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

“Dennis Reed,” McClaren said, seeing Craine’s struggle. “He works here—technician. Fixes the computers. Listen.” He leaned forward, planting both elbows on the book-cluttered desk top, his elbows moving things aside as they settled in. “I’ve told you what I know. How about you telling me what you know?”

“One other question,” Craine said, getting his pipe out, then patting his pockets for matches. “What’s he like, this man Professor Furth? I think you mentioned he’s a friend of yours.”

“We’ve worked together a good deal, yes,” McClaren said. “Over there in Crime and Correction, where I am, we frequently have use for a computer man. Believe me, Furth’s the best. Experience with some of the finest computers in the world, I understand. NASA, Ma Bell, FBI, some computer in Chicago called PLATO …”

“Older man, I take it?”

“Oh, fifty—early fifties. I suppose you could say that’s old in computers.” He smiled, professorial.

“Married, I suppose?”

“No, single man. Married to his work, you might say.”

Craine nodded. “Travels a lot, I take it. Some kind of computer trouble-shooter. You mentioned he’s got a van.”

Suddenly McClaren was uneasy, Craine sensed. His pale blue eyes bored steadily into Craine’s, and his grin went dead. “That’s very clever,” Inspector McClaren said. It was clear that he intended to volunteer no more.

“Nothing going on between Furth and April Vaught, I suppose.” Craine shook his head, saving McClaren the trouble of answering. “No, that’s the first thing you’d have mentioned, if there was. So why isn’t he in today?”

“I imagine it’s upsetting, finding some young woman you know in your van, dead …” Dead and naked, he almost said, Craine saw, but then censored himself. He was an interesting man, this McClaren. Suppose he, McClaren, was the murderer—cracked by a profound inability to deal with the fact that we’re born, as somebody put it, between urine and feces.

No wonder how I lost my Wits; Oh! Caelia, Caelia, Caelia shits!

Mysterium tremendum, as somebody else said, the bottom line of creation’s non-sense: to fashion radiant feminine beauty, the veritable goddesses that beautiful women are, to bring this out of nothing, out of the void, and make it shine in noonday; to take such a miracle and put miracles within it, deep in the mystery of eyes that peer out—the eyes that gave even dry Darwin a chill, to do all this, and to combine it—O horrors!—with an anus! Too much! O Christ where is Thy triumph? So McClaren, anally fixated Platonist, struck back. (“So it’s you!” the guru would say, Ira Katz had said. Big smile from both parties …)

“…tried him several times,” McClaren was saying, “but no answer.”

Craine’s wandering attention returned. “You happen to check to see if the van’s there?”

McClaren’s eyes narrowed. “What are you thinking? That he might’ve made a run for it? or somebody might’ve grabbed him?”

“Just like to know where everything is,” Craine said. “I misplace things a lot. Sometimes it takes me half the morning to find my shoes.”

McClaren was watching him steadily again, so intent that he forgot to smile. What the danger was, Craine had no idea, but he understood that somehow he was in danger. “What’s the date today?” McClaren asked from nowhere, as if suddenly remembering he had a dental appointment.

Craine touched the palp of his thumb against the tips of his first three fingers, one by one. “Thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth,” he said.

“Yes, that’s right,” McClaren said, remembering now. “The fifteenth.” He smiled. “Funny that you started with the thirteenth.”

Craine smiled back, no more readable than McClaren. “Yes it is.”

“So tell me,” McClaren said, “how’s your young friend Ira Katz?” He pressed his fingertips together, shaping a kind of cricket box over his chest.

“I haven’t seen Ira since the morning we found Carnac,” Craine said. “He was all right then.”

“And also you saw him the night before, I think? With April Vaught?”

“Yes that’s right, I did. Actually I went over quite a while before she got there, borrowed a cup of sugar and stayed a while—”

“Arguing—”

Craine glanced at him, puzzled. “No, not arguing … I don’t think so.

“You don’t remember?”

“I remember pretty well. It was late in the day, of course—”

“And you’d been drinking—”

“In moderation, yes. Since early morning.” He spoke solemnly, as if humorlessly, and watched the inspector’s reaction.

McClaren blushed and jerked up one side of his upper lip, baring three gold-framed teeth. Stupid bastard, he said, or seemed to say; the next instant Craine wasn’t sure, because McClaren was saying, genial, “Put it this way, why don’t you tell me what happened that night, from beginning to end?”

Craine sighed and, after he’d filled and lit his pipe, obeyed. It didn’t take long. He could remember now only snippets of the conversation—which McClaren found uninteresting anyway. For no real reason, he said nothing of how the light on the stereo had gone off. When he mentioned that the phone call was from Ira’s wife, McClaren perked up. “Hold on, now,” he said. “You know it was from his wife?”

“I suppose I can’t swear to it,” Craine said. “That was my impression.”

McClaren was leaning on his elbow, his head to one side, his fingers elegantly curled to support his cheek. Craine had a sudden sharp vision of him in navy whites, then, revising it, dressed him in a pea coat. There was no way on earth he could be wrong, Craine knew. Twenty, thirty years ago, McClaren had been a navy man. What it meant about his psyche Craine wasn’t sure yet, but he’d get it, in due time. His left hand went into his suit coat pocket and struggled out again, dragging a paper scrap. “You got a pencil?” he said.

McClaren’s eyes widened a fraction of an inch while his right hand, as if of its own accord, went for the pen in his pocket and held it toward Craine. “What’s the note?” McClaren asked, one eyebrow lifted.

Craine held it up and read, “ ‘McClaren—former navy man.’ ”

“Jeesus!” McClaren hissed, then leaned in hard on both elbows. Though his