The Criminal

Book 0: Mulholland Classic

by Jim Thompson

Genres: Hard-Boiled; Suspense; Thrillers

Synopsis

Everyone in Kenton Hills knows that short-tempered, tongue-tied Bob Talbert wasn't the one responsible for the brutal crime that ended Josie Eddleman's life. Nevermind that he was the last one to see her alive. But in a town filled with the likes of an amoral tabloid reporter known only as The Captain, a district attorney who'll do anything for a confession, and Bob's parents, who care as little for Bob as they do for each other, guilt and innocence are little more than a matter of perspective. In a masterfully woven tapestry of multiple points of view, The Criminal explores the nature of guilt and responsibility in a psychological thriller of an entire town under the spell of an act of brutal violence. Jim Thompson unlike you're ever read him before.

Release date: July 1, 2012

Publisher: Mulholland Books

Print pages: 169

Sample

It had been a pretty good day in many ways, so I might have known it would turn out bad. If you’ve read any papers lately I guess you know that it did. It’s always that way with me, it seems like. I’ve never known it to fail. I’ll wake up feeling rested and be able to eat breakfast for a change, and maybe I’ll even get a seat on the 8:05 into the city. And it’ll go on like that all day—no trouble, everything rocking along fine. My kidneys won’t bother me. I won’t get those crazy headaches up over my eyes. Then, I’ll come home, and somehow or another, between the time I get there and the time I go to bed, something will happen to spoil it all. Always. Anyway, it seems like always. There’ll be a dun from the Kenton Hills Sewer District or a gopher will have eaten up what blamed little lawn we have left or Martha will break her glasses. Or something.

Take the night before last, for example. I’d had a pretty good day that day—as good as any day can be, now. Then, after dinner, I sit down to read the paper, and—bingo!—I hop right back up again. Martha’s glasses were in the chair, or, rather, what was left of ’em. Both lenses were broken.

“Oh, my goodness,” she said, fluttering around and picking up the pieces. “Now, how in the world did that happen?”

“How did it happen?” I said. “How did it happen? You leave your glasses in my chair, and then you wonder how it happens when they get broken.”

“I must have left them on the arm of the chair,” she said. “You must have brushed them into the seat when you sat down. Oh, well, I needed some new ones anyway.”

I looked at her, taking it all so calm and casual, and something seemed to snap inside my head. I wanted to hurt her, to hurt someone and she was the nearest thing at hand.

“So you needed some new ones,” I said. “That’s all you’ve got to say. You throw fifteen dollars down the drain, and it doesn’t make any difference to you, does it? You’ll never change, will you? If you weren’t so scatter-brained, if you’d kept an eye on Bob instead of letting him run wild and do as he pleased he wouldn’t have—”

Her face went white, then red. “And what about you? What kind of a father are you to—to—” Her hand went up to her mouth, pushing back the words. “D-Don’t,” she whispered. “I—I d-don’t need any glasses. I can’t read any more, anyway. I can’t—all I can think about is… Oh, Al! Al!”

I put my arms around her, and she tried to pull away—but not very hard—and then she buried her face against my shirtfront, and she cried and cried. I didn’t try to stop her. I wished I could have cried myself. I stood holding her, patting her on the head now and then; noticing how gray she had gotten. It was funny, strange I mean. You hear about someone turning gray almost overnight, and you think, oh, that’s a lot of nonsense. It couldn’t really happen, not to normal people anyway. And then it does happen, right to your own wife, and I don’t imagine they come more normal than Martha.

It’s like it is with Bob. With Bob’s trouble. You hear about some fifteen-year-old boy killing a neighbor’s girl—raping and strangling her, and you think, well, I’m pretty well off after all. My boy may be a little wild but… but Bob was never really wild; he was just all boy, I guess, just about average… but my boy would never do a thing like that. That could never happen in our family. He—

Your wife couldn’t turn gray overnight, and your fifteen-year-old couldn’t do what that other fifteen-year-old did. The idea is so crazy that—well, you just laugh when you think about it. And then…

“Al,” Martha whispered. “Let’s move away from here!”

“You bet,” I said. “We’ll go to work on it tomorrow. We’ll move way off somewhere, clear to the other side of the country.”

I was just talking, of course, and she knew it. I couldn’t start in all over at my age, get a job that would support us. We don’t have any money to move on. I had to borrow against the house to pay that lawyer. All the equity we’ve got in it now you could stuff in your ear.

Anyway, moving wouldn’t do much good. Because it isn’t the other people so much, the way they talk and act and the way we imagine they talk and act: it’s not them so much as it is ourselves. Wondering about it, and not being sure. Sure like you’ve got to be about a thing like that.

“Al,” Martha whispered, “h-he—he didn’t do it, did he?”

“Of course, he didn’t,” I said. “It’s too ridiculous to think about.”

“I know he didn’t do it, Al!”

“I do, too. We both know it.”

“Why, he just couldn’t! I mean, why—why—how could he, Al?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I—it doesn’t matter. He didn’t, so there’s no sense wondering about it. We’ve got to stop it, Martha. We’ve got to stop wondering and talking and—and—”

“Of course, dear,” she said. “We won’t say another word. We both know he didn’t, that he couldn’t have. Why, my goodness, Al! How could our Bob…?”

“SHUT UP!” I said. “Stop it!”

It ended as it usually ends. We kept telling each other that he hadn’t done it, and it was crazy even to think he had. Finally, we went to bed, and all night long, whenever I woke up, I heard her mumbling and tossing. And in the morning I caught her looking at me worriedly, and she asked me if I’d slept well. So I guess I must have been doing some mumbling and tossing myself.

Well…

I guess there’s no right place to begin this. A thing like this, it probably starts a long way back, before you were ever married probably and ever had a son named Bob. And maybe you didn’t have too much to do with it yourself; you didn’t have too much control over it. You just rock along, doing the things you have to, and you get kind of startled sometimes when you stand off and look at yourself. You think, my God, that isn’t me. How did I ever get like that? But you go right ahead, startled or not, hating it or not, because you don’t actually have much to say about it. You’re not moving so much as you are being moved.

Maybe I’m making excuses, but what I’m trying to say is that it might have begun with another person. Or other people. My parents, say. Or their parents. Or people I’d never met in my life. It… I don’t know. I couldn’t say. There’s no way of telling, and one beginning place is probably as good as another. So maybe I’d better lead off with the start I had.

Maybe I’d better go back to the day it happened. The day that had been a pretty good one until it did happen. If I start right in with the beginning of the day and follow it on through, maybe… maybe I’ll spot something.

I do that down at the office sometimes, down at the Henley Terrazzo & Tile Company. I mean, the books will be off a few cents when I try to strike a balance, so I’ll take a new set of transcript sheets and recopy my figures, checking them off item by item. And sooner or later I’ll find the error. It’ll pop up at me. Providing, of course, that it’s in that day’s work.

Well, I’ve told you I’d had a good night’s sleep and a pretty good breakfast. Bob and I ate together that day, and I kind of joked with him a little, like I don’t often have the time nor the inclination for, and afterwards he walked part of the way to the station with me on his way to school.

It had been a long time since he’d done that. In fact, I couldn’t remember when the last time was he’d done it. It used to be, back when he was in the grades, we’d walk together almost every morning. It put him to school earlier than he had to be, but he insisted on doing it, He’d actually get upset if Martha let him sleep and I’d go off without him.

Well, though, as I say, that had been a couple years ago, Or even longer I guess. Back in those days, up until the time, say, he was about in the sixth grade, he not only walked with me in the morning but he’d be at the train to meet me in the evening. It seemed he’d rather be with me than he would kids his own age. Quite a few people commented on it. I remember Martha’s mother was visiting us one spring, and she couldn’t get over it. She said she’d never seen anyone that was such a Daddy’s boy.

A very fine woman, Martha’s mother. She passed on—let’s see—sixteen months ago, next June. No, fifteen months ago. The way I remember the date is that I had the undertaker spread his bill through twelve equal installments, and… But we don’t need to go into that. She was a very fine old lady, and I was glad to do what I could.

Well, as I was saying, that was the way Bob had used to be. Back during the war when there was more terrazzo and tile work than you could shake a stick at, and your only problem was priorities. I’ll tell you: things were a lot different in those days. I didn’t draw any more salary than I do now, but the bonuses almost doubled it. I didn’t work half so hard and I made almost twice as much as I do these days. If I wanted to take an afternoon off, I took it. Not very often, but Henley never let out a peep when I did.

One time I took a whole day off, a Friday. I had Martha and Bob meet me in town Thursday night, and we stayed the whole weekend—Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Three days and four nights. I got us a couple of connecting rooms at a pretty good hotel, but we weren’t in ’em much except to sleep. At least, Bob and I weren’t. Martha would say, “You men, I just can’t keep up with you.” So we’d leave her at the hotel to catch up on her rest, and we’d go out on the town by ourselves.

Saturday morning we went out by ourselves; we went out for breakfast together. I bet Bob that I could eat more hotcakes than he could, and we had three stacks apiece—a tie—before we called it quits. Nine hotcakes apiece, mind you, not to mention the butter and syrup. If I did that now, it would kill me.

After breakfast, we went to a penny arcade and I bought five dollars worth of change. It was noon before we’d spent it all, so we had a big feed at an Italian restaurant, and then we strolled around and finally wound up in a shooting gallery. I kind of went hog wild in there. Bob and I were shooting a contest with each other, and the first thing I knew I’d spent twenty dollars. It was quite a bit of money even for good times, and Bob was a little scared when I told him about it. “Gosh,” he said, sort of shakily, “I’ll bet Mom will be mad.”

“I’ll bet she won’t,” I said. “Not unless she’s a mind reader.”

He looked up at me, a trifle puzzled. And I nodded and gave him the wink. Then I grinned, and after a minute he grinned. And that was the end of the matter. I didn’t need to tell him to keep quiet about the money. He caught on right away. I maybe shouldn’t say it, but they didn’t make kids sharper than Bob.

Well, we had a fine time that weekend. Monday morning I took Bob and Martha to the station, and we had breakfast there before they caught their train. Martha asked me if I wasn’t afraid I’d be late for work.

“So I’ll be late,” I said. “What of it?”

“But won’t Mr. Henley say something?”

“I hope he does,” I said. “He gives me a little trouble, and I’ll tell him where to head in.”

Bob’s eyes got as big as saucers. He looked at me like I was John L. Sullivan, or someone like that.

I can’t put my finger on the exact time when he began to change, but it was some time after the war. It wasn’t much of a change at first—he’d just kind of avoid me, and not have much to say when I was around. And when I said something to him, he acted like I was picking on him. I couldn’t say the smallest word to him about why he wasn’t doing better in school, for Pete’s sake, or why he couldn’t comb his hair without being told sixteen times, without him getting sullen. Anything I said, it was that way.
. . .