Candy Page 13

  It made no sense. No—it made sense if you could believe in Candy. Candy was the part of the equation that made no sense at all. Candy’s reasoning fit neatly with Candy, but Candy herself did not fit in with anything in the entire world. She was a species all her own.

  “Look,” she said. “I know you’re mad at me right now but you might as well be practical. If you want to see me punished for murdering Caroline you’re crazy. I couldn’t possibly be convicted. There’s not a chance in the world.”

  She was right.

  “The only way you can save yourself is by leaving the country. And if you do—Give me a cigarette, will you?”

  I gave her a cigarette and held a match for her. She drew on the cigarette and blew out smoke. Her hands were steady and she seemed calm.

  “If you leave the country,” she went on, “you might as well take me with you. We’re registered as Mr. and Mrs. David Trevor and we’ve left a wide trail under those names. It’d look funny if we split up now. You might have trouble getting across the border.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Besides, I’ve got the money.”

  I shrugged. “I could take it away from you.”

  “Probably, but not without a fight. And a fight could attract attention and I don’t think you can afford attention. If worst came to worst I could always tell the police on you and turn state’s evidence. The most that could happen to me is that I’d get a year or two in jail. Probably not even that.”

  “Go on.”

  She stretched lazily. She was entirely in command of the situation by now and she knew it and the knowledge pleased her no end. I looked at her and I let my eyes take in all of her from her head to her feet. Her body was just a body now and I found it hard to believe that I had ever been a slave to it. It was just flesh, just a chemical mess worth maybe 79c on the open market.

  I shook my head sadly and she raised her eyebrows, wondering what I was shaking my head sadly about. I didn’t say anything and she breezed idly on.

  “If we go to Mexico together,” she continued, “nothing will be changed. You’re the best man I ever had, Jeff. That’s the truth. I love having you. I always have and I know for a fact I always will.”

  Perhaps she was telling the truth; perhaps she was lying in her teeth. At one time it would have been very important to know whether the words she spoke were true or not. Now it seemed inconceivable that I could care one way or the other.

  “And you want me. I know you do, Jeff. You won’t get tired of me. I’ll be good.”

  Very good. Like a machine. Put in a nickel and the hips start rolling.

  “It’ll be the same as if you never found out, Jeff. I could have turned you in to the cops but I didn’t because I want to be with you. So we’ll do just what we planned on doing before you read that article in the newspaper. We’ll go to Mexico and settle down and live on Caroline’s money and make love all the time and—”

  I’d been shaking my head from side to side all through the tail end of that little speech but it took her a while to run out of words. Then she looked at me blankly as if she wondered very genuinely what was the matter with my hitherto logical mind.

  I just went on shaking my head. Then I dropped the cigarette on the floor and ground it out.

  “Jeff?”

  I looked at her.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Somewhere in Galveston a bell was tolling the hour and I counted the chimes without thinking. It was ten o’clock, ten o’clock and all’s well, except for the pertinent fact that all was not well. I fished out another cigarette and set it on fire. I didn’t say anything.

  “Jeff?”

  “You killed her,” I said simply.

  “So what?”

  I shrugged.

  “Look,” she said, “be reasonable. Jeff, look at it sensibly. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

  I opened my mouth, then closed it.

  She sat up on the bed and smiled. She was almost-but-not-quite sure of herself now and that’s what the smile was saying, a shy, almost girlish smile that curled her mouth prettily but left her eyes serious.

  When she sat up like that her breasts were just a few inches from me. They looked like ripe fruit and they were obviously there for the plucking.

  I remembered her words: I’ve got the hardest and firmest breasts of any girl I know. They’re big, too. You can see how big they are.

  That had been long ago. Not so long ago by the calendar perhaps, but ages ago, a lifetime ago by the clock that ticked in my head.

  That was in another country. And besides the wench was dead.

  I have read that when a man drowns, his entire life passes before his eyes. The exactness of this time-worn myth has never seemed apparent to me—if the man drowns, how does anybody know what was on his poor mind before he gobbled down enough water to kill him? I was not drowning, needless to say, so I am still unable to report on the dilemma of the drowning dolt.

  But I do know that my whole life passed through my mind as I contemplated the succulent breasts of Candace Cain. All the rather inane things I had done, all the stupidities of my life unreeled before me in one unholy panorama of Cinemascope and Technicolor and Stereophonic Sound and, God save us, Aromarama.

  It was an unpleasant spectacle. The Aromarama came into play quite prominently.

  The whole thing stank out loud.

  The murderess cupped a breast in each of her bloody hands and offered them to me. Perhaps the sick aspect of the scene actually aroused her; perhaps she was enough of a fake to simulate tangible signs of excitement. Whatever the reason, her proud little nipples stood up and beckoned to me.

  “Take me,” she pleaded.

  If I could have laughed out loud that is precisely what I would have done. The whole tableaux was hysterical. But I was beyond laughter.

  I didn’t even turn away. I just looked at her and drew a complete blank. No, thanks, I wasn’t having any.

  “Jeff—” she said huskily.

  I said: “No.”

  “Jeff—”

  “I’m not interested.”

  “Of course you are.” Her voice was suddenly fierce, as if the world would end if I ceased to want her body. “You want me, Jeff. You want me!”

  “I don’t. I did once but now I don’t.”

  When she pouted at me she looked like a baby, a child denied an extra hypnotic hour in front of the television set or a second piece of candy. I had to remind myself that she was not a kid but a killer, not a baby but a bitch.

  “Jeff,” she oozed, “what else can you do?”

  I told her.

  “I can kill you,” I said.

  And I did

  She was inches from me when my hands reached out for her throat. She did not draw back at once as she might have done. I think she refused to believe me, thought I was joking, assumed my hands were reaching to possess her rather than to destroy her.

  She could not have been further from the truth.

  My hands went around that neck and I squeezed her neck harder than I have ever squeezed anything in my life. It is not a simple matter to strangle another person with your bare hands. The books and television shows make it seem much easier than it really is. It is a tough proposition, even if you are a relatively strong guy and the person you are strangling is a woman.

  There are all those cords and tendons and muscles in the human neck, and they get in your way. They were in mine, and if Candy had put up much of a fight she might have made things harder for me. But she did not put up any fight at all, did not try to scream or fight me off or anything. She just sat there, her eyes bewildered and her forehead wrinkled in a frown that was part disbelief and part sheer physical pain; just sat there with something approaching calm while I choked her to death.

  She must have been dead long before my hands relaxed their grip. God knows how long I held onto that throat. I think I was afraid that if I let go too soon she would pick up another k
itchen knife and wipe out half the human race.

  She might well have.

  But finally I was satisfied that she was dead. Quite satisfied, and very pleased with myself. Not joyous, not happy, but curiously elated with my performance.

  I had performed a task which was not only difficult but essential.

  For quite some time I remained in the room with Candy’s corpse. She was not beautiful in death. Perhaps no victim of strangulation could ever be beautiful—her tongue hung out of her mouth, her eyes bulged, her face was purplish and puffy.

  But it was more than that. A good part of what passed for beauty in Candy was actually more akin to vivacity. She had been very much alive, desperately alive, alive with the verve and spirit of a jungle creature to whom civilization is a cumbersome affair.

  Now, now that she was dead, this Life with a capital “L” was gone, and what remained was nothing but the right amount and variety of component parts which added up to Woman. The result could not be called beautiful by anyone but a true necrophile, an absolute worshipper of Death.

  When I couldn’t stay in the room any longer I rummaged through her purse and took as much money as I felt I would need. I stuffed the wad of bills into my pocket and left the room, hanging a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the doorknob so that no errant chambermaid would stumble upon the body of the late and unlamented Candace Cain. I took the elevator to the main floor, wandered out through the lobby into the sunshine.

  A pawnshop in a less-than-respectable section of town supplied a .38-calibre revolver and some bullets. I had to pay a good deal of money for the gun but I didn’t worry about the price.

  My next stop was a typewriter sales and service shop a few blocks from the hotel. I bought a new typewriter—an extravagance, I admit—and paid cash for it.

  From there I went to a stationery store and bought a ream of bond paper. With the gun and bullets in my pants pocket and the paper and typewriter in my arms I re-entered the hotel and elevated back to my floor. I opened the door of the room and it was as I had left it, which was hardly surprising. Death had not been kind to Candy. She looked worse than she had when I left her.

  I placed the typewriter on the desk and pulled up the chair and sat in it.

  I am sitting in it now.

  I placed the revolver, loaded with a single bullet, on the desk by the side of the typewriter. I looked at it from time to time.

  I am looking at it now.

  I began typing, and I typed very fast and very long. The words came freely, almost too freely. There is still some of the ream of typewriter paper left, but quite a bit has been used already.

  I strongly suspect, Officer, that this is the longest suicide note you have ever read.

  THE END

  A New Afterword by the Author

  CANDY, PUBLISHED TOWARD the end of 1960, may have been Sheldon Lord’s last book for Midwood Tower. (It wasn’t the last book by Sheldon Lord—several ghostwriters produced a string of books for Beacon Books, and the last that Beacon printed was, in fact, one I wrote myself, a crime novel they called The Sex Shuffle, now available under my own name as Lucky at Cards. Nor was Candy the last book I wrote for Midwood; they published Jill Emerson’s first two ventures in lesbian fiction, Warm and Willing and Enough of Sorrow.)

  If Candy was my final Sheldon Lord for Harry Shorten at Midwood, I suppose there must have been eight or ten before it. And that, it seemed to me, was enough labor in that particular vineyard. I’d welcomed the assignments and had a good enough time turning out soft-core erotica, but it wasn’t how I wanted to spend my writing life. It was very much my intention to write books that might be a source of satisfaction and even pride, and that was generically impossible in the field where Sheldon Lord had been making a name for himself.

  I remember having read an article in which crime fiction writer Bill Gault talked about his own literary ambitions. Early on, he said, he’d wanted to become a second Ernest Hemingway, but over time he decided he was better off trying to become the best possible William Campbell Gault. While my earliest fantasies might have shown me as a second John O’Hara or James T. Farrell or John Steinbeck or Thomas Wolfe, I’d since lowered my sights, and becoming the best possible Lawrence Block seemed reasonable.

  But I wasn’t entirely sure what that might mean, or how to get there. Mystery fiction, it seemed to me, was both respectable and attainable, and my inner self seemed to come up with ideas that lent themselves to the genre. My first sales were short stories to crime fiction magazines, and I’d sold a couple of crime novels to Gold Medal Books by the time I wrote Candy.

  There were times when the two genres overlapped, at least in my house. Grifter’s Game started out as a book for Shorten; a couple of chapters in I decided it was cut out for better things and finished it accordingly. Knox Burger bought it at Gold Medal. And sometimes the reverse happened: Cinderella Sims was supposed to be a Gold Medal crime novel, but something went awry and I lost confidence in the book and finished it up for Bill Hamling’s Nightstand Books. ($20 Lust, they called it, by Andrew Shaw; it’s since been republished under my name and original title.)

  This sort of migration, from crime to erotica or erotica to crime, isn’t all that remarkable. It was perfectly reasonable for crime novels to have sex in them, and it was a fairly standard ingredient in the paperback originals Gold Medal published. And crime was no stranger to the field of erotic fiction, serving the useful function of endowing the books with at least the minimal illusion of a plot.

  Candy wound up being very much a crime novel. There are two murders in it, which would seem to satisfy the genre’s entrance requirements. But it never occurred to me to aim it higher than Midwood Tower, and all these years later—fifty of them, astonishingly—I have to wonder why.

  It’s hard to know, but I suspect I’d written a substantial amount of the book before the crime element entered the picture. I’d have had to go back and change a lot of what I’d written if I were to aim the book at a higher market, and it would have been ever so much easier to wrap it up and save any ambition for another book.

  For all the books I wrote for him, I met Harry Shorten only once.

  This was very much in keeping with the Scott Meredith Literary Agency’s view of the author-publisher relationship. Scott didn’t believe in keeping writers and publishers at arm’s length—because that was far closer than he wanted them to get to one another. It was best, as he saw it, that they never meet, and just as well if they never exchanged letters or phone calls, either. The less contact writers and publishers had, the more indispensable was the agent who had established himself as their sole point of contact.

  I don’t know how many books I wrote for Bill Hamling. Dozens, certainly, plus dozens more ghostwritten under my name. I never did meet the man, and the only time we were in contact was when I wrote him a letter after Scott and I had ended our author-agent relationship. I had begun a book for Nightstand, which I could no longer submit as the market was a closed shop, and I wrote to find out if I could, in fact, finish this book for him. He called Scott, wanting to know what the hell was going on; no one had told him I’d been dropped from the client list, and I’m sure Scott was prepared to ship him ghosted Andrew Shaw novels forever, leaving Hamling in the dark and me out of the picture.

  There was a flap, and Scott called me and offered to resume representing me. I declined—pride? stupidity? The two, God knows, are not mutually exclusive—and I did finish that one book for Hamling but that was the end of it. We never met.

  But I did meet Shorten. He wanted to meet Sheldon Lord and learned that I was in New York. My agent Henry Morrison, unable to figure out a way to prevent it, arranged a meeting at Midwood Tower’s midtown office.

  I don’t remember much about the occasion. It seems to me Midwood had offices on Fifth Avenue in the Forties, but I could be wrong about that. Wherever it was, I went there, and Harry was a bluff and hearty middle-aged fellow. He asked me a few questions, and I did what I could to
answer them. He did contrive to bring up the grease pit scene from Carla and expressed admiration for my having come up with that one. And he wondered how I managed to get so much sex in without having the books come out dirty. That’s not how he worded it, but that seemed to be the gist of it. And I vamped, and said something about writing realistic books about people whose problems and concerns happen to be sexual in nature. I’m not sure what I thought I meant, but I do recall that Harry nodded thoughtfully, and seemed to regard it as a meaningful response.

  Harry retired in 1982 and moved to Pompano Beach, Florida. (My Aunt Mim and Uncle Hi lived in Pompano Beach; I wonder if they ever ran into Harry?) He died in 1991, at the age of seventy-six so he must have been around forty-five when we met.

  Bob Silverberg, a prolific writer, told me recently that Bill Hamling’s still alive and living in Southern California. Maybe I’ll drop him a line …

  —Lawrence Block

  Greenwich Village

  Lawrence Block (lawbloc@gmail.com) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.

  A Biography of Lawrence Block

  Lawrence Block (b. 1938) is the recipient of a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and an internationally renowned bestselling author. His prolific career spans over one hundred books, including four bestselling series as well as dozens of short stories, articles, and books on writing. He has won four Edgar and Shamus Awards, two Falcon Awards from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan, the Nero and Philip Marlowe Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of the United Kingdom. In France, he has been awarded the title Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has twice received the Societe 813 trophy.

  Born in Buffalo, New York, Block attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Leaving school before graduation, he moved to New York City, a locale that features prominently in most of his works. His earliest published writing appeared in the 1950s, frequently under pseudonyms, and many of these novels are now considered classics of the pulp fiction genre. During his early writing years, Block also worked in the mailroom of a publishing house and reviewed the submission slush pile for a literary agency. He has cited the latter experience as a valuable lesson for a beginning writer.