he was calling himself or how old he looked, he was me. Had I thought his voice
sounded familiar? Sure. The way your
own voice sounds familiar–although not quite the way it sounds inside your own head–
when you hear it on a
recording.
He picked my limp hand up off the desk, shook it with the briskness of a real-estate agent on the make, then dropped it
again. It hit the desk-blotter with a plop, landing on Mavis Weld’s telephone number.
When I raised my fingers, I saw
that Mavis’s number was gone. In fact, all the numbers I’d scratched on the blotter over the years were gone. It was as
clear as . . . well, as clear as a hardshell Baptist’s conscience.
“Jesus,” I croaked. “Jesus Christ.”
“Not at all,” the older version of me sitting in the client’s chair on the other side of the desk said. “Landry. Samuel D.
Landry. At your service.”
_______________________________________________________________________
V. An Interview with God.
Even as rattled as I was, it only took me two or three seconds to place the name, probably because I’d heard it such a
short time ago. According to Painter Number Two, Samuel Landry was the reason why the long dark hall leading to my
office was soon going to be oyster white. Landry was the owner of the Fulwider
Building.
A crazy idea suddenly occurred to me, but its patent craziness did nothing to dim the sudden blaze of hope which
accompanied it. They– whoever they are–say that everyone on the face of the earth has a double. Maybe Landry was
mine. Maybe we were identical twins, unrelated doubles who had somehow been born to different parents and ten or
fifteen years out of step in time with each other. The idea did nothing to explain the rest of the day’s high weirdness,
but it was something to hang onto, damn it.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Landry?” I asked. I was trying like hell, but my voice was no longer quite steady. `Ìf it’s
about the lease, you’ll have to give me a day or two to get squared around. It seems my secretary just discovered she had
pressing business back home in Armpit, Idaho.”
Landry paid absolutely no attention to this feeble effort on my part to shift the focus of the conversation. “Yes,” he
said in a musing tone of voice, `Ì imagine it’s been the granddaddy of bad days . . .
and it’s my fault. I’m sorry,
Clyde–really. Meeting you in person has been . . . well, not what I expected. Not at all. For one thing, I like you quite
a bit better than I expected to. But there’s no going back now.” And he fetched a deep sigh. I didn’t like the sound of it
very much.
“What do you mean by that?’ My voice was trembling worse than ever now, and the blaze of hope was dying. Lack of
oxygen inside the cave- in site which had once been my brain seemed to be the cause.
He didn’t answer right away. He leaned over instead, and grasped the handle of the slim leather case leaning against the
front leg of the client’s chair. The initials stamped on it were S.D.L., and I deduced that my weird visitor had brought it
in with him. I didn’t win the Shamus of the Year Award in 1934 and ’35 for nothing, you know.
I had never seen a case quite like it in my life–it was too small and too slim to be a briefcase, and it was fastened not
with buckles and straps but with a zipper. I’d never seen a zipper quite like this one, either, now that I thought about it.
The teeth were extremely tiny, and they hardly looked like metal at all.
But the oddities only began with Landry’s luggage. Even setting aside his uncanny older-brother resemblance to me,
Landry looked like no businessman I’d ever seen in my life, and certainly not one
prosperous enough to own the
Fulwider Building. It’s not the Ritz, granted, but it is in downtown L.A., and my client (if that was what he was) looked