Mystery

Mr. Winters reclined in his stiff chair, swirling a snifter of brandy in his right hand. He heard a sharp knock, and then a second knock, and then more knocks after that, which each knock after the first becoming progressively softer and soggier than the previous. The last knock he heard was the sound of someone dropping a wallet into the other end of an Olympic-sized swimming pool, or the ocean.

It was the sound of Mr. Winters being struck repeatedly in the back of the head with a candlestick. The very last thing he realized was that he had somehow gone from upright in his stiff chair to face-down on the beaten carpet.

-------

***NOTE:*** The preceding is merely the author’s conjecture, and may NOT necessarily accurately represent the sensation or experience of being struck repeatedly in the back of the head with a candlestick until death.

-------

Mr. Winters’ body was found by his wife of some 30-odd years (the marriage license was lost, which I found suspicious, it was the third or fourth thing I wrote in my notebook: “MARRIAGE LICENSE LOST”). She stepped over her husband’s body to reach the telephone and called the police.

The police called me.

-------

ME: Short, lean body, fat face, way bald.

-------

I spoke with Mrs. Winters over the phone. Her name is Bernice. I called her Mrs. Winters. She insisted I call her Thomas.

We had a brief conversation. She seemed dispassionate. She told me she had lost her marriage license years ago and therefore didn’t know how long she and the deceased had been married, but that it was somewhere in the ballpark of 35 years-ish. After our conversation I pulled out my notebook. To the end of the line “MARRIAGE LICENSE LOST,” I added the characters “… ?”

-------

(That is the last you will hear of the marriage license. It is a red herring.)

-------

I decided to see the body myself. I went to the coroner’s and asked to see it. He wheeled it out of a small freezer. From the top he looked fine—all the damage was localized at the back of the head. From this I determined that the murderer had approached Mr. Winters from behind and hit him in the back of the head, perhaps with a candlestick. But by whom?

I searched briefly for some kind of forensic evidence. There were several hairs on Mr. Winters’ head, but they all were his.

-------

I met with Brixton, Mr. Winters’ longtime butler. Brixton had the night of the murder off, which I found suspicious.

“I always have Sundays off,” Brixton said, “that’s my day off.”

“And what does Mr. Winters do without you?”

“He cooks for himself, or he orders takeout. He answers the door for himself, or he doesn’t receive visitors.”

“And how do you know that if you are never around on Sundays?”

“I didn’t say I am never around on Sundays. I am always around on Sundays. We watch football together, or watch a movie on TV. Our relationship is a friendly one—it is far more complicated and rich than the average master-servant relationship.”

“So then you were in the house on the day of the murder?”

“Not that Sunday. That Sunday I was out of town.”

I saw a candlestick on Brixton’s coffee table. Brixton noticed me noticing it. We both dove for it, wrestling on the ground for several seconds. I pinned him down and examined the candlestick.

“This isn’t the same stick,” I said. It was the wrong weight, made of the wrong material, was not dented or blood-stained.

“No,” said Brixton, sounding ashamed.

-------

I sat down with my psychoanalyst. It was a tough case, I told him.

“What have you been dreaming?”

I told him I hadn’t been having any dreams, but it was probably because I hadn’t been sleeping.

“Well then I have no use for you, then,” said my psychoanalyst. He then handed me three lemons and studied me very carefully for some kind of reaction.

-------

I went to the old man’s funeral. It was well-attended.

Everyone was crying. It seemed a little suspicious to me. Sure seemed like someone was trying to cover something up—like the fact that he or she was not actually sad. Because he or she was the murderer. Maybe everyone was trying to cover something up, because none of them were sad.

I had some work to do.

Then I noticed a man in the corner who was not crying. He seemed a little suspicious to me. Why shouldn’t he be crying? Couldn’t he see that everybody else was crying? Sure seemed like he had something to hide, and he wasn’t doing a very good job hiding it, as opposed to all the other people at the funeral, who were having no trouble hiding all the things they had to hide.

After the service, I decided to have a few words with him. I introduced myself, then realized I was actually talking to my reflection in a mirror. Over my shoulder, I saw the man who hadn’t been crying in the church.

“Sad,” I said.

“Very sad,” he said.

“So why aren’t you crying, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Why aren’t you crying, if you don’t mind me asking?”

The guy was quick on his feet, I had to give him that. “I’m a P.I.,” I said. “I’m here to investigate the death of Mr. Winters.”

“Do you have any idea who murdered him?”

I cocked an eyebrow. “Who said anything about a murder?”

“Well he was hit in the skull several times with a candlestick, wasn’t he?”

“Could have been an accident.”

“Probably not, though.” He was quick and nimble, feet-wise—I had to give him that.

He told me he was not crying because had lost his tear ducts in a freak tear-duct-loss accident. I wrote a couple letters to his psychologist, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, optometrist, ophthalmologist, ornithologist and his seven-year-old niece (closest living relation I could find), and his story checked out. It was back to square one.

-------

I walked around Mr. Winters’ estate. It was quiet. No one lived there anymore.

I walked into his library, where he was killed. “Who killed you, old man?” I asked. I wondered why someone hadn’t picked up the body yet, since it had been four days since he had been murdered, but upon closer inspection, it was just a bear-skin rug.

So Mr. Winters was a hunter. I decided to pay a little visit to the hunting club.

-------

I found nothing of interest at the hunting club.

-------

I went to the reading of the will. I sat in the back.

The lawyer opened the envelope quietly and pulled out the will. There were a couple dozen other people in the room. A lot of people were looking for a payday, it appeared. It was ten minutes after the funeral, give or take a couple hours. No one was crying anymore, but all the skin under all their eyes was red and swollen.

“‘So, I died,’” the will began (the lawyer was the one reading it), “‘and now I am faced with the unhappy task of dividing up my not-inconsiderable estate. All you all here? Good. I am giving all of my money and property and shares in the Family Business to Tanya, who is the mysterious blonde sitting in the back row whom none of you have ever met who is (as of the time of this writing) my secret mistress.’” Everyone looked back at the mysterious blonde whom everyone had noticed but whom no one in the room had ever met. Her non-expression was difficult to interpret. “‘To everyone else, I am sorry. You get nothing. There is only so much money and property and share in the Family Business to go around, and even if there had been more, I would have given it all to Tanya, as per our unspoken agreement, whereby she engaged in relations of a strictly sexual nature with me. You see, although this was never a tit-pro-tat relationship, strictly, I think we can all agree she would likely have had nothing to do with otherwise (if not for the money, I am saying). This is not fair to the rest of you, but tough shit, life isn’t fair, sometimes.

“‘Some of you may be wondering—why? Why bother giving all your money to this secret mistress of yours, whom you did not care for besides as a sexual object, and who obviously did not care for you except as a rich old man who could buy her things to make her happy? You are dead now, so who cares if she’s angry with you. Doesn’t it burn you up that she thinks so little of you, and isn’t this a great way to get back at her for that, and to reward the people who really did care about you? To this, I can only respond: I suppose I am a loyal man. I believe very strongly in the bonds we make with each other in society, and though there are no doubt bonds which are considerably stronger than the bonds between man and mistress, there is also the messy fact that none of these bonds are quite so clear-cut. I am rambling, but to make a long story short—what do I owe my daughter? I raised her and loved her and cared for her best I could, and still she went to Smith, over my objections. Which is not to say that I think less of her for this. But that is entirely my point—what does she owe me, and what do I owe her? I simply cannot say. These questions defy answers—they cannot be easily pinned down. Man-mistress relationship is much easier, and I did not rise to prominence as a business man by leaving corners uncut. So, that’s that.’” And abruptly, the will was over.

Everyone had left, except for me and the lawyer—even the mysterious blonde.

-------

Who killed Mr. Winters? There was no way of knowing. One had to ask a different question: Who had the most to benefit from Mr. Winters’ death?

1) Mrs. Winters, who is now free of her husband and had every reason to believe she had a large inheritance coming her way.

2) Mr. Winters’ children, all of whom are mired in debt and all of whom had reason to believe they had a large inheritance coming their way.

3) Brixton, the butler, who felt degraded to be another man’s servant, and who had an outside chance of landing at least a modest inheritance.

4) Tanya, the mysterious blonde, who actually did have a large inheritance coming her way.

5) Mr. Winters, who no longer has to wake up every morning on this shithole of a planet.

6) The coroner, who profits from all deaths, because without death, he would have no work, and maybe he makes a commission for every body.

7) Me, the private investigator, who had reason to believe if Mr. Winters were murdered, he would be able to collect checks from the police and the old man’s family in his capacity as private investigator investigating the murder.

Hmm.

-------

HHHMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

-------

It was not until Mr. Winters was dead that he realized he was dying.

It all rushed into him at once, as if pouring in through the hole in the back of his head, the hole from which all his blood and brain matter was pouring out. Had he been careless? Had he been too careful? Was it fate, or random chance? Who would do such a thing, and why? He looked down (which was by now where he was—the part of him that saw was up and the rest of him was down). He saw himself—all of himself, even the parts he couldn’t have seen unless he was somewhere else—and he saw the chair and he saw the candlestick and he saw the big red stain on the carpet, and he saw flashes of the murderer, but he could not see the face. It was turned away; it was obscured; it was in a blind spot; it was all of these things, and then he caught a full glimpse of it, straight on, and it was unrecognizable—not just as a face of someone he knew, but as face qua face—it had all the face-parts in all the right places, but he could not understand it as a capital-F Face. The murderer was nervous and dropped the candlestick and ran out of the house, leaving the front door open. Mr. Winters chased after him, spinning wild circles around him, seeing the murderer from every angle but incapable of moving him or her out of the blind spot, or moving the blind spot around him or her, which blind spot he now understood to be not an obstruction or smudge or something blocking his field of vision but something within him, and what it felt like more than anything was like say you could somehow affix a tennis ball to the top of a dog’s head—can you see what that would be like? It would be like when you dangle something right on the top of its head and it jumps up and tries to bite it, the dog apparently thinking that if it moves fast enough the ball (or whatever you’re dangling) will stay in the same spot (when in reality, you are playing with it, and will simply yank it out of the way)—well imagine if that ball was just there, on the top of its head, and it wasn’t held there by anything, and the dog couldn’t shake it off or reach it with its paws—what it would do is it would jump and spin, trying to grab that ball with its teeth (and which it wouldn’t even know it was a ball on top of its head, it would just feel the thing, the pressure of it) and but all it would bite down on was the bit of air where the ball had just been, and the ball would stay right on top of its head, and the dog would be feeling it feeling it feeling it and the ball would just be driving it CRAZY with the desire to reach it, and the very act of reaching for it is what moves it, out of reach, the really twisted thing being it’s NOT EVEN MOVING AT ALL—that’s the whole thing, the dog feels it on the EXACT SAME SPOT the whole time, and—just put one finger on the top of your head and try to forget it’s there and don’t move and see if you can even stand it—that’s what it felt like for Mr. Winters and his murderer, whose face he couldn’t see—or—that’s not right—whose identity he couldn’t comprehend, even on the lowest level, if that makes sense—and for the murderer, who (and Mr. Winters couldn’t have known this) felt exactly the same, for some reason, he felt exactly the same ball on the top of his head.