“Get to the point, you’d say. In my
time we say cut to the chase, but it comes to the same. I finished the book. On the day I discovered Linda dead in
bed–the way the police are going to find Gloria Demmick later today, Clyde–I had finished one hundred and ninety
pages of manuscript. I was up to the part where you fish Mavis’s brother out of Lake Tahoe. I came home from the
funeral three days later, fired up the word-processor, and got started right in on page one-ninety-one. Does that shock
you?’
“No,” I said. I thought about asking him what a word-processor might be, then
decided I didn’t have to. The thing in
his lap was a word-processor, of course. Had to be.
“You’re in a decided minority,” Landry said. `Ìt shocked what few friends I had left, shocked them plenty. Linda’s
relatives thought I had all the emotion of a warthog. I didn’t have the energy to explain that I was trying to save myself.
Frog them, as Peoria would say. I grabbed my book the way a drowning man would grab a life-ring. I grabbed you,
Clyde. My case of the shingles was still bad, and that slowed me down–to some extent it kept me out, or I might have
gotten here sooner–but it didn’t stop me. I started getting a little better–
physically, at least–right around the time I
finished the book. But when I had finished, I fell into what I suppose must have been my own state of depression. I went
through the edited script in a kind of daze. I felt such a feeling of regret . . . of loss . . .” He looked directly at me and
said, “Does any of this make any sense to you?”
`Ìt makes sense,” I said. And it did. In a crazy sort of way.
“There were lots of pills left in the house,” he said. “Linda and I were like the Demmicks in a lot of ways, Clyde–we
really did believe in living better chemically, and a couple of times I came very close to taking a couple of double
handfuls. The way the thought always came to me wasn’t in terms of suicide, but in terms of wanting to catch up to
Linda and Danny. To catch up while there was still time.”
I nodded. It was what I’d thought about Ardis McGill when, three days after we’d said toodle-oo to each other in
Blondie’s, I’d found her in that stuffy attic room with a small blue hole in the
center of her forehead. Except it had been
Sam Landry who had really killed her, and who had accomplished the deed with a kind of flexible bullet to the brain.
Of course it had been. In my world Sam Landry, this tired- looking man in the hobo’s pants, was responsible for
everything. The idea should have seemed crazy, and it did . . . but it was getting saner all the time.
I found I had just energy enough to swivel my chair and look out my window. What I saw somehow did not surprise me
in the least: Sunset Boulevard and all that surrounded it had frozen solid. Cars, buses, pedestrians, all stopped dead in
their tracks. It was a Kodak snapshot world out there, and why not? Its creator could not be bothered with animating
much of it, at least for the time being; he was still caught in the whirlpool of his own pain and grief. Hell, I was lucky
to still be breathing myself.
“So what happened?’ I asked. “How did you get here, Sam? Can I call you that? Do you mind?’
“No, I don’t mind. I can’t give you a very good answer, though, because I don’t
exactly know. All I know for sure is
that every time I thought of the pills, I thought of you. What I thought specifically was, `Clyde Umney would never do
this, and he’d sneer at anyone who did. He’d call it the coward’s way out.’ ”
I considered that, found it fair enough, and nodded. For someone staring some horrible
ailment in the face–Vernon’s
cancer, or the misbegotten nightmare that had killed this man’s son–I might make an exception, but take the pipe just