An Exaggerated Murder: A Novel Read online

  AN EXAGGERATED MURDER

  Copyright © 2015 by Josh Cook

  First Melville House printing: March 2015

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  8 Blackstock Mews

  Islington

  London N4 2BT

  mhpbooks.com facebook.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse

  ISBN: 978-1-61219-427-1

  Library of Congress

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cook, Josh D., 1980–

  An exaggerated murder : a novel / Josh Cook.

  p. cm

  ISBN 978-1-61219-427-1 (pbk.) – ISBN 978-1-61219-428-8 (ebook)

  1. Private investigators—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 3. Experimental fiction. 4. Postmodernism. I. Title.

  PS3603.O5717E93 2015

  813’.6—dc23

  2014035357

  Designed by Christopher King

  v3.1

  THE FIRST ONE IS FOR BETH AND RAY.

  THE REST ARE FOR ’RISSA.

  Excellent people, no doubt, but distressingly short sighted in some matters.

  Sumptuous and stagnant exaggeration of murder.

  —James Joyce

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  All Ordinary Nooks of Concealment

  Forget About it, Jake

  Reclusive Billionaire Vanishes in the Middle of the Night, Baffling the Police?

  The Concealed Dumbwaiter

  The Fucking News Trucks

  Room in Brooklyn at Noon

  Just Be Patient

  Cut to the Trike Gripes

  The Sweaty Messenger

  Never Open With a Reference to the Black Panther

  Office Coffee

  The Sleeves Damn Near Rolled Themselves

  Debt, Disappearance, and the Organic Whole

  A Key is Just a Symbol of Permission

  The Old-Timer has his First Say

  Attacker Fails, Knife Vibrates, and Lola Does not Draw a Tree

  Was Seppuku Induced?

  Like the Dark When you Turn on the Light

  The Hare Courses the Dog

  The Font of Intuition

  His Righteous Sentence

  On Marty Mcsorley

  Look at This Fucking Color Chart

  Cocaine, Assault Rifles, and Stolen Art

  The Old-Timer Ain’t Home

  Communication at Its Finest

  Field and Gray

  Class War

  The Surprise Party or the Ambush

  The Mayor’s Car and the Matrices

  Five Percent of Gold Cup Casinos Incorporated

  The Twenty-Two Broken Bones

  The Void

  The Pipe was Necessary and the Wednesday Jog

  Awkward, Anxious, and Out-of-Place

  Total Eclipse of the Heart

  The One Word Known to All Men and It’s not “Bacon”

  The Old-Timer has his Second Say

  The Annual Municipal Fancy-Dress Ball

  Interlude the Mysterious Spark: A Horn-Rims Case

  The Life and Times of Barry Rochechouart

  And the Lady Drew a Gun

  On the Rag

  Standing in the Way of Those who Have Already Rejected the Law

  The Columns

  The Mary Tudor and what he Discovered About George Mullins

  The E. P. Allen O’pine Conference on Detecting

  Sunday Morning Coming Down

  Who the Fuck is the Queen’s Lover?

  Cosmopolitanism and Justice

  Unified Theory of Art

  The Old-Timer has his Third Say

  Max Catches Up

  About the Author

  ALL ORDINARY NOOKS OF CONCEALMENT

  A daredevil’s thrill surged up his spine as the blood approached the toes of his shoes; an inspiring and destroying thrill for criminals, detectives, and other artists of existence. If the observed pattern held, his adversary, Trike Augustine, would be awake, despite the lateness of the hour, wallowing through one of the labyrinthine fugues that plagued the young detective’s many sleepless nights.

  He checked his watch again. As planned, traffic had ceased on the adjacent road fifty-four minutes ago. There was no point in lingering in the study with the blood, but he found himself in an unforeseen grotto of calm. With the vibrant intensity of the preceding years vanished by the completion of the task and the subsequent actions awaiting The Butler’s discovery of the crime in roughly four hours, it felt as though he encountered a new color, one only visible from a perspective of stillness. He looked at the fake books on the top shelves of the bookcase, at the lamps in need of new bulbs, at the antique furniture, and out the picture window. However one once classified these objects, now they were evidence.

  He imagined how the young detective spent this last evening before everything in his career and perhaps his life changed. He pictured Trike obsessing over a cold case, cramming information into that brain by watching CNN while reading newspapers, churning through some esoteric conversation with Max, and sitting at the kitchen table drinking until whatever drives the motion of his brain slowed down enough for him to reach temporary unconsciousness. All nearly equal parts struggle and success.

  With the blood seeping into the carpet, his theories about the response of criminals and artists to the misery of existence looked affected, like half-believed theories of Hamlet spouted on the way to the bar, or the pantomime of lethargy by an energetic French minister, or the promises quitting smokers make to themselves and the world, but, he thought as he inched his left foot back, crime and art are pied; colored simultaneously with their creation and their destruction.

  He checked his watch again. Power does not come from the ability to seduce, but from the ability to resist seduction, so he ignored the thrill of the advancing blood, rejected the luxury of the calm moment, ceased imagining the activities of his adversary, and fled the crime scene.

  FORGET ABOUT IT, JAKE

  [Author’s note: This chapter contains a spoiler for the movie Chinatown.]

  Smoking six cigarettes in twenty-seven minutes and three seconds, with a nicotine patch on each arm, made Trike suspect he could smell time, yet he still held the miasma in his lungs as long as possible. This was his last cigarette. His real, true, actual, definite, genuine, indisputable, ultimate, last cigarette. Distinct from his three previous real, true, actual, definite, genuine, indisputable, ultimate, last cigarettes because Lola finally spotted him from her apartment.

  He remembered The Case of the Commotion Outside the Hotel. He remembered Neill Broadbent. He remembered Marc Lacenaire and August Franzen. He remembered The Case of the Strong Tea, The Case of the Cracked Mirror, The Case of the Leftover Shaving Lather. He remembered every case. All those cases. All those criminals. All those cigarettes. He crushed the attenuating flame from the singed filter of the last cigarette on his heel and threw it and his real, true, actual, definite, genuine, indisputable, ultimate, last pack in the garbage bin at the corner. He had already kept Lola waiting, most likely with Chinatown cued up, for too long. Trike made two decisions walking back to Lola’s door: ask her to replace the cigarettes in his house and office with nicotine patches and smoking-cessation gum, and break the bad news about the reward money for the kidnapping case tomorrow.

  Lola saw Chinatown two weeks ago. Tuesday night. No money, of course. Sitting around watching the cable Trike arranged for her to get for free, and Chinatown was just on AMC. You catch up on a lot classic movies when you’re not a sports fan, y
ou’ve got no money, and your cable is somehow free. She waited as long as she could. But Trike was 11–1 or maybe 12–0, and this was a movie that could do it. And, even though it was a setup, even though it was only partially about spending time with Trike and even though he knew that, Lola knew when she said, “Hey, Trike, want to watch a movie tonight?” he’d watch that movie. No matter what.

  Lola popped the popcorn. Trike brought the beer. And drank it. They watched the movie. Lola waited for the moment.

  “Who is she? And don’t give me that crap about your sister, because you don’t have a sister.”

  “Here it comes,” Trike said, through a mouthful of popcorn.

  Lola paused the movie. Disappointed, even though she was prepared to be disappointed. “Here what comes?”

  “One of the answers. A big revelation. The shock.”

  “Which you assume you’ve figured out.”

  “Ahh,” Trike said, taking a dramatic sip of beer, “I see.”

  “You see what?”

  “Chinatown is just the latest installment in your ongoing quest to find a mystery movie I can’t solve.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe? Ninety-three percent of the time you ask me to watch a mystery movie, it’s in the hopes of stumping me. Chinatown was on AMC two Tuesdays ago, when you were bitching about not having enough money to go out. Every time you’ve tried to stump me, and I’m twelve–and-oh, by the way, you’ve used the phrase ‘I just think it’s a good movie, and you’d like it,’ which you said today, and, just to apply the coup de grace, you’ve been giving me the eye the whole time we’ve been watching this.”

  “You’re eleven-and-one.”

  “That’s total bullshit. I figured out Clue would have multiple endings and I figured out, with eighty-seven-percent accuracy, two of the three endings. We just happened to see the other one on TV.”

  “So because you were wrong in the moment, you did a bunch of research to make sure it wasn’t the case?”

  “I did a bunch of research because what I saw didn’t make sense. And, frankly, my third option was way better. Secret Nazis are cinema gold.”

  “Fine, we’ll call Clue a draw. I didn’t know there were multiple endings until you told me, and yes, I looked it up. And yes, secret Nazis are cinema gold. And we’ll see how things go with Chinatown. It comes out of nowhere.”

  “Nothing comes out of nowhere.”

  “All right, I’ll just leave it paused—”

  “While I tell you the girl is Evelyn’s daughter by incest with Evelyn’s father, Noah Cross.”

  Lola was trained not to show emotion in conflict. Emotion tells your opponent about the effects of their actions, and above all else, in conflict, effects must be concealed. Her shoulders did not sag. Her eyes did not glare. Her breathing did not change. But she had to know.

  “All right, I have to know. How did you figure it out?”

  “First, the actress cast to play the girl bears a familial resemblance to Faye Dunaway. She actually looks like she could be Dunaway’s sister or daughter. Why cast that actress unless she were a family member in the story? Second, Noah Cross’s villainy would be too abstract for us to feel an emotional reaction to his deeds. Without the incest, his crimes are all politics and the economics of irrigation in Los Angeles. Heinous crimes, for sure, but not something we get angry about.”

  Trike took a dramatic swig of beer, “How much better would the world be if we could? So, in order for us to feel his villainy the way movies are supposed to make us feel villainy, we needed a crime with emotional content.

  “As a corollary to this idea, there would no emotive sympathy for the murder victim, Hollis Mulvray. To the viewer, he is just a grumpy bureaucrat who gets upstaged by a flock of sheep and wanders around looking at culverts. Eventually we get a sense of his professional decency, but that’s not emotionally heroic. Marrying a woman who had a child by her own father and then caring for that child, however, certainly is. And this is a Roman Polanski film.”

  “But none of your evidence actually comes from the movie,” Lola argued.

  “Where else would it come from?”

  “No, I mean it didn’t come from the world of the movie. Gittes wouldn’t have used it to draw his own conclusion.”

  “It doesn’t make my conclusion wrong,” Trike persisted. “And it did come from the movie, just not from the story. It’s evidence within the evidence.”

  “It’s still cheating, because the information is totally out of context.”

  “The only context information can be taken in is the truth—I am totally going to say that to Horn-Rims someday—but if you want contextual evidence, here you go.

  “Why would Hollis Mulvray be seen in public with a young, blond, pretty girl, and dozens of people see them in the boat on the pond, if he didn’t have a legitimate reason to be with her, or at the very least, a reason his wife understood? This is the Thirties. Married men didn’t just hang out in public with pretty young girls. And Evelyn didn’t hire Gittes, because she knew why Hollis was out with the girl. Cross used an imposter to make a scandal of it and discredit Mulvray.

  “Then the long pause after Evelyn says ‘Father’ at one-eleven left implies a relationship where that term is inappropriate. It’s like she was looking for the right title to use for her relationship with Cross, or she knows ‘father’ is wrong, but must hide that wrongness.

  “Next, Noah Cross offers an exorbitant sum of money to find a person he should have absolutely no connection to, meaning he has a connection to her. When Gittes presses him on it, Cross’s response is ‘Just find the girl.’ That was at one-oh-six. Then there’s the embarrassed posture Evelyn strikes after she and Gittes have sex, when the topic of her father comes up. She sits up, then covers herself with her arms. Bringing up dad after doing it is always awkward, I assume, but there is real shame in her movements. They practically tell you at thirty-eight minutes when Evelyn gives the girl a pill to calm her down after she finds out Hollis is dead, but it is not the fact of the pill, or that Evelyn was able to prevent the girl from seeing the newspaper, but the manner in which the pill was given. Motherly, not sisterly.

  “And if that wasn’t enough, when Evelyn tells Gittes the girl is her sister, he says, ‘Take it easy. So, she’s your sister, she’s your sister, why all the secrecy?’ to which Evelyn doesn’t really give a response. Gittes himself offers the explanation, based on the girl’s supposed relationship with Hollis. He should have listened to his own question, or at the very least, paid more attention to how she responded to it.

  “We have a matrix of atypical behavior. I imagined different situations that would explain the matrix. Daughter by way of incest is the one that works with all the other information in the story.”

  “Okay, all of that makes sense, but what I don’t get is that your conclusion is based on a thorough understanding of the subtleties of human emotions,” Lola said.

  “Yeah?” Trike said.

  Lola just gave him a questioning look. Then she raised her eyebrows and tossed up questioning hands.

  “Oh,” Trike said, “right, I could see how you might be a little surprised by my thorough understanding of the subtleties of human emotions. I have two responses. The first, I know how to fake it, I just don’t always have the energy, mental resources, or inclination to fake it. The second, I read books, you know.”

  “All right, all right. Does anything in the movie surprise you?”

  “I’m shocked it’s so hard to find a good secretary in the Thirties in L.A. You’d think the place would’ve been crawling with ’em. The one at the Water Department couldn’t deflect Gittes for two minutes.”

  Lola sighed. “So should I turn it off, since you already figured it out?”

  “No, not at all. If surprise is the only thing a mystery has got going for it, it’s got nothing going for it. And this,” Trike pointed at the screen, “this has a lot going for it.”

  “That’s true.”

>   “And besides, if I walked out of every movie I figured out, I’d walk out of every movie.”

  “Yes. Of course. How could I assume otherwise?”

  Lola hit PLAY. They watched the rest of Chinatown.

  After the movie, and after Lola had swapped all the cigarettes in his place with nicotine patches and smoking-cessation gum while he stayed in her apartment in the dark remembering the blackened lungs and excavated esophagi of smoking-prevention education, and after he made a terrible, just terrible joke about culverts intended, somehow, to induce Lola to invite him to sleep on her couch, standing too far away and at too sharp an angle to see with any detail or be seen at all, Trike watched the rest of Lola’s night through the pattern of her apartment’s lights. Living-room light. Kitchen light. Bathroom light. Bedroom light. A ballet choreographed by our limited resources. And then the bedroom light was off and Lola was in bed.

  Trike waited another twenty-seven minutes and fifty-five seconds, in case the soft refracted glow of lamplight told him she couldn’t fall asleep and would knit while listening to talk radio until she could.

  When the time passed, Trike walked back to the garbage bin and extracted from the crumpled pack his real, true, actual, definitive, genuine, indisputable, ultimate, last cigarette, to smoke while he drove home.

  RECLUSIVE BILLIONAIRE VANISHES IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, BAFFLING THE POLICE?

  Columns of concrete interrupted by squared glass. Towers of glass squares ribbed by steel. Lines into triangles of wood. Bricks. Fiberglass. Plastic. Compounds of material science. A harmonic sound metallic and thin. Different from the vibration of interior activity. Sharp. Disrupting. The city’s lights all turned on.

  A tinny version of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” trinkled from the only cell phone Trike would answer before one p.m. Only Max had the number, and he only called it when a crime scene was eroding.

  Trike flopped his hand off the bed, excavating the surrounding detritus. Underwear. Soda cans. Beer cans. Cassettes. Spritzer bottle of vodka. Socks. National Geographics. Candy wrappers. The phone was found and answered.