Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

would give you his word as a specialist in these matters, a man who’d been studying—or anyway outfoxing—the abnormal psyche for a quarter of a century: there were, at least among particular persons, no cat-women, she-devils, goddesses come back; there were only bores, fools, and lunatics—also some good people, though he could think of none—and there were therefore no openings for your old-time True Adventurer.

That was general knowledge in the world these days, though fools might struggle infernally to deny it, wearing charms, smoking pot, buying lottery tickets. Disillusionment was king, except with morons. It used to be, even here in southern Illinois, that a boy could aspire to be a lion tamer. Now if he was lucky he got a job as attendant for the kiddie-kar rides at the Murdale Plaza; or he saved up his money and rented an office like Craine’s, above the Baptist Book Store, with a view of the flower-lined hospital parking lot, sparrows on the window ledge, and got himself a pistol and a ball-point pen and a sign on the cracked, frosted glass of the door, GERALD B. CRAINE DETECTIVE AGENCY.

No business for a person in Craine’s condition. His bowels were the least of it.

His agency covered, in theory, the usual: civil and criminal investigating, guarding, patrolling, confidential and undercover, missing persons, industrial, personal injury…. He had a large staff, for a town like Carbondale: three, or, counting himself, four. He’d had sixteen people in his Chicago agency, but in a place like Carbondale, sixteen would be an army. When need arose, which it rarely did, he could expand his staff by stepping down the hall to the Hannon Agency, or Curtis, across the street, or by signing on a few university students or calling in various down-and-outs worse off than Craine himself, old business acquaintances—the usual practice, cheap labor. Put ’em in a uniform and prop ’em up in a conspicuous place and, if nothing else, they tended to discourage vandalism. He’d seen many a night when, discounting the police—which it was wise to discount in any case (sitting in the station, hardly answering the phone, watching TV in the cell-block with the prisoners)—the town had been placed in the sole guardianship of addicts and flat-out alcoholics. You could walk from the ABC Liquor Store, downtown, to that field with the cinder-block building on it, which the Carbondale Council called its industrial park, and you’d never encounter but two night watchmen with their peepers open—and those two, for all you could tell, dead.

But mostly the four of them were all the Gerald Craine Agency required—himself; his secretary, Hannah Johnson, who occasionally stepped in as a female operative, though she’d never been licensed; his man Tom Meakins; and that pushy, irascible little banty Emmit Royce, ex-Marine, big chin with a dimple in it—a man Craine ought never to have brought down from the city, but it was too late now. Fire Royce and the son of a bitch would shoot you. It was possible. Royce got meaner every year, like an old German shepherd. Forty pushups a day, despite his emphysema. Played with his gun like some hopped-up kid, had it always within reach and, in a joking way, would pull it on people, especially big, tough blacks from the Northeast, the Negro section. He’d do it anywhere—gas station, whorehouse, hardware store, some stinking, grimy public lavatory. “Gotchoo, you bastard!” Royce would cry, eyes glittering with excitement, icy as a dog’s eyes, and he’d push the gun tight into the black man’s jaw and with his free hand reach into the black man’s coat and relieve him of his heat. The black man would roll up his eyes in mock terror, playing, always, playing, though deadly for all that; then both of them would laugh and Royce would toss the gun back, with a fierce, sharp-toothed grin, saying, “Watch yourself, that’s all, you dumb black bastard!” Royce meant nothing by it, nothing whatsoever, merely keeping his hand in, but eventually someone was going to kill him—if not some irate black then some irate husband—it was a foregone conclusion. Yet time went by and nobody did it—Royce must be pushing forty-five by now—and Craine, when he recalled that it hadn’t yet happened, would be surprised, but only slightly. Detectives know better than most people do what incredible stupidity and inconvenience human beings will put up with.

So the work was a bore. They’d called Craine an artist, in his Chicago days, and they were right; that was his problem. He knew all the tricks and had practiced them for years with weary mastery until, bored to drink (he remembered no details), he’d thrown it all away and come down here to Carbondale, to semiretirement, where diligence and thought were unnecessary. “Maybe do some reading,” Craine had said. A joke of sorts. He’d been known even then for his insatiable consumption of the word. “Maybe take a course or two. College town,” he’d said. But here it was even worse, he’d discovered. Craine himself, though head of the agency, had done more than his share of sitting all night in an old pickup truck inconspicuous as a stump, with a bottle beside him, his pipe in his hand, trying to read by the moonlight through the window and waiting for some housewife—her husband off throwing their money at the ponies—to come sneaking down the back-porch steps and away through the bushes to her cabdriver lover. He’d done more than his share of skimming through old papers at the Southern Illinoisian or scrawled official records at the Murphysboro Courthouse, figuring out who was the cunninger liar, his client’s enemy, his client’s enemy’s lawyer, or his client; and more than his share of questioning some poor bastard about people the man knew no more about than he knew about the night of his conception. It had made Craine testy, cranky-philosophical. “I’ve had it,” he said aloud. He got an image of himself, walking bent over, the skirt of