The Redactor, Chapter 01

Six Days Earlier 

“I’ve got a feeling in my blood,” the kid said. “You ever get that? The desire to seduce someone?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “Only, it’s not seduction.” He licked his lips and seemed to consider. “Feels more like murder.”

  “Murder?” I said thickly, trying to gauge Hiero’s mood. Was he depressed? Or was this just the latest attempt to coax a novel from his experience and imagination. Literature students can be obtuse. And of all my students, Hiero was the hardest to read. Finally I forced a laugh. “You need to pick a vice. Yesterday it was--”

  He spoke over me. “What would you say if I said I want to kill a man?”

  Was this suicide talk? But it didn’t fit, coming out of Hiero’s mouth. I played along.

  “You want to...?” I said.

  “Kill a man.”

  “Kill a man, yes.”

  “Homicidus Hieronymus,” he added.

  The kid’s full name was Hieronymus Edgar Beck. He nearly always referred to himself as Hiero.

  “Homicidus?” I checked.

  He nodded.

  I leaned back in my chair and let my eyes roam through my office. My gaze inevitably fell on the bookcase taking pride of place, nearly filling the long wall. Its shelves bowed under the weight of classics. I scanned the shelves, reading names—Chandler, Lewis, Nabokov, Salinger, Tolstoy, Vonnegut. This was no book-of-the-month portfolio club set. These books were marked by life, picked from charity shops, garage sales, laundromats, each stained by the grit of life, dog-eared by fingers uncaring or eager.

  How I loved those books. How I hated those books.

  “This guy you want dead. How does he die?” I probed. “Blade, poison, fire, blunt force trauma, asphyxiation?”

  “All of the above,” said Hiero.

  “You need to choose.”

  “Choose?” He said it like it was a foreign word. Gen-Y—always want all the options.

  He took a sheet of paper from a manila folder in his lap and wrote. The scratching of his pen was the only sound for the time it took him to write.

  “Then there is the matter of forensics,” I said. “What trace evidence will the medical examiner find? Where does it lead?”

  “Traces,” he said, stressing the sibilant. “And they lead to the climax. A school of red herrings, and one black.”

  “Black? I’m not sure that’s in the idiom.”

  Idiom is not a word I throw into many conversations. But lit students like it. Hiero loved it. Or so I assumed. He had come to my office most days of the year. He fancied himself the next J.D. Salinger, and he meant to write the next Catcher in the Rye. He said he had one book in him. But that one book would be a cracker.

  I watched him scratching in his notepad, and wondered if I’d miss our talks when he returned home. He was on exchange, and semester had almost finished. He was flying home to the US next day.

  “You’ll have to choose,” I said. “Murder needs precision. Say you pick poison. Okay. Is it Hemlock or Arsenic? Dilation of the pupils, dizziness, trembling, paralysis; or headache, drowsiness, diarrhea, leukonychia striata—white patches—in the fingernails? Hemlock grows by the side of the road in Washington. And Arsenic looks like cholera in Haiti.

  “The devil is in the detail. You won’t fool your readers if you don’t know it back to front.”

  He lifted his gaze from the notebook and smiled. “So I’ll research,” he said, eyes glinting behind a curtain of chestnut bangs.

  I hammered the point. “Agatha Christie knew her poisons so well that a real murder was solved using one of her books.”

  “Life and art,” he said with a smile.

  “Art and life,” I replied in what had become a shared verbal tick. An in-joke.

 

  Night had fallen when we said our goodbyes. I locked up my office in the pale green light of an emergency exit sign.

  —and slipped on the corridor tiles. I crashed onto my hip and sent my briefcase careening into the darkness.

  When I’d collected myself, I discovered what had caused my fall. I’d slipped on a manila folder. Loose paper had slewed from it onto the tiles. I gathered them up, then held the folder up to the poor light.

  Printed on one side of the folder in permanent marker was Hieronymus E. Beck. And below that, The Immortal Novel.

  I’d slipped on the notes for Hiero’s novel.

  And my life would never be the same.

 

  As I drove home that night I struggled to drown the pity I felt for Hiero. Back home, without my goading, he would probably forget about writing. Besides, he lacked talent. Real talent. With his looks, he would have more chance in Hollywood. I convinced myself it was a good thing he had lost the notes. That even if I knew where he lived, I wouldn’t return them.

  But my conscience must’ve been uneasy. At my apartment, I ate a microwave dinner at my writing bureau, and examined his notes.

  The folder held even less than I had first thought. Besides loose sheets, there were five sets of stapled pages, each of two or three sheets, and all titled Research. The cover page of each set appeared to be a typed template, and the last two were blank. Hiero had probably paid twenty bucks for a decrepit typewriter from a charity shop. Another Hemmingway-wannabe.

  Shit — guilt, guilt.

  I retrieved the topmost and held it to the light to read. The first line of the template said Means. Next to that, in curling script, was written, Asphyxiation.

  The next item was Scene, followed again by the curling script: riverside path, near bush.

  Then came Time: Evening, and finally, Victim: Female jogger. Redhead. An ellipsis, then Large-breasted.

  I gave him a tick for the hyphen, then laughed, thinking, Hollywood and Hiero would get along fine.

  A memory of my ex-wife killed the moment. I read on.

  Below the cover page were notes written freehand. Hiero had made a study of methods for asphyxiation. Under Garrotting, he had Thickness and texture of rope, and wire. Even a kyoketsu-shoge—a weapon of ninjitsu, and relic of feudal Japan. The likely particulate trace evidence left by each, the texture left upon skin, the chance of rupturing the skin, and the likelihood of crushing the cartilage of the windpipe. He had drawn diagrams of the larynx, littered with details of angle and force, and concluded the minimum strength required.

  I adjusted my opinion of Hiero’s career aptitudes. This kid needed to get into engineering. Safer in the current economic climate. Paid better too.

  Sleep hit me before I got a chance to look at the rest of his notes. I binned the remains of my dinner and climbed the steps to my bedroom. The bed felt empty that night, and I blamed Hiero’s hormone-charged imagination.

  Tomorrow I’d visit Bedbarn. Stop sleeping in one half of a queen-size bed.