Modern Masters of Noir Read online

  I run my light down the walls, sweep it in arcs through the darkness before me as I draw nearer to the stalls, and in spite of myself I recall that other autumn when the snow came early, four feet deep by morning and still storming thickly, how my father went out to the barn to milk and never returned for lunch, nor supper. There was no phone then, no way to get help, and my mother and I waited all night, unable to make our way through the storm, listening to the slowly dying wind; and the next morning was clear and bright and blinding as we shoveled out to find the cows in agony in their stalls from not having been milked and my father dead, frozen rock-solid in the snow in the middle of the next field where he must have wandered when he lost his bearings in the storm.

  There was a fox, risen earlier than us, nosing at him under the snow, and my father had to be sealed in his coffin before he could lie in state. Days after, the snow was melted, gone, the barnyard a sea of mud, and it was autumn again and my mother had the connecting door put in. My father should have tied a rope from the house to his waist to guide him back in case he lost his way. Certainly he knew enough. But then he was like that, always in a rush. When I was ten.

  Thus I think as I light the shadows near the stalls, terrified of what I may find in any one of them, Meg and Sarah, or him, thinking of how my mother and I searched for my father and how I now search for my wife and child, trying to think of how it was once warm in here and pleasant, chatting with my father, helping him to milk, the sweet smell of new hay and grain, the different sweet smell of fresh droppings, something I always liked and neither my father nor my mother could understand. I know that if I do not think of these good times I will surely go mad in awful anticipation of what I may find. Pray God they have not died!

  What can he have done to them? To assault a five-year-old girl? Split her. The hemorrhaging alone can have killed her.

  And then, even in the barn, I hear my mother cry out for me. The relief I feel to leave and go to her unnerves me. I do want to find Meg and Sarah, to try to save them. Yet I am relieved to go. I think my mother will tell me what has happened, tell me where to find them. That is how I justify my leaving as I wave the light in circles around me, guarding my back, retreating through the door and locking it.

  Upstairs she sits stiffly on her bed. I want to make her answer my questions, to shake her, to force her to help, but I know it will only frighten her more, maybe push her mind down to where I can never reach.

  “Mother,” I say to her softly, touching her gently. “What has happened?” My impatience can barely be contained. “Who did this? Where are Meg and Sarah?”

  She smiles at me, reassured by the safety of my presence. Still she cannot answer.

  “Mother. Please,” I say. “I know how bad it must have been. But you must try to help. I must know where they are so I can help them.”

  She says, “Dolls.”

  It chills me. “What dolls, Mother? Did a man come here with dolls? What did he want? You mean he looked like a doll? Wearing a mask like one?”

  Too many questions. All she can do is blink.

  “Please, Mother. You must try your best to tell me. Where are Meg and Sarah?”

  “Dolls,” she says.

  As I first had the foreboding of disaster at the sight of Sarah’s unrumpled satin bedspread, now I am beginning to understand, rejecting it, fighting it.

  “Yes, Mother, the dolls,” I say, refusing to admit what I know. “Please, Mother. Where are Meg and Sarah?”

  “You are a grown boy now. You must stop playing as a child. Your father. Without him you will have to be the man in the house. You must be brave.”

  “No, Mother.” I can feel it swelling in my chest.

  “There will be a great deal of work now, more than any child should know. But we have no choice. You must accept that God has chosen to take him from us, that you are all the man I have left to help me.”

  “No, Mother.”

  “Now you are a man and you must put away the things of a child.”

  Eyes streaming, I am barely able to straighten, leaning wearily against the door jamb, tears rippling from my face down to my shirt, wetting it cold where it had just begun to dry. I wipe my eyes and see her reaching for me, smiling, and I recoil down the hall, stumbling down the stairs, down, through the sitting room, the kitchen, down, down to the milk, splashing through it to the dollhouse, and in there, crammed and doubled, Sarah. And in the wicker chest, Meg. The toys not on the floor for Sarah to play with, but taken out so Meg could be put in. And both of them, their stomachs slashed, stuffed with sawdust, their eyes rolled up like dolls’ eyes.

  The police are knocking at the side door, pounding, calling out who they are, but I am powerless to let them in. They crash through the door, their rubber raincoats dripping as they stare down at me.

  “The milk,” I say.

  They do not understand. Even as I wait, standing in the milk, listening to the rain pelting on the windows while they come over to see what is in the dollhouse and in the wicker chest, while they go upstairs to my mother and then return so I can tell them again, “The milk.” But they still do not understand.

  “She killed them of course,” one man says. “But I don’t see why the milk.”

  Only when they speak to the neighbors down the road and learn how she came to them, needing the cans of milk, insisting she carry them herself to the car, the agony she was in as she carried them, only when they find the empty cans and the knife in a stall in the barn, can I say, “The milk. The blood. There was so much blood, you know. She needed to deny it, so she washed it away with milk, purified it, started the dairy again. You see, there was so much blood.”

  That autumn we live in a house in the country, my mother’s house, the house I was raised in. I have been to the village, struck even more by how nothing in it has changed, yet everything has, because I am older now, seeing it differently. It is as though I am both here now and back then, at once with the mind of a boy and a man . . .

  And Miles to Go

  Before I Sleep

  by Lawrence Block

  After a long career trying to find his real voice and real audience, Lawrence Block has become one of the best American practitioners of the private eye form. His Matt Scudder novels are state-of-the-art. But the piece you’re about to read will remind you that he’s also written many fine short stories as well.

  First published in 1965.

  When the bullets struck, my first thought was that someone had raced up behind me to give me an abrupt shove. An instant later I registered the sound of the gunshots, and then there was fire in my side, burning pain, and the impact had lifted me off my feet and sent me sprawling at the edge of the lawn in front of my house.

  I noticed the smell of the grass. Fresh, cut the night before and with the dew still on it.

  I can recall fragments of the ambulance ride as if it took place in some dim dream. I worried at the impropriety of running the siren so early in the morning.

  They’ll wake half the town, I thought.

  Another time, I heard one of the white-coated attendants say something about a red blanket. My mind leaped to recall the blanket that lay on my bed when I was a boy almost forty years ago. It was plaid, mostly red with some green in it. Was that what they were talking about?

  These bits of awareness came one after another, like fast cuts in a film. There was no sensation of time passing between them.

  I was in a hospital room. The operating room, I suppose. I was spread out on a long white table while a masked and green-gowned doctor probed a wound in the left side of my chest. I must have been under anesthetic—there was a mask on my face with a tube connected to it. And I believe my eyes were closed. Nevertheless, I was aware of what was happening, and I could see.

  I don’t know how to explain this.

  There was a sensation I was able to identify as pain, although it didn’t actually hurt me. Then I felt as though my side were a bottle and a cork were being drawn from it. It p
opped free. The doctor held up a misshapen bullet for examination. I watched it fall in slow motion from his forceps, landing with a plinking sound in a metal pan.

  “Other’s too close to the heart,” I heard him say. “Can’t get a grip on it. Don’t dare touch it, way it’s positioned. Kill him if it moves.”

  Cut.

  Same place, an indefinite period of time later. A nurse saying, “Oh, God, he’s going,” and then all of them talking at once.

  Then I was out of my body.

  It just happened, just like that. One moment I was in my dying body on the table and a moment later I was floating somewhere beneath the ceiling. I could look down and see myself on the table and the doctors and nurses standing around me.

  I’m dead, I thought.

  I was very busy trying to decide how I felt about it. It didn’t hurt. I had always thought it would hurt, that it would be awful. But it wasn’t so terrible.

  So this is death, I thought.

  And it was odd seeing myself, my body, lying there. I thought, you were a good body. I’m all right, I don’t need you, but you were a good body.

  Then I was gone from that room. There was a rush of light that became brighter and brighter, and I was sucked through a long tunnel at a furious speed, and then I was in a world of light and in the presence of a Being of light.

  This is hard to explain.

  I don’t know if the Being was a man or a woman. Maybe it was both, maybe it changed back and forth. I don’t know. He was all in white, and He was light and was surrounded by light.

  And in the distance behind Him were my father and my mother and my grandparents. People who had gone before me, and they were holding out their hands to me and beaming at me with faces radiant with light and love.

  I went to the Being, I was drawn to Him, and He held out His arm and said, “Behold your life.”

  And I looked, and I could behold my entire life. I don’t know how to say what I saw. It was as if my whole life had happened at once and someone had taken a photograph of it and I was looking at that photograph. I could see in it everything that I remembered in my life and everything that I had forgotten, and it was all happening at once and I was seeing it happen. And I would see something bad that I’d done and think, I’m sorry about that. And I would see something good and be glad about it.

  And at the end I woke and had breakfast and left the house to walk to work and a car passed by and a gun came out the window. There were two shots and I fell and the ambulance came and all the rest of it.

  And I thought, Who killed me?

  The Being said, “You must find out the answer.”

  I thought, I don’t care, it doesn’t matter.

  He said, “You must go back and find the answer.”

  I thought, No, I don’t want to go back.

  All of the brilliant light began to fade. I reached out toward it because I didn’t want to go back, I didn’t want to be alive again. But it all continued to fade.

  Then I was back in my body again.

  “We almost lost you,” the nurse said. Her smile was professional but the light in her eyes showed she meant it. “Your heart actually stopped on the operating table. You really had us scared there.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She thought that was funny. “The doctor was only able to remove one of the two bullets that were in you. So you’ve still got a chunk of lead in your chest. He sewed you up and put a drain in the wound, but obviously you won’t be able to walk around like that. In fact it’s important for you to lie absolutely still or the bullet might shift in position. It’s right alongside your heart, you see.”

  It might shift even if I didn’t move, I thought. But she knew better than to tell me that.

  “In four or five days we’ll have you scheduled for another operation,” she went on. “By then the bullet may move of its own accord to a more accessible position. If not, there are surgical techniques that can be employed.” She told me some of the extraordinary things surgeons could do. I didn’t pay attention.

  After she left the room, I rolled back and forth on the bed, shifting my body as jerkily as I could. But the bullet did not change its position in my chest.

  I was afraid of that.

  I stayed in the hospital that night. No one came to see me during visiting hours, and I thought that was strange. I asked the nurse and was told I was in intensive care and could not have visitors.

  I lost control of myself. I shouted that she was crazy. How could I learn who did it if I couldn’t see anyone?

  “The police will see you as soon as it’s allowed,” she said. She was terribly earnest. “Believe me,” she said, “it’s for your own protection. They want to ask you a million questions, naturally, but it would be bad for your health to let you get all excited.”

  Silly bitch, I thought. And almost put the thought into words.

  Then I remembered the picture of my life and the pleasant and unpleasant things I had done and how they all had looked in the picture.

  I smiled. “Sorry I lost control,” I said. “But if they didn’t want me to get excited they shouldn’t have given me such a beautiful nurse.”

  She went out beaming.

  I didn’t sleep. It did not seem to be necessary.

  I lay in bed wondering who had killed me.

  My wife? We’d married young, then grown apart. Of course she hadn’t shot at me because she’d been in bed asleep when I left the house that morning. But she might have a lover. Or she could have hired someone to pull the trigger for her.

  My partner? Monty and I had turned a handful of borrowed capital into a million-dollar business. But I was better than Monty at holding onto money. He spent it, gambled it away, paid it out in divorce settlements. Profits were off lately. Had he been helping himself to funds and cooking the books? And did he then decide to cover his thefts the easy way?

  My girl? Peg had a decent apartment, a closet full of clothes. Not a bad deal. But for awhile I’d let her think I’d divorce Julia when the kids were grown, and now she and I both knew better.

  She’d seemed to adjust to the situation, but had the resentment festered inside her?

  My children?

  The thought was painful. Mark had gone to work for me after college. The arrangement didn’t last long. He’d been too headstrong, while I’d been unwilling to give him the responsibility he wanted. Now he was talking about going into business for himself. But he lacked the capital.

  If I died, he’d have all he needed.

  Debbie was married and expecting a child. First she’d lived with another young man, one of whom I hadn’t approved, and then she’d married Scott, who was hard-working and earnest and ambitious. Was the marriage bad for her, and did she blame me for costing her the other boy? Or did Scott’s ambition prompt him to make Debbie an heiress?

  These were painful thoughts.

  Someone else? But who and why?

  Some days ago I’d cut off another motorist at a traffic circle. I remembered the sound of his horn, his face glimpsed in my rearview mirror, red, ferocious. Had he copied down my license plate, determined my address, lain in ambush to gun me down?

  It made no sense. But it did not make sense for anyone to kill me.

  Julia? Monty? Peg? Mark? Debbie? Scott?

  A stranger?

  I lay there wondering and did not truly care. Someone had killed me and I was supposed to be dead. But I was not permitted to be dead until I knew the answer to the question.

  Maybe the police would find it for me.

  They didn’t.

  I saw two policemen the following day. I was still in intensive care, still denied visitors, but an exception was made for the police. They were very courteous and spoke in hushed voices. They had no leads whatsoever in their investigation and just wanted to know if I could suggest a single possible suspect.

  I told them I couldn’t.

  My nurse turned white as paper.

  “You’re
not supposed to be out of bed! You’re not even supposed to move! What do you think you’re doing?”

  I was up and dressed. There was no pain. As an experiment, I’d been palming the pain pills they issued me every four hours, hiding them in the bedclothes instead of swallowing them. As I’d anticipated, I did not feel any pain.

  The area of the wound was numb, as though that part of me had been excised altogether. But nothing hurt. I could feel the slug that was still in me and could tell that it remained in position. It did not hurt me, however.

  She went on jabbering away at me. I remembered the picture of my life and avoided giving her a sharp answer.

  “I’m going home,” I said.

  “Don’t talk nonsense.”

  “You have no authority over me,” I told her. “I’m legally entitled to take responsibility for my own life.”

  “For your own death, you mean.”

  “If it comes to that. You can’t hold me here against my will. You can’t operate on me without my consent.”

  “If you don’t have that operation, you’ll die.”

  “Everyone dies.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said, and her eyes were wide and filled with sorrow, and my heart went out to her.

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said gently. “I know what I’m doing. And there’s nothing anyone can do.”

  “They wouldn’t even let me see you,” Julia was saying. “And now you’re home.”

  “It was a fast recovery.”

  “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

  “The exercise is supposed to be good for me,” I said. I looked at her, and for a moment I saw her as she’d appeared in parts of the picture of my life. As a bride. As a young mother.

  “You know, you’re a beautiful woman,” I said.

  She colored.

  “I suppose we got married too young,” I said. “We each had a lot of growing to do. And the business took too much of my time over the years. And I’m afraid I haven’t been a very good husband.”