The second thing you need to know is what Midwest Jack looked like. Perhaps you do not want to know what it meant to me when I saw him dead on the hallway floor, but I intend to tell you anyway. I’ll start with his appearance. He wore a black T-shirt and shorts. He was tall and lean, with ropy muscles suggesting uncanny strength. In some way I could not define, he seemed more animal than human; no one who encountered him in low light or a lonely place would think of him as a boy. His long face was malformed in a way that explained the metaphor that my inadequately clairvoyant unconscious employed to warn me about him in dreams. Exceptionally wide brow. Sharp face narrowing severely toward the chin. His mouth, frozen in a death grin, revealed teeth like the beveled edges of chisels. His somewhat protuberant eyes were set farther apart than they should have been, enhancing the vague but unmistakable impression of a mantis face.
I feared him when he was alive. In death, however, he became a subject of sympathetic pity, at least to me. He might have been born with the capacity to love, as I had been. There was no reason to suppose he had been born evil, though the possibility could not be ruled out. Maybe he had come into this world with the ability to be formed by experience into what a child of God should be. If so, he’d had the bad luck to be in the care of parents who might havewantedto love him in spite of his appearance but who lacked the compassion to take him into their hearts.
In their defense, life on an undercapitalized farm was without exception a hardscrabble existence of exhausting physical labor and endless worry about destitution. A sweet-faced baby could bring with him hope for the future, thereby inspiring love. An infant who lookedlike Jack required an effort to love and might seem to be an omen of the family’s imminent destruction.
Before I discovered my uncanny talents, my good luck had been a sweet face and a good mind. My bad luck was everything else about my body. My bad luck was to have been placed in the care of Captain; my good luck was that I made money for him, so he became a source of books for me. This person, Midwest Jack, was a financial burden in a home where books were not valued. My luck had been better than his. It was incumbent upon me to recognize that and be grateful. “Rest in peace,” I said. I went downstairs to do my part, wondering about luck and divine grace and nature’s role in the way of all things.
The events of that day could have been a media sensation, with the sleazy tabloids and cheesy mainstream press competing viciously to sell the most extreme version of what had transpired. Before it was all done, the public might have been led to believe that Jack was actually Franklin and Loretta’s freakish child whom they had chained in the attic all these years to prevent him from tarnishing their squeaky-clean reputation and glamorous image. Once again, the good will with which they had treated others was repaid.
The county sheriff, Emmett Oates, was a World War I veteran who lost his left leg below the knee while engaged in fierce resistance to the Germans at Château-Thierry. When Emmett had run for office in 1928, the sheriff at that time, Robert “Big Bob” Burnside, was so corrupt that behind his back people called him Bobby Boodle. Big Bob ran a mean campaign focusing on Emmett’s “incapacity” and claiming that the war hero had actuallyshot himselfin the calf in order to be sent home from France justbeforethe battle at Château-Thierry. Franklin and Loretta not only backed Emmett’s campaign financially; they also used the skills they learned selling their movies to design his advertising, which was so successful that people kept asking when the “bio flick” wascoming to theaters. Sheriff Oates ended bribery in all county offices; he had been a friend of the Fairchilds ever since.
In the matter of Midwest Jack and Captain Farnam, they didn’t ask Emmett to break any laws, only to guide them as to how best to minimize the likely mad-dog barkfest in the tabloids and other press. At 1:40 in the morning, he came to the Bram alone, no siren and no flashing lights. He had known my story since the Fairchilds first brought me home with them. They suspected Captain might not be out of our lives, in which case the sheriff needed to know the pitchman’s name if in the future he got a call about some kind of confrontation at Bramley Hall, though back then no one could have imagined anything as bizarre as what happened on this night in 1938.
Sheriff Oates went upstairs with Franklin to view the scene of the homicide. The condition of Captain’s corpse was such that no one but Midwest Jack or a like creature could have torn into him in the various ways he had been ripped, gouged, and bitten. It was as if the fictional universe of director Tod Browning’s movieFreakshad intersected with our universe for a few horrific minutes. Captain’s murderer was dead and beyond the reach of the law. Midwest Jack’s executioner, our Harry, acted in self-defense; therefore, he had broken no law. Sheriff Oates said, “There’s not a whole hell of a lot here for the law to do except waste taxpayer’s money and fritter away time we could use to chase down bad guys. Besides, if we let the press in on this, then our more excitable citizens will be so frightened by mantis boy, they’ll get it in their heads how there must be legions of monsters skulking through the county. Then one egg-sucking fool or another will shoot the innocent paperboy when he cycles around before dawn, delivering theLos Angeles Times.My best advice is we clean this up and no one talks about it until I’ve been shot dead in the line of duty or been carried away by cancer to my mansion in the sky.”
And so, with a key taken off the dead pitchman, Harry went out in search of the vehicle Captain had said was parked half a mile away, along the county road. He drove it to the Bram and parked it under the portico. Having had experience searching corpses in a variety of disgusting conditions, Sheriff Oates finessed Captain’s wallet from his trousers; it contained authentic-looking driver’s licenses in three names, none of which was Forest Farnam. Because it provided nothing but false leads, the sheriff returned it to Captain’s pants pocket. He and Franklin then rolled the cadavers into painters’ tarps to contain bodily fluids during transport to the car. Outside, Captain and his “special boy” were unwrapped, tumbled into the back seat, and left in whatever posture they assumed. The tarps were carried to the employee parking area behind the high hedge south of the driveway, where they would be hosed off.
With the sheriff leading the way in the squad car, Franklin donned gloves and chauffeured the dead passengers fourteen miles, to a remote stretch of unpaved back road along a canyon in the county adjacent to ours. In Southern California, there were many steep-walled canyons of great depth. Only grass and scrub brush grew on the slopes of this chasm, but heavy vegetation flourished at the bottom, where rushing streams formed in heavy rains and the water table lay near the surface. Franklin stopped the car crosswise on the road, facing the abyss, and turned off the engine. With the vehicle in neutral, he and the sheriff pushed it over the brink and listened to it rattle through the brush until it came to a stop far below. Emmett used a handheld spotlight that was part of his car’s equipment to search the depths. The runaway car with its grisly occupants seemed to have disappeared into the dense green canopy perhaps a thousand feet below.
By the time Franklin and Emmett returned to the Bram, Loretta had hosed off the tarps, which had dried quickly in the warm night air. They folded them and returned them to storage cabinets in the garage. As Loretta had dealt with the tarps, Gertie and I had been at work onthe second floor. A series of four Persian carpet runners lay end to end along the upper hallway. Together, we rolled up the soiled rug from in front of the door to the master suite and secured it in that compact form with lengths of coarse binder twine. Only a thorough cleaning by a carpet specialist could restore the runner. However, we felt it would be reckless to try to explain the amount of blood caked in the fibers. Sheriff Oates would take it away and dispose of it at the county dump.
As the six of us gathered in the foyer, where exhausted Rafael was deep in sleep, Sheriff Oates said, “There’s still the door full of bullet holes.”
Franklin said, “Lynette will take it down in the morning and adapt a door from another room to serve temporarily, until we can have a carpenter replace it.”
“What will she say about the bullet holes?”
“If I don’t mention them, she won’t.”
“That’s quite something. Are doors around here that often riddled with bullets?”
Loretta shrugged. “It’s just that everyone at the Bram respects everyone else’s privacy.”
Emmett Oates considered that for a moment. “It’s a good thing this is largely a law-abiding brood. If you’d taken the Ma Barker path, you’d have been an unstoppable crime family.”
“We thought about it,” Gertie said, “but we were concerned that Rafael would be traumatized by the endless violence.”
So many friends of this family were huggers. I was never sure if they were huggers before they met the Fairchilds or if the habit came upon them after, like a communicable infection. Sheriff Oates had to give each of us a hug before leaving. When he hugged Loretta last of all, she asked if there was anything we could ever do to thank him. If she had offered him cash, he would have arrested her for bribery.
“If it’s not too awkward,” Emmett said, “maybe you could invite Laura and me to dinner next time Groucho Marx is here. For that, I’dhelp you dispose of as many corpses as you’re ever stuck with in the years ahead—as long as it’s not you who murdered them.”
“Keep the Friday after Thanksgiving open,” Loretta said. “Mr. and Mrs. Marx will be here then.”
After the sheriff departed, we went to the kitchen, and Rafael bestirred himself to come with us. Loretta prepared a large pot of coffee while the rest of us dressed the breakfast table with place mats, napkins, china, flatware, and juice glasses. A short while later, as dawn was about to break, Chef Lattuada arrived and was surprised to see us sitting on stools at the center island, having coffee spiked with Baileys Irish Cream.
“Mass insomnia,” he asked, “or did the Parcheesi game run long last night?”
Harry said, “We were discussing those new inventions everyone’s excited about—Teflon and Fiberglas—and we lost track of time.”
“Well, if you’re all so starved you can’t wait, I can provide you with buttered toast and prune juice.”
“We’ll wait,” Franklin said, “for you to exercise your culinary brilliance. After we eat, we’re going to sleep for ten hours and then dress for dinner.”
“If your majesties would like dinner in bed, I can arrange it and spare you the need to groom yourselves.”
“We might do that,” Loretta said, “if we were sleeping in our usual room. But we’ll most likely be shifting to a guest room for today, and that’s not as accommodating for dinner in bed.”
“The door to their usual room is riddled with bullet holes,” I said, “and will have to be replaced. You know how it is.”
