Hatch. I decided to go out and walk the streets until weariness forced me back to bed.

    When I stepped outside, a white sliver of my landlady's face disappeared behind the fold of a curtain. I closed the door with a loud, satisfying bang. I wanted a drink. Maybe three drinks.

    Sounds of a commotion grew louder as I walked down Chester Street. All thetroublemakers in Hatchtown had not yet found their heels.Idid not want to be Robert's toy. I haled the idea that he had been maneuvering me, directing me, shaping my life. Well, why? I stopped walking, struck by the most obvious question imaginable.

    The answer came when I remembered:'Mr. Booker, you have something that belongs to me.'

     Once a year, Mr. X had gone in search of Robert, my shadow. A connection of which I had known nothing had pulled me, the shadow's shadow, into the search. Star and Robert had met at least twice, in front of Biegelman's department store and outside Nettie's house; surely, there had been other meetings. Maybe she had somehow kept Mr. X at bay. Our birthday arrived on the day after her funeral, and Robert could not face the annual challenge alone. He had saved my life because he needed me.

    I didn't need him. Robert could go to hell. It was fine with me if Mr. X erased him.

    Brimming with rage, I took another step forward and realized that what I had missed all my life was the being I had just consigned to destruction. A tide of emotion I can only describe asyearning nearly brought me to my knees. Every cell in my body called out for reunion with its other, split-off self. All over again, more painfully for being an adult, I felt like an amputated half, bleeding for the want of what would make it whole.This is crazy, I said to myself.You felt like that when you were three years old.

    The enormous ache of yearning slipped back beneath its scar tissue, and Chester Street once again stretched out through the lamplight, peaceful and empty in the night air. It was past 3:00 on a Sunday morning in Edgerton. If Robert needed me to defeat Mr. X, I would help him or not, depending on how I felt at the time. But I was here because he was: Robert had set me on the path that led from Ashleigh Ashton to Laurie Hatch.

    I was still worrying about Laurie when I reached Merchants Park, decided to get a drink from her husband's self-aggrandizing fountain, and finally noticed the flashing lights of the squad cars and ambulance in front of the Cobden Building. The voices I had heard came from the crowd at the top of the park and the smaller groups scattered beneath the trees.

 •63

 •A little man with a halo of curls fanning out beneath his cap waved a brown bag at me from a bench.

    I sat down next to him. 'Hello, Piney. What's going on?'

    'Hell if I know. Looks like trouble in the Cobden Building.'

    Two more patrol cars came screaming into Ferryman's Road. At the top of the stairs, the ambulance attendants were talking to a gray-haired man whose tired face shone pink and red in the flashing lights. His stomach protruded like a shelf over the waistline of his suit. 'Captain Mullan,' I said.

    'Your buddy. Have a taste.'

    Whatever was in the bottle tasted like cigar smoke.

    'Just a naive little domestic burgundy, but I thought you'd be amused by its pretensions.' Cackling, Piney raised the bottle. 'A saying of my old friend Erwin Pipey Leake's. Pipey used to be a professor at Albertus, came out with the damndest shit.' He stiffened with emotion.'Follow a shadow, it still flies you;/ Seem to fly it, it will pursue. You know who wrote that?'

    I shook my head.

    'Ben Jonson.Darkling I listen; and for many a time/I have been half in love with easeful Death, / Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,/ To take into the air my quiet breath. John Keats.'

    My scalp tingled.

    'People took Pipey for a bum. Nobody gave a damn when Black Death come along and took him out.' Piney wiped his eyes and jerked himself off the bench.

    He shambled forward, and I followed him through the crowd at the narrow end of the park. A man in a black leather jacket glanced at me, glanced away. Frenchy La Chapelle had been drawn out of his hole.

    Across Ferryman's Road, bands of colored light flew across the front of the Cobden Building. Captain Mullan stood in front of the half-opened door in conversation with a man in a blue suit who looked as though he were hoping he might wake up to find himself back in bed.

    'Who's that with Mullan?'

    A burly guy with slicked-back dark hair said it was Hatch's chief of security, Frank Holland.

    'My boy, Bruce McMicken,' Piney said.

    “I'm not your boy,' Bruce said.

    'Somebody broke into the Cobden Building?'

    Bruce McMicken gave mea sidelong glance. His slablike face made him look like eithera bartender or a patrolman. 'According to one of the cops, whoever got in trashed the place. Screwed up the computers. Roughed up the guard, too. That's why the ambulance.'

    'An older man? I saw him going in the other day.'

    'Yeah, Earl.'

    “I got no use for Earl Sawyer,' Piney said. 'Standoffish.'

    'Earl's just unfriendly,' said Bruce. 'At least he doesn't sleep in alleys, like you.'

    Piney uttered a phlegmy chuckle, as if he had been complimented.

    'Here's the boss.'

    A thickset man in a blue button-down shirt, khaki shorts, and loafers without socks burst through the door and took charge. He had the broad, executive face and beveled haircut of an untrustworthy senator.

    'Stewart Hatch?'

    'Of the Hatchtown Hatches,' Piney said.

    The paramedics carried the stretcher through the door, and the three men on the steps went down onto the lawn. Earl Sawyer's battered face protruded from one end of the blanket. His eyes were closed, and a stripe of blood crossed his cheek like a banner. Lieutenant Rowley followed the paramedics down the steps and joined Captain Mullan on the short front lawn. Stewart Hatch climbed into the ambulance after the paramedics.

    Bruce, Piney, and I moved onto the sidewalk. The paramedics were shifting the unconscious guard onto a gurney. Frank Holland wandered up to the rear of the ambulance.

    'Shitting in his pants,' Bruce said. 'They got a top-of-the-line security system in there. A fly lands on a lampshade, sirens are supposed to go off.'