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Another Summer’s Reading

Grant Tracey

–1–

“Nice night for a murder.”

Calvin Clark sat in the shadows of my hack, a squirrely line across his lips.

We were idling in Big Woods Park, north of Winsome, near a wood-chipped path. Trees bent with heavy spring winds.

I gripped the steering wheel, breathed in, out, tension, release. “Yeah you could kill me.”  My smile in the rearview mirror slid into a lopsided grin. “You got a gun?”

He grimaced.

“Your first shot will kick like a mule—I’ve been shot before—but if you don’t get the job done, I’ll kill you—”

Clark wasn’t afraid to die. He’d seen death up close—a helicopter pilot, Vietnam, 1964–66. “I got no gun, no knife.” He shifted in the back seat, the gray of the moon bringing out bits of ash in his predominantly dark Van Dyke beard, face full of sweat blossoms. He felt like he had the flu, only it wasn’t the flu.

Shadows of trees draped the cab, a crowded curtain.

He winced and bent slightly at the waist. “I don’t have much time.” It was hard to breathe, to get air. “Aconitine poisoning. I’m a dead man.” My mouth’s burning all the time, he said. It’s  fast-acting, a  deadly plant. His vital organs were infected and already shutting down.

He didn’t know how the poison was passed. He’d been working in his office on a film article all day. Hadn’t eaten a thing. “Living on coffee and cigarettes.” The coffee he brought from home.

“Maybe somebody slipped something in your thermos.”

“No chance.” His face convulsed with pain. “I need answers—I called City Cab and requested you because If anyone could do me justice, it’s you.”

My rap sheet was well publicized in the Winsome Mercury: rescuing Rebekkah Feddersen from two hit men in Bingston; Irene Sizemore from a homicidal husband in an ice house; Susan Norget from attempted suicide at the Daws Motel.

He clutched his stomach, words black spots of oil. He was a professor of literature at Polis College; in 1968 he wrote a critically acclaimed monograph On the Fiction of Suffering and the Art of Bernard Malamud. Shortly after that Clark took a leave of absence to help a colleague, Geoffrey O’Neill, run for Mayor. Clark was his speech writer. O’Neill won on a platform of urban renewal. Clark stuck around for a few months and then returned to the college last fall.

Just weeks ago, Mike Stoller left several messages for Clark at the college, “but I was too damn busy on an article about Pragmatic Modernism and the Cinema of John Cassavetes. Yesterday, Stoller fell from a fourth floor balcony onto Garfield Avenue. He was allegedly watering his plants.”

“Maybe he was pushed.”

Clark coughed and crumpled. “Maybe.” Stoller was the accountant for the urban renewal committee that promised to build a new Market Center in the low-income East end.

“Who else was on that committee?”

Clark followed the sway of branches gently tapping at his passenger side window. “Me. Initially. Donald Curtis. My dentist. Stoller. And O’Neill, of course.”

Black clouds covered the moon.

“Our department secretary, Gail, said Stoller muttered something or other about a book, Books.”

“And someone killed you because they were afraid you heard what Stoller had to say.”

“Right. Right.” He coughed and crumpled forward again. “Can you do me a favor?” Clark clutched his stomach and glanced over at the picnic table scattered with dried sap from the fingers of leaves. “Could you just leave me here and come back in twenty minutes? I don’t want you to watch me die—”

–2–

“YOU’RE NOT A DETECTIVE,” my wife reminded me.

We were sitting on our living room couch, eating yesterday’s macaroni: hers was warmed up in a skillet; mine, I like cold.

“I know, hon, I know.” I wiped at the edges of my mouth. “I’m just a cab driver, but Clark died on my watch. I owe him. A debt has to be paid.”

Kind light filled Evelyn’s gray eyes. She nuzzled against my shoulder, legs curled on the couch. I played with her dark, blue-black hair, coiffed in a page-boy style. She’d had a busy day at the college, where she was head librarian.

Calvin Clark was one of Evelyn’s favorite professors when she was a student. “He had a way of making you feel important.”

I nodded, lit a Lucky.

“Professor Clark teared up in class when he read something aloud that was well-written. Like Malamud’s ‘A Summer’s Reading.’ Those last lines, the boy in the library, taking a hundred books off the shelves, and sitting down to fulfill a promise he had made.” She kissed me. and then took a long pull from my cigarette. “Clark was very shy about his writing—We had this one assignment on suffering in Malamud’s The Assistant and I asked if it would be okay if I wrote a short story instead of a critical essay and he said sure but he wanted me to tell the story in Malamud’s style, from Helen Bober’s perspective—she’s a character in the novel. Bring my experiences as a woman to her experiences.”

Helen was raped by Frank Alpine in the novel and Evelyn, when she was sixteen and babysitting for the Sizemores, was given a ride home by Vic who pulled over on a dark, dirt road and forced her to remove her top and sit idly by while he fondled her breasts.

I squared things with Vic in an ice-house shootout, three, four years back.

“Professor Clark thought some of that darkness in my depiction of suffering was so real.” She laughed. “Because it was so real, dammit.” Later that semester, he gave her three of his stories to read, self-conscious about them being derivative of Malamud. ‘Call them Another Summer’s Reading,’ he joked. “I thought they were great. And I told him that summer how moving they were. But he never sent them out—not a one.”

“Stoller must have been onto something big to get pushed off his balcony.”

“That’s what his wife thinks.”

“You’ve talked to her?”

“I have. Cindy said something was fishy about the books on the urban renewal plan. So, I set up a meeting with her, with us, tomorrow in the library’s study carrels, 2 p.m.”

–3–

INITIALLY THE POLICE felt Mike Stoller did a Brodie over the balcony railing while watering plants.

Cindy wasn’t buying it. She was a diminutive woman with bronze Cleopatra bangs, green eyes, and expressive eyebrows that curved with permanent inquiry. “If he fell forward, how could he have landed in a sitting position and broken his spine?”

Who’d want him dead? Somebody worried about the books? Maybe the mayor?

“Or the dentist, Curtis,” Evelyn said.

“I don’t think so—not Curtis. They were best friends.” Cindy opened a large book, the size of an artist’s portfolio case, across the long table. “This is the ledger for the Bolemac Corporation, the front that distributed and invested the money for the city’s urban renewal program.” She pointed at the hieroglyphs of numbers. “Things don’t match up.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. I was taking her word for it. I’m not a numbers guy.

Cindy met Michael while studying actuarial science at a SUNY school. They got married, and like so many women of the early 1970s, she never finished college, taking a back seat to his career.

“But I know enough to crack these codes.” She stabbed at the ink bleed before her. Bolemac took the city’s money, she said, but they cut corners: cheaper bricks not up to code; wood scaffolding spaced farther than they should have been; sheetrock listed at twice the cost of what it should have been. “Charge high, build low, pocket the money.”

“Who was a part of this Bolemac?”

“Calvin Clark.”

“I don’t believe that.” Evelyn shook her head, eyes filling with emotion.

Cindy sighed. “I know he was much revered by his students, but—”

“No.” Evelyn held her arms tight to her body, fingers tapping grace notes along her collarbone.

“Did you know he has, had, a small villa in Florence?” The question marks of her eyebrows stretched. “On a professor’s salary. A villa? Clark traveled to Italy four years ago on a Guggenheim to research Malamud’s time spent there and how that landscape shaped some of the New Yorker’s Fidelman stories.”

“So, wait?” I snapped my fingers. “When your husband called about books it wasn’t to share a secret but to accuse the professor of embezzlement?”

“Yes.”

The fluorescent lights hummed. Their fixtures looked like upside down ice-cube trays.

“That’s just not him.” Evelyn couldn’t look at us.

“Do we ever really know anybody?” The four or five ringed bracelets around Cindy’s left wrist jangled with emphasis.

–4–

“THESE SPRING COLDS are the goddamn worst.” O’Neill held up jittery hands. “Don’t get close.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t.”

He was drinking Metrecal from the can. “I’m all stuffed up.” He swallowed a Contac Cold capsule. “This helps a little.” He wiped chalky residue from the corners of his mouth.

The mayor’s offices were housed inside a seven-story structure called the City Building. O’Neill’s office on the fourth floor was wood paneled, with a walnut desk, a grandfather clock, and narrow windows.

Directly across from me was a huge corkboard, full of Polaroid snapshots: people sitting in his office, smiling, holding up various certificates of accolades.

He followed my eyeline. “Those are people who make a difference in our community, big brothers, big sisters, firemen, policemen, school teachers, social workers. They remind me of who and what I work for.”

 I unzipped my red windbreaker. It was hard to get comfortable in the undersized chair he had directed me to.

“Sorry to hear about Calvin. He was a good man.” He coughed awkwardly, finding it hard to breathe and talk at the same time. “These time-release capsules. I don’t know how they work, but they work, I’ll be breathing normally soon.” He flipped his netted tie over a shoulder and sat in a big leather chair. He patted his paunch that bulged above the belt line of his Haggar slacks. “Trying to control my weight. A mayor’s gotta think thin—I have two of these a day, and a big meal for dinner.” He smiled pleasantly.

“This isn’t a soft interview.”  I took a short drag. “Bolemac. Urban renewal. Pots of money.”

“Stoller kept the books.”

“Was he murdered because of the books?”

“Police say he fell.” O’Neill flashed a campaign smile and tossed the empty Metrecal can into a wastebasket across the room. It clanked a couple of times before settling. “You gotta drink that shit fast,” he said.

“The way he fell suggests he was cold-cocked, picked up, and dropped over the balcony railing. And then there’s the villa in Italy—”

“Villa?”

I shared what Cindy shared about Bolemac: estimating high for building supplies, gobbling up government money, and building low, pocketing said money. “Villas in Italy. The American Dream overseas.”

“That wasn’t Clark. A villa?” Clark lived a Spartan life, O’Neill said. “He only had three keys. One for his house, one for this office building and the other for his office door. He didn’t even own a car. Bicycling everywhere. Slept on a futon mattress, on the floor. And his apartment was dimly furnished: a breakfast table, a TV, a Remington typewriter, and three or four bookshelves.”

“Well somebody wanted him dead. What about the dentist guy on the committee?”

“Donald Curtis?”

“Yeah, Curtis.”

“No. They were tight. Best friends. Curtis fancied himself an upstate Mark Twain—occasionally had Calvin critique his work, offer feedback.”

“Was it any good?”

“Calvin never said, one way or the other. Not to me anyway.” He shrugged.

I shifted in the chair, my upper back knotting up. I saw three probabilities for why Calvin Clark was killed. One, someone in academe, jealous. Two, something to do with possibly cheating the government and embezzling money. Three, love gone wrong. “Was Clark involved with someone’s wife?”

“Well, it wasn’t someone’s wife—He was a homosexual. And I got nothing against them. God bless them all, but in this town—”

“Do you know who he was seeing?”

“Curtis, the dentist.”

–5–

WHILE I WAS TALKING to the mayor, Evelyn was up one floor, in an office at the end of the hall, talking to Donald Curtis, DDS.

We were now two blocks over at Gus’s Diner, a 1950s-era throwback full of red stools and benches, excess of chrome, and a black-and-white checkered floor, sharing our notes and a plate of fried chicken and waffles.

Evelyn struggled to speak clearly. She, too, now had a cold.

“O’Neill takes that Contac cold capsules stuff. Maybe you should too.”

“I hate that stuff. Dries me out.” She snuffled, sipped tea with honey. Curtis was courteous, she said, real polite. The last time he saw Calvin Clark was on Tuesday, the day before he was murdered. Clark needed a crown. Broke a tooth eating cheesecake. “Can you imagine?”

The villa angle seemed like a dead end. No names. Leads.

“How about Curtis? Could he have killed Clark?”

“I don’t know. Curtis sure teared up talking about Clark’s death. They were best pals.”

“They were also more than best pals.”

She put down a chicken leg. “What? No—” Evelyn’s face broke into a bunch of mismatched lines, a Picasso painting. “I never got that vibe.”

“What vibe?” I laughed and butted my cigarette. “Vibe now.”

“He was checking me out when we talked. I mean like checking me out. My tits.” And later he excused himself, she said, for a moment, and Evelyn heard him and a woman kissing.

“You sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. There were pleasant sighs coming from down the hall, breathy pauses.”

“You ever get the feeling that we’re getting played? That everything we hear is half-truths, half-lies?” O’Neill, Stoller, Curtis. Who could we trust?

She nodded, struggling to breathe. “This whole thing—” She reached for my hand.

“You’re running a fever—let’s go to Regehr’s and get you something for that.”

I wanted to take care of her, but I had to drive hack that night. Back then, we always needed the money.

–6–

“WHAT ARE YOU doing up?”

It was 7:30 in the morning and Evelyn wore a pink blouse and blue bell bottoms. A plate of bacon and eggs was waiting, middle of the table.

“I was hoping you’d get here sooner.” A hand touched the thin cross around her neck.

I kissed her cheek, patted her hip, and sat down. “We got busy right at 6, backed up. They needed me to stick around.”

She pinched between her eyebrows and sat across from me. “I didn’t sleep at all.”

The eggs were cool and the bacon crisp.

Evelyn slid a book across the table, an oversize paperback. Stenciled across the top:

“Uncorrected Author’s Proof.” Curtis MidKnight. One Day, Everyday. It was “a stunning collection of short stories on love, suffering, and redemption.”

As a librarian, Evelyn often received advance copies from major publishers.

I absently flipped pages. “Any good?”

“Very—” She placed an elbow on the gray Formica table, resting her face in her hand. “Curtis MidKnight is Donald Curtis.”

“The dentist wrote a book?”

Her eyes glazed. “Fake name for a fake.”

“Lots of writers use pseudonyms: Donald Westlake writing as Richard Stark—”

She tossed ad copy my way. Folded up inserts landed like a tent in front of me. According to the enthusiastic publicist MidKnight was a “real find, the Irish-Catholic Malamud.” She snuffled. “God, this cold.”

“Take some of those cold capsules I got you.”

She reached for the box of Contac, pulled one from its tab. “Three of the stories in this book, the best stories in this book, are Clark’s.”

“Wait, wait. Plagiarism?”

“Remember ‘Another Summer’s Reading’? Clark’s joke? The three stories I read that summer are in the book. And who knows about the other stories. Maybe most of them are Clark’s. But I remember the three I read, vividly.” She swallowed the cold capsule with what was left of my orange juice. “That’s why Curtis killed the Professor. What was it Gail said, the message from Stoller was something or other about books or a book? Not books, but book. Stoller was calling about this book.” She tapped the cover to the uncorrected proof, with fingers ready to excavate. “It had nothing to do with Bolemac or some made-up villa.”

“So, Cindy’s story—?”

“Another work of fiction just like Curtis presenting himself as an author.”

“Hmm.”

“Mike found out the truth and Curtis killed him—Cindy’s in on it.”

“Curtis’s not even an academic.” I shook my head. “He doesn’t have to worry about publishing or perishing. I just don’t get it.”

“He wanted fame.”

Look, she said. Curtis’s dental office was open for emergencies, Saturdays from 9 to noon. Evelyn called his answering service and set up an appointment for 10:15. “I told him I cracked a tooth—I too, can create some fiction.”

Clark and Curtis were lovers, I said, nodding with my index finger. Curtis could have stolen all of the stories.

Evelyn pushed away from the table and opened a drawer under the cabinets. She returned with an original story, “Essentials,” typed on onion-skin paper. It was signed, “For Evelyn. Who feels things deeply. Who thinks with her heart.”

I randomly scanned dozens of paragraphs between the two copies. Word for word. Same.

“How many other people will Curtis have to kill to keep his secret?”

“Yeah.” I wandered to the spare room of our trailer home, the one with the antiquated radio equipment—transistors, oscillators, tubes—and found my backup .45. I returned, placed it on the breakfast table. My shoulders were locking up. I breathed in, breathed out. Tension. Release. “That’s how he did it—release, time release—Cracked tooth—”

I held up the box of Contac cold capsules. “He lined the inside of Clark’s crown with Aconitine, then sealed it with a time-release gel, like dissolving stitches. In time the gel would melt away, releasing the poison, but doing so several hours later, giving Curtis a perfect alibi.”

“All we have to do is exhume the body and check the crown for traces of Aconitine.”

“Would traces even be visible—on a crown?” My wife was skeptical of my gumshoe skills.

“I don’t know. I’m not a coroner. I’m just a cab driver.”

“In the meantime I have an appointment with the ‘writer,’ Dr. Curtis.” Her gray eyes darkened.

I tucked my .45 in the back of my pants, zipped up my red windbreaker. “I recommend you bring your snub-nosed .38 and the ankle holster.”

“Already wearing it,” she said.

–7–

DAMN, I should have known better.

The door was open to Curtis’s office but no one was at the front desk or in the waiting area. “I let my gals go early today. C’mon back.”

In the two and half hours before Evelyn’s scheduled appointment she encouraged me to read six or seven stories in MidKnight’s collection, including all of “Essentials.” Three were set in libraries.

We quietly moved down the corridor. A curtain here and there swayed in the light breeze of air conditioning.

“Over here—”

We pushed aside a mauve curtain and entered a brightly lit room. A long narrow window overlooked the Armory and Winsome’s downtown: the hardware store, the movie theater, Gus’s Diner.

Curtis stood behind a classic pivoting chair, the overhanging dental operating light slightly obscuring his face. His coffee-colored eyes had a splash of cream in them. “How nice. I see you brought a guest.” He dipped his chin slightly with determination. “I’ve been expecting you, the two of you.”

That sent a chainsaw buzz through my shoulders.

“We know you killed Calvin Clark.” Evelyn leaned into her words, the lines on the back of her hands raised.

“And don’t forget Mike Stoller.” He raised a hand. “I was involved in that kill too.”

My mouth was full of dry tumbleweed.

“And all for what?” Evelyn’s eyes narrowed.

“Fame. Legacy. To be immortal.” Calvin was a talented writer he said, but he sat on his talent, not trusting himself. “I read his stories and thought, My God, this is amazing, this needs to be in the world. But he wouldn’t listen, and the more I read the stories, the more I felt I wrote them. That they belonged to me and needed to be shared. So—”

“You poisoned him,” I said.

“I hurried him along,” he corrected.

“Not all the stories were Clark’s. ‘Tuesdays at the Library’. That was my story,” Evelyn said. She wrote it for a class she was taking with the Professor. Only then it was called ‘Helen Bober’s Story.’” She turned toward me and smiled briefly. “I was never any good with titles—” Professor Clark had asked Evelyn for a copy, for his files.

I had read that one just hours ago. That was hers?

“Did you actually write any of the stories in the collection, Curtis?” I said.

“A few, not many.” He smiled again. It had all the charm of a coral snake. “‘A Matter of Vocation.’ That was mine.”

“Actually, we co-wrote that,” said a voice behind me that was like heat waves rising off hot asphalt. A gun barrel dug into my back as she removed my .45.

“Check her for an ankle holster.” The dentist pointed at the open cuffs of Evelyn’s bell bottoms. He had read about our tangle with two Buffalo-area mobsters who tried to kill my buddy Chris Sutherland. “We know your M.O., my dear.” Curtis’s voice stretched out the latter words as if time were on his side. Little did he know he was running out of minutes.

Just as Curtis, DDS, couldn’t write a real story, he couldn’t read real stories either. Sutherland wasn’t a man but a woman. And she wasn’t my friend. Just someone I was helping. While hiding at my trailer home, she killed Vader’s “associates” with a snub-nosed, attached to an ankle holster. Curtis mixed up Ginny Sutherland and Evelyn Williams, just as he mixed up author credit between himself and Clark.

Cindy Stoller removed the snub-nosed .38 from Evelyn’s ankle. She plunked both guns on the crisp white countertop below the cabinets. She felt a need to explain her actions, the subterfuge, the false leads she gave us. “I pushed my husband over the balcony. Just a nudge.”

“But—the way his body landed—he had to be lifted, tossed—”

“I made that up. You should’ve fact-checked.” She laughed. Look, she said, no embezzlement. No problems with Bolemac. She and Curtis became lovers. Two of her stories were in the collection—and now they were going to kill us, like they killed Calvin Clark. Except in our case: a heavier dose, two milligrams of Aconitine. “Instant death.”

“Everyone wants to be a writer, I guess,” I muttered.

“To create something that other people will read and enjoy,” Curtis rhapsodized.

“But you didn’t create the collection,” Evelyn yelled.

For some reason that cracked Cindy up.

And that was the moment. Audie Murphy in his memoir To Hell and Back said that the element of surprise is what one needs in combat: act quickly; move directly toward the target; catch the enemy off guard; and I did.

I turned sideways, making myself small, and lunged for Cindy. She squeezed off one hurried shot, the bullet knocking at my insides, but I didn’t crumple. Before she fired a second round, I hit her with the flat part of my hand and she buckled into the cabinets. She struggled to raise the Colt .38 Super, a gun that was too heavy for her, and I had a grip on the gun, her hand, and raised the works and Curtis’s dangle of a smile vanished as he reached for his throat, gurgling blood, unable to articulate anymore about legacy and immortality. A third shot took out most of his teeth and he flailed back, an errant arm hitting the dental operating light, as he slid off into the cabinets. A red stain marked the final exclamation point to a life.

Cindy was screaming and Evelyn crushed Cindy’s face into grapefruit pulp with her retrieved snub-nosed .38.

Cindy was out.

Me. My ribs, my stomach, were on fire, and I felt like I was going to fucking puke.

But, I was still standing, stumbling a little, and then wondering if Audie Murphy ever felt as bad as all this.

Following that I was in the hospital for over seventeen days. They patched up my guts, but couldn’t remove a bullet lodged near my spine. I can walk and everything. The nurses and docs treated me well.

Afterwards, Curtis MidKnight’s “bravura” book was shelved, and Evelyn and I were invited to Mayor O’Neill’s offices. We posed for photographs with certificates of appreciation and a gold key of the city.

In 1983 Evelyn curated three of the Professor’s stories into a chapbook published by a Midwest outfit. One of them won a Pushcart Prize.

A year later, at the start of O’Neill’s fourth term as mayor, Evelyn’s photograph was still posted  on his corkboard. She looked beautiful, of course, smiling with kindness radiating.

In my photograph, well, I look small in an oversized leather chair. When the photo was snapped, my eyes were half-closed.

“Tuesdays at the Library.” I’d read that story before we met up with Donald Curtis and Cindy Stoller, and I had no idea that Evelyn had written it. No idea whatsoever. Was it a test she was giving me? How well do you know your spouse? I don’t know. What else do I have no ideas about?

Makes me think, eyes half-closed: the story of my life.

▪ ▪ ▪

Grant Tracey is the author of the Hayden Fuller Mysteries, including the forthcoming A Shoeshine Kill. His crime noir stories have been widely published: Freedom Fiction Journal, Femmes Fatale Flashes, Groovy Gumshoes, Tough, Magpie Lit, Twelve Winters Journal, Bang!, Merry Creepsmas: The Green Book, and elsewhere. He is a long-serving editor of North American Review, and teaches film and creative writing at University of Northern Iowa. Read the author’s commentary on his story.

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