THE UNSAYABLE, Part Two

Trembling, Michael snuffed out the candlewick and righted the tripod, yet remained only half-convinced he was awake. Jacques’ videotaped suicide was as frightening an image as he should ever care to see. The videocassette was taken back downstairs and, on inserting it into the VCR, rewound with dread. A blink preceded an unpromising black screen, but then the flashing twelve on his bedside clock appeared. The painter had succeeded in copying over the tape, although several seconds of fast-forwarding the murky footage turned up nothing else. No plausible explanation would explain why a clock face should show up on a tape where a lamp would not.

Nothing short of insanity, that is.

There was no evidence he had left the house—not even his clothes were damp. The videotape was ejected and tossed back on the heap with the others in the floor, leaving the man to charge back upstairs in a tear. “Come out, you bastards!” he yelled. “Show yourselves!” He reentered the hidden passageway from the guestroom closet. “Come out!” he again cried. The summons sent him tumbling over the unseen suitcase—which was somehow returned to its original location.

Flabbergasted, he hoisted himself up over the piece of enigmatic luggage and flung it out onto the guest bed. As he was about to unclasp the lid, he spied a dark car parked across the street through the parted drapes. The car itself was not what stopped him. It was the man inside it: Police Detective Harrod Pincher. It was just as Omar said it would be. The moment he started nosing around for their bugs, they sent a squad car by to cow him. This was just too obvious. And this phony Count Dracula police detective was simply over-the-top.

Michael stormed down the stairs and out the front door. He was at the car before the detective could react. The irate man pulled at the car door handle as Pincher was about to open it. Returning to form, the inspector was once more wearing a Halloween costume. This time he was Frankenstein.

Michael crackled with sarcasm. “Going to another pre-Halloween party, are we?”

“Ah, Mr. Louden-West.” The police detective, out of his element, was not used to addressing people from the seated position of a car. He struggled to pull himself out, even though the taller man was standing so close to the door it was difficult to rise up with his customary gracefulness. “Yes,” he began again, “you gave me a start! I was hoping to find you home.”

The painter was barely intelligible. “You wicked people! Where are your cameras?”

The detective reeled at the effrontery. “Mr. Louden-West? Are you yourself?”

Michael reached over to grab one of the detective’s fake neck bolts. “Are those microphones?”

Pincher brushed his hand away. “Sir, if you were still a suspect, then your mental state would be of concern to our investigation. As it is, I have come not to harass you, but to inform you that you are no longer under suspicion. We have our perpetrator.”

“What perpetrator?”

“The man who kidnapped and in all likelihood murdered the caretaker’s child. It was none other than the graduate student, Jacques Cretier. It has all come together today with his blood sample turning up at the mortuary.”

Michael rolled his eyes as one absurdity was heaped upon another. “What do you mean? Jacques works for you! I bet the whole lot of you are having a good laugh at my expense!”

“I can assure you, Mr. Louden-West, Mr. Cretier is truly dead, and is most probably our culprit.” He added, crisply, “I myself am not inclined to find humor in these matters.”

The artist was caught between conflicting realities. “I don’t know what to say. What do you want me to say to this?”

“I require nothing of you, sir. But I will apprize you of the facts: The blood we found on the sheet tears from your trash was indeed a DNA match to your own and did not match the sample we found on the victim’s bedroom window screen, so you were never a strong candidate as a suspect. As for Mr. Cretier, he had bandages on his fingers, and it was his blood found at the scene of the crime. He probably encountered the child at his furtive place of employment, Peek-a-Boo Putt-Putt, where he formed a design on her.”

Michael scoffed, “Then where is she? Where’s Brae?”

“We have yet to find a body.”

“That’s because there isn’t one!”

The detective curled his eyebrows. “You waste my time, Mr. Louden-West, with this trifling conspiracy theory.”

The painter laughed. “I hope there will be some monetary compensation in this for me playing the prize fool in your TV show!”

Laughter was answered with brittleness. “You are no fool, Mr. Louden-West. Your artwork is the product of a morose imagination (that goes without saying), but perhaps it also vents your darker impulses. In which case, I hope you keep painting. As for Mr. Cretier, well, perhaps his talent was not as great as yours. It is possible living too long in this small town as an outsider put him over the edge.” Pincher latched onto the car door handle, adding, “Small towns tend to amplify perversions of one type or another. It is well worth remembering. I advise you not to stay too long here as many others have. I would not wish to see you end up worse for the experience.”

Michael was not ready to let the man go. “What about Emma? Is she involved?”

The detective’s expression did not change. “The young woman has only been an unfortunate victim in this, Mr. Louden-West. The recipient of unsolicited phone calls… ”

“But the tape.”

“Tape?” Pincher bristled with surprise. “How do you know of a tape?”

“I heard your men gabbing about her being on a tape.”

The detective spoke disapprovingly. “You have leapt to another conclusion, sir.”

The painter plummeted. “But...?”

The detective commented indirectly on it. “Being a performance artist was a clever means for the deceased man to case houses, so it appears. You see, Mr. Louden-West, no matter how well or poorly conceived an act is, more consequences are generated by it than can be anticipated or intended.” Michael was already fading away from the door, providing the inspector with a moment to drop in his car seat. “I must bid you good day, sir.”

The wounded man lashed out one last time. “Tell the people at Fox I’ll be looking for the check in the mail!”

Detective Pincher’s face crinkled as he rolled down the window. “Your discourteousness does you no credit, Mr. Louden-West. But, mind you, we will be keeping an eye on you.”

At the moment he pulled away from the curb, the galling television news van was spotted down the block. The vehicle abruptly started up and drove off after the detective’s car.

Michael ran after it with his arms in the air, screaming, “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille!”

He needed more than wanted to see Emma, and could only view her as his one moored buoy in treacherous waters. Given the way he had left it with her that morning, it could well be a bumpy encounter; and given his present state of mind it could not have been more ill timed. He was forever putting himself in a situation where he would have to act out of desperation rather than on more agreeable terms. Bean and Nothingness was several blocks out of the way to Emma’s house, but Michael reasoned a cup of coffee would help him organize his thoughts.

He could not think what to say to her. There was something inherently inferior and “in the way” about words, but he was habitually compelled to fill up the air with the tin ring of them. Still, he knew firsthand it was not always about words in love. There might be the courage to ask a woman out, and the wind for a four-hour conversation over dinner (with him nervously doing most of the talking), yet he could never figure out how to take it to the next level—or even if there was a next level. A second date would be more of the same, and a third date would be too painful to endure. In the end he would blame the woman for not facilitating in language what he found impossible to say. He would find himself hogtied and neutered by his own ineffectual discourse; and the woman, having no true romantic regard in him he thought, would make into friendship what she surely knew he never intended to be friendship.

To avoid such outcomes, he reconciled himself for a while to collecting women’s phone numbers as a form of courtship. More times than not they were written out in the giver's hand. Even though he faithfully kept these slips of paper in his wallet as keepsakes, he rarely called one. A person could be clubfooted in asking for a phone number, he reasoned, but clubfooted or not, asking for a kiss—or a heart—rang untrue.

Once in high school he gave a girl he dearly, secretively loved a daisy when she returned to school still speechless from laryngitis. He had never attempted up to then to advance their flirtation, and sometimes even pointedly ignored her out of fictitious wounds. Perhaps his thinking was that the simple gesture would require no embarrassing explanation, yet the long look they shared in the transaction was like tripping over the key to a code. No boldness was intended by his offering, but he could not deny he said more to her in those silent seconds than he ever said before or would ever say again. He intellectually understood the dimension of nonverbal communication, but “intellectually” was in the only sense in which he could embody it.

He saw truculent Erica at the counter, but only after she spotted him; she was pulling a double. A very married Seth Bowles was cooing over her in a very public way. The sight of them together was nauseating, but given the place was dramatically empty, there was no backing out of the showdown. The professor was just as anxious to avoid another encounter as was the painter, so passed him without comment to the door.

Erica began preparing the patron's drink for a second time. Her grating midwestern twang rose above the steamer. “Where have you been hiding all day?”

Michael threw her an impervious look, but it was spread too thinly over his face to be convincing.

The barista looked up through the contrails of milk, still bothered by their previous exchange. “You think you’re so high and mighty, don’t you?”

He did not want to be drawn back into it, but was still in a snit.

“You don’t know shit about us. About him,” she continued.

He finally answered. “I know he’s a self-centered man who’s been pampered and placated his whole life like a spoilt child.”

“And how does that make him different from any other man?” she asked hotly.

He would not be outwitted by a witless girl. “That’s simply a cynical excuse to justify your enabling his bad behavior,” he grumbled.

“No. That’s just knowing the lay of the land.”

“Well, there’s a wife on this landscape,” he rejoined. “And those kind of roots—even rotted ones—run deep.”

Erica became defensive. “She’s an invalid. She’s never been in the picture much.”

“Are you so naïve to think you can come between them? You will never be more than a trophy to him in good times, or a crutch in bad.”

She shot back. “And which are you? A trophy or a crutch?

He was thrown by her question.

She could see his surprise. “Surely you’ve seen the engagement ring on Emma’s finger.”

The air escaping Michael’s lungs was audible just as the steamer shut off.

The barista’s bracelet clanged dully on the counter with the plop of the to-go cup. “Looks like we both want to be home wreckers.”

Forgetting his drink yet again, the man turned red-faced to the door.